Category: Content Marketing

Explore our library of content marketing articles and discover the content marketing tips you need to create an effective content strategy.

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Content Marketing

How to Use the Right Directional Cues in User Interfaces

User interface directional cues may be either implicit or explicit – obvious like arrows or subtle things like white space that the brain picks up on subconsciously. Knowing when to use them and which ones to use is crucial to building a positive user experience.

Implicit Directional Cues

Implicit cues are the ones that users don’t often notice. Familiar implicit directional cues include:

Color and Contrast

The color itself plays a significant role in how users respond to your content. Color theory indicates that each shade can evoke emotion and has strong psychological associations. Therefore, it’s essential to take time to match your color choices to the message you’re trying to send to site visitors.

  • Red: This primary color is associated with anger, danger, heat, passion, love, and sexuality.
  • Orange: This secondary color mixes equal parts red and yellow, and therefore shares qualities of both colors. It combines the warmth of red when the optimism of yellow to promote socialization and stimulate the appetite.
  • Yellow: As a primary color, it is the most visible color from a distance, so it’s often used as a cautionary color. Yellow is playful, happy, and is often associated with intellect, optimism, and mental clarity.
  • Green: This secondary color is the result of mixing equal parts blue and yellow, thereby sharing characteristics of both colors. Green is associated with both nature and money. With natural associations, it represents growth, rebirth, and renewal. With monetary associations, it represents greed, wealth, and prestige.
  • Blue: This primary color is associated with business, nature, royalty, military, trust, and more. Studies show blue is a favorite color across the globe. It evokes calmness and tranquility.
  • Indigo: Indigo is associated with higher knowledge, intuition, wisdom, devotion, justice, and spirituality.
  • Violet: Violet is associated with a feeling of intelligence and confidence like blue, but it is also associated with individuality and creativity.
  • Pink: As a mixture of red and white, pink is associated with romance, femininity, sensitivity, and sweetness. Certain shades can be energetic.
  • White: White is a color without a hue and is the symbolic opposite of black. In Western culture, white symbolizes purity and innocence, whereas, in Asian culture, it is the color of grief, mourning, and loss.
  • Black: This is the darkest color because it completely absorbs light. It is similar to white because it is also a color without a hue. Black is associated with evil, sadness, darkness, and mourning, but in ancient Egypt, the color had a positive association of protection and fertility. Today, it is becoming a symbol of elegance and simplicity.
  • Grey: As a mixture of black and white, it is both versatile and timeless. As a neutral color, it can be combined with nearly any other color in the spectrum. Though it isn’t the cheeriest color, it can create a contemporary and sophisticated feel. When used with white and black, it creates a serious feel.
  • Brown: Creating brown must occur through a mixture of red black and yellow or red and green depending on which color system you’re using. Surveys indicate that most people dislike brown. The warmth of brown is associated with strength, healing, and reliability. Brown pairs well with nearly every color because of its prominence in nature.

Research has shown that light and color have a specific physiological mechanism that can affect impulsivity, alertness, heart rate, mood, and more.

Need help choosing the right colors for your landing page? With this tool, you can choose one color, then a color combination (complementary, monochromatic, etc.) to generate a palette to work from.

But beyond the colors you choose, the contrast between them matters, too. Stark differences in color drive visitor attention to certain areas of the interface. The contrasting colors also affect readability, which is vital for the overall experience.

White Space

This is the empty area or negative space of your pages. Keeping plenty of white space helps draw attention to specific elements and keeps the page simple and makes it easier for visitors to understand your offer. With fewer components to focus on, visitors have no choice but to look where you want them to.

Encapsulation

Encapsulation refers to how objects are framed. It highlights what’s important on a page by creating a window of focus with boxes, outlines, and contrasting colors. This helps to reduce clutter on the page while also drawing attention to specific elements.

Visual Weighting

Visual weight is the concept that design elements have varied weights. Even in a two-dimensional medium, some objects appear to be heavier than others. This concept allows designers to create visual hierarchy along with harmony, symmetry, and balance in their designs. When strategically used, visual weight can help guide a viewer’s attention to the places we want in a design, making it a rather subtle directional cue.

Sometimes, visual weight is evident because larger objects appear heavier than smaller ones simply because they occupy more space. Color can also influence visual weighting, as can size, shape, proportion, density, and complexity.

Explicit Directional Cues

Explicit directional cues are more obvious to the human eye, making them easier to spot. They include:

Eye Tracking

Also known as eye gaze, eye tracking measures the eye’s motion as a user views a web page or measures where the eye is focused. When website visitors are connected to eye-tracking software, it’s possible to learn:

  • How the size and placement of objects on your existing site or proposed design changes affect attention
  • Where visitors are looking
  • The parts of the user interface that you miss
  • How their focus moves from object to object on a web page
  • How they are navigating the length of the page

Knowing the path of eye gaze helps ensure you guide user attention to the areas where you want the most focus.

This is where using heat maps can be highly beneficial. Also known as a scroll map, this technology is excellent at showing where the most substantial drop off points on a page are located. Heatmaps use a light-to-dark color range to show you the parts of a web page that are getting the most attention. They are based on which sections of the page get more clicks.

The higher activity levels get a dark color, and the lower levels get a light color. You can also use them for scrolling to see how far down your scroll on your website. Confetti and maps are also available to help you learn about the clicks from different segments of viewers, such as where the clicks are coming from or what referral source is bringing them to your website.

Arrows

Arrows are one of the most commonly used directional cues because they are easy to understand and straightforward. Sometimes, you’ll see moving arrows,  but stationary ones are effective as well. Arrows are placed to help users navigate below the fold.

Object Positioning

With object positioning, designers position images and video, so they’re pointed toward a particular Focus area to draw user attention and make that element more noticeable.

Lines

Humans tend to follow a path naturally, so using lines can be helpful on landing pages. Linear directional cues guide visitors through various parts of your page and help prospects stay focused on certain sections of your page.

Gesturing or Pointing

Though this technique isn’t as subtle as using eye gaze, some opt to have a model point or gesture toward a critical element to get visitors to focus on that area. There’s always a chance the gesture may appear unnatural, so it’s crucial to split test your pages with different gestures to determine what provides the best results.

How User Interface Directional Cues Influence User Experience

Directional cues:

  • Make it easier to navigate around a website.
  • Improve visual hierarchy
  • Ensure the screen or page is scannable.
  • Improve conversion rates

Though your copy, form, headline, and call to action (CTA) are indeed crucial for driving conversions, these elements only make up a portion of the user experience. Adding directional cues, both implicit and explicit, helps to ensure your prospects focus their attention on what matters most to your conversion goal.

Did you know it takes only 1/10th of a second to form a first impression of another individual? Websites are no different. It only takes about 50 milliseconds (.05 seconds) for a user to judge a site and determine whether they like it enough to stay.

That first impression, according to British researchers, is 94% design related. It depends on many factors, including structure, symmetry, colors, spacing, the amounts of texts, fonts, and more. The look and feel of a website is the primary driver of the first impression. Website navigation and visual appeal have the most significant influence on people’s first impressions of a website.

Another study conducted by Stanford University credibility experts, similar results were found. The study indicated that what people say about how they evaluate a website’s trust and how they really do it are different.

The data showed that the average consumer paid far more attention to the superficial aspects of a website, such as visual cues than to its content. Nearly half of the consumers in the study assessed website credibility based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design or user interface.

People are information foragers, and as we look for relevant information, we rely on familiar cute, and icons to direct our path. We process visual stimuli with our past experiences and mental shortcuts known as heuristics to form our visual perception.

As a result, when you perceive a landing page elements such as a CTA or arrow, you process the element via your past experiences. A pointing arrow is generally a cue to direct your attention towards something, and that translates online as well.

The important thing to remember when it comes to directional cues and user interfaces is it visual processing is complicated. It is possible to overdo it on the directional cues, and this is a situation where more is not necessarily better.

If your images or visual cues are irrelevant or distracting from the primary purpose of the page, they can damage conversion. Because of this, it’s important to consider how images reinforce or distract from your value proposition as you’re choosing photos. For instance, if your value proposition is around emotions, using faces could work well. If not, it may be better to use an informational graphic or products.

Directional cues are crucial to effective design. But, as with many things related to the user experience and conversion rate optimization, it is a mixture of both art and science. While there is a lot of creativity that goes into effective page design, it is crucial to test it all for yourself because no two audiences are exactly the same, and they don’t necessarily respond in the same way.

 

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Content Marketing

Content Marketing TED-Style

Content marketing TED-style leverages the power of storytelling to captivate and engage audiences. It involves presenting ideas in an informative, inspiring, and concise manner, akin to a TED Talk. This approach focuses on delivering value through compelling narratives, thought-provoking insights, and actionable takeaways, making complex topics accessible and memorable. It’s a dynamic way to connect with audiences, leaving a lasting impact and fostering brand loyalty.

Chances are unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you know what a TED Talk is. TED has 15.8 million people subscribed to its content. TED is a global conference for media organizations with strong engagement. Nearly every video that TED releases gets hundreds of thousands of views and they all go viral on social media.

As a small business owner, there’s quite a bit you can learn from the success of this massive media group. TED offers a stellar example of content marketing. Even a small business with limited resources can benefit from following TED’s example.

Quality and Quantity Matter

TED covers a wide range of topics from business to politics, biology, culture, and more. Every piece of content is based on a single Idea – “ ideas worth spreading.” yes the brand has large stages and a globally-recognized name but that’s just the icing. The cake is in the quality of the curated content from TED.

Beyond market research and SEO, TED focuses on releasing informative, interesting, and shareable pieces of content that engage the audience.

Content marketing is a strategy that every small business needs. A steady stream of quality videos, blog posts, and other pieces of content will help a brand get noticed on social media while also proving expertise in the industry and prompting the Google search algorithm to rank a company more highly.

As long as the provided content is valuable to readers, original, and optimized for sharing, it’s on the right track to building an engaged audience just has Ted has done successfully for 35 years.

Tips for Following TED’s Lead

Diversify

It takes time to build a large portfolio of content across multiple platforms especially if you are a small business. But if you’re writing a blog already, there’s no reason you can’t repurpose that content into a webinar, a short video, an infographic, and more. TED branched out like this with its daily podcast where YouTube TED Talks exist in audio form. This allows fans to listen on their daily commute and the company can catch newer users whom they may have missed otherwise.

Research shows that 41% of monthly podcast listeners say they have more podcasts in their feed now than they did a year ago. That means there’s still time for you to get in the game. If you get it right, people will follow your podcast and provide you with a new platform to grow your business.

Reward Returning Audience Members

You must build an audience that regularly engages with your content and to do this, consistency is key. TED subscribers want all new content posted on a regular basis, and that’s exactly what the organization does. Release new content frequently and consistently. As you seem more reliable to your target audience and Google algorithms, you’ll find your business grows.

As much as consistency can benefit you, the opposite can cause unintended harm. Inconsistency is the number one biggest content marketing faux pas many brands make across the board. Midsize businesses, startups, and even enterprises can succumb to this form of self-sabotage. If you go dark after a couple of enticing posts, your audience likely feels ghosted and won’t transform into a strong relationship.

Reach Out to Guest Contributors

All of us only have so many hours in the day and for the small business owner on a tight budget, it can be difficult to produce the amount of content you need to. That’s why it’s a good idea to call on guest contributors to help you. Reaching out to other industry experts and asking them to share their wisdom on your platform will keep a steady flow of content coming in. It also offers third-party validation for your guest contributors including speakers, authors, podcast hosts, and more.

TED outsources much of its content work. The flagship brand has indeed produced thousands of talks on its own but countless additional conferences happen every year under the TEDx sub-brand. Independent conference organizers get the boost of the TED name while the umbrella organization gets additional content without the in-house labor that’s involved in producing it. This creates a win-win situation for every party involved and your small business can benefit from a similar approach.

Whether you’re a startup or a multimillion-dollar organization, the same rules apply across the board. You have to offer quality, sharable, digestible content. The audience will follow. By taking the time to find your own “ideas worth sharing” and sending them out to the world, you can reap the same success as TED has, with nearly infinite growth potential.

As an added bonus, If you want to generate some buzz about your company, you should seek information about your local TEDx program. TEDx is a grassroots initiative, designed to bring the spirit of TED to local communities. If there’s no one already working to bring the global TED experience to your community, you can apply to host your own TEDx event or partner with TEDx. If you find that there is a TEDx event near you, you can apply to become a speaker there to share your expertise. Having the credentials for your business or brand can also help you grow.

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Content Marketing

What 912 Million Blog Posts Tell Us About Content Marketing

Here’s what 912 million blog posts tell us about content marketing: Longer posts typically generate more backlinks, a crucial factor for SEO. While most posts don’t receive external links, those with more in-depth research and unique insights do. Engaging headlines and visually appealing formats enhance shareability. These findings underscore the importance of quality, relevance, and strategic distribution in successful content marketing.

Backlinko and BuzzSumo partnered together to analyze 912 million blog posts to glean insights about content marketing today. They looked at factors such as content format, headlines, and word count and how it correlates with backlinks and social media shares. The findings they discovered were quite interesting.

In this article, we explore what

Long-Form Content Gets More Backlinks

When it comes to building backlinks, long-form content significantly outperforms short articles and blog posts. There are other industry studies that find a correlation between long-form content and achieving first page Google rankings.

But, it doesn’t seem that anyone has investigated why that longer-form content tends to do so much better. Does the algorithm prefer longer content? Or, is it that longer content is better at satisfying searcher intent?

While the study doesn’t make it possible to draw conclusions, the data suggest that backlinks are part of why long-form content tends to do better in Google’s ranking.

Content longer than 3,000 words gets an average of 77.2% more referring domains than content that has fewer than 1,000 words.

Want to Maximize Social Media Shares? Aim For 1,000-2,000 Words

Long-form content gets more social shares than short content, but once you go over 2,000 words, your returns start to diminish. That makes content that falls between 1,000 and 2,000 words the ideal option for maximizing the number of shares you get from social media. Content in that range gets an average of 56.1% more social media shares than content that comes in under 1,000 words.

Most Content Online Doesn’t Get Backlinks

Backlinks, or the number of external links to a piece of content, are an important part of how Google ranks content – as shown in their How Search Works report. We found that getting links is difficult. The data showed that 94% of the content earns no external links.

Getting someone to link to your content is hard. Getting links from more than one more website? That’s even tougher. Only 2.2% of content on the internet gets links from multiple websites.

Why is it so hard to earn backlinks? Again, this is a situation where you cannot answer the question from the study data lone, but it’s most likely a result of the fact that there is so much content published every day.

WordPress reports that 87 million posts were published on their platform in May 2018, 47.1% more than in May 2016. In two years, that’s 27 million monthly blog posts, making it harder for each piece of content to earn backlinks.

Looking at a 2015 study, 75% of the content in the study had zero links, and when you consider that this study’s data showed 94%, it demonstrates that it is much more difficult to earn links to your content than it was five years ago.

Social Shares Aren’t Distributed Evenly

The data in this study indicated that only a small share of outliers get the most social shares. 1.3% of the content in the study received 75% of the social shares. But when you look closer, it becomes even more disproportionate. 0.1% of the articles in the sample accounted for 50% of the total social shares. That means half of the social shares go to a small number of viral posts.

No Real Correlation Between Social Shares and Backlinks

There is no correlation between the number of social shares a piece of content receives and the number of backlinks it earns. Content that gets a lot of backlinks doesn’t typically get shared on social media. And the content that gets a lot of traction on social media, doesn’t usually earn a lot of backlinks. Those shares on social media don’t translate to more backlinks.

This is a surprise for many since one of the SEO “best practices” involves sharing your content on social media. The idea behind this is that by getting your content in front of more people, you’ll increase the chance that someone will link to you. In theory, this makes sense, but it doesn’t play out the same way in the real world – because people share and link to content for different reasons.

Create content that caters to your goal. If you want to go viral on Facebook, try a list post. If you want to get more backlinks, opt for visual content like infographics.

Longer Headlines Correlate with More Social Shares

Other industry studies show a relationship between long headlines and social shares. The data in this study also found that to be true. Very long headlines do better than short headlines by 76.7%. “Very long” is defined as being between 14 and 17 words. It plays out the same way when you consider the character count at 80+. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule.

Question Headlines Get More Social Shares on Average

Interestingly enough, headlines that use a question mark at the end perform well right now. Headlines using a question get 22.3% more social shares compared to headlines that don’t follow the question format. This could be because they add an element of intrigue that boost click-through rate. Many people decide to read a post because they want to know the answer to the question in the headline. That said, they aren’t a magic bullet guaranteed to boost all your social shares and traffic.

There’s No “Best Day” for Publishing New Content to Maximize Social Shares

While social media platforms have best times of the day and best days of the week to get engagement, there doesn’t seem to be a best day of the week to publish your content if you want to maximize social shares.

Though Sunday had a slight edge compared to every other day of the week, the difference in shares between content published on Sunday vs. other days of the week was only 1.45%…hardly a reason to only update your blog on Sundays.

Rather than focusing on a best day of the week or best time of the day – learn what works for your audience based on metrics you have on hand. The best time is always when your audience is available to consume and share your content.

 

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Content Marketing

6 Ways to Monitor Your Competition’s Content Strategy

There are several ways to monitor your competition’s content strategy. Monitoring competition involves analyzing their social media activity, blog post frequency and topics, email newsletters, and SEO strategies. Observing customer engagement and feedback on their content provides insights into what resonates with the audience. Additionally, tracking their backlink profiles and digital PR efforts can reveal their outreach strategies.

Knowing how to compete with other businesses in your niche is crucial, especially if you’re in a highly saturated niche. Content is one of the ways you can differentiate yourself because the more value you can provide to your readers and potential customers, the better off you are.

Here are six ways to monitor your competition’s content strategy so you can develop your content strategy based on what works.

Join their Email List

According to a survey, 59% of marketers say that email is the most effective channel for generating revenue. As such, your marketing team needs to monitor the emails that your competitors are sending to their prospects and customers. Using a personal email address, subscribe to your competitor’s email marketing list.

With this approach, your marketing team can learn more about the company’s culture, seasonal campaigns, business news, types of content and frequency of publishing as well as how the competition addresses their target audience

Track Their Social Media

The majority of companies are now active across several social media platforms. This gives you an excellent opportunity to monitor and track what the competition is doing online.  Use a personal account to follow them and turn on notifications for updates.

Pay attention to the tone of their posts, the imagery they use, and how effective their overall social media strategy is. If a particular type of content a competitor shares sees high levels of engagement, consider using a similar approach.

You can use a tool such as Rival IQ to monitor your competitor’s social activity. This tool helps you see how quickly your competition is gaining followers, how often they post, their most successful posts, and their average engagement rate.

Watch Their Webinars

61% of content marketers rely on webinars as part of their strategy. These webinars dig deeper into a particular topic and with this, Brands can find out what interests the competitors’ audience and the angles they take. Webinars generally use a question-and-answer session at the end so it’s important to stick around so you can hear the questions from the audience. Brands can then address those questions in their own content or even generate topics based on the information shared during the webinar.

While you can always attend these webinars live, you can also watch recordings of many of them if you can’t attend the actual event. Keep in mind, however, watching the recordings of older webinars may defeat the purpose of using it for competitive research. You may not get access to the recording if you don’t sign up to attend live.

Find Their Best Performing Content

You can also learn a lot about your competitor’s content strategy by taking a closer look at their best performing content. Social shares is one of the best and easiest metrics to evaluate this content. Tools like Buzzsumo, for example, make it easy to find and analyze top-performing blog post for any topic or competitor.

You can also use Social Animal to dig deeper into each article to see the main keywords, article links, total social shares and more.

Use the insights from these tools to consider what differentiates the popular content and what makes it so compelling. Think about the questions the content answers and the keywords it targets.

Taking time to review a competitor to the top-performing content and gathering insights about what attracts your audience to it can help your marketing team develop new content ideas and topics.

Track Website Changes

You should always take time to monitor the competitor’s blog or website for any major changes in messaging or design.

For instance, marketers must know if a competitor is launching a new product or service. Tracking their approach to messaging is also helpful. It’s important to evaluate your competitor’s overall content experience. What colors and fonts are they using on their website? How are they organizing their content? Is it easy for users to find information?

Brands need to be aware of how the competition is delivering content and make sure they can give their audience an even better user experience.

Subscribe to Their YouTube Channel

A recent study suggests that were are quickly approaching the time when 81% of consumer internet traffic will be video. As such, many brands are now including video as a crucial part of their content marketing strategy. Marketing teams need to know whether or not competitors are using video and look for interactions and engagement.

Engagement is a wonderful indicator of content performance. Check to see which website videos have the most views, evaluate the target keywords in the video title and description, and keep track of anything that’s noteworthy.

Just as you subscribe to their email list, it’s also a good idea to subscribe to your competitor’s YouTube channels in order to get alerts for new videos. (If they don’t have one, that’s a good thing for you!)

There are several ways your marketing team can monitor the competition. Keeping track of your competitor’s content is an essential part of developing your own content strategy that continues to grow and involved with your business.

As new competition enters the industry, brands have to be willing to make changes to their own strategies to adapt to the marketplace. Those that are able to consistently adapt will be able to stay ahead of the game.

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Content Marketing

15 Content Marketing Predictions for 2020

There’s no better time to share some content marketing predictions for 2020. Predictions for 2020’s content marketing trends included a surge in video and interactive content, emphasizing user engagement. Voice search optimization was expected to rise, alongside personalized content driven by AI and machine learning. Content authenticity and storytelling were anticipated to be key in building brand trust. Additionally, a greater focus on content analytics for strategy refinement was predicted.

**This post was selected as one of the top digital marketing articles of the week by UpCity, a B2B ratings and review company for digital marketing agencies and other marketing service providers.**

As we welcome the new year and new decade, it’s the perfect time to make predictions about what we can expect in the coming months and years. Content marketing has gone through quite an evolution, and we don’t expect that to stop being the case any time soon. The importance of content marketing continues to shine through the years, helping companies align their brand with their audiences. Let’s take a look at some predictions from industry experts.

Before we dive in, though, it’s important not to lose sight of the basics – you must spark conversation rather than throw marketing speak out into the world. Review the fundamentals of creating and delivering your messages. While flashy new technology and trends may catch your eye keep your eye on what matters – personal communication.

Content Creation

Work Smarter – Not Harder

This year and beyond, look at the content you’ve created and how it can evolve. If you’ve created a bunch of webinars with thought leaders in your niche, what else can you do with them? Transcribe the webinars and turn them into ebooks. Create blog posts from sections of the webinar. Create audio clips to use on social media or as podcast content. Create guest content that you can use to link back to the webinars.

Getting More Personal

Though content marketing is already leaning personal, 2020 will make it even more so. Content marketers will start behaving more like journalists. By shifting their focus to real people and weaving authenticity into the content, the aim will be to make the audience feel as close to their stories as possible.

Effectiveness Matters

The internet is home to lots of high-quality content that doesn’t get read because it can’t be found. The title is weak. The meta description is missing. Marketers have to keep writing effectiveness as one of their top priorities.

Content Distribution and Promotion

Integrating Influencers Into the Content Creation Process

Brands will spend less money with emerging influencers, yet engage them more effectively. They’ll start to involve the influencers in the content creation process and create situations that allow the influencers to be the heroes in their own stories.

Doing More With Less

Marketers will shift their focus to how much time they are spending on their content and distribution. As their time has become more valuable, they will shift to strategies that allow them to grow distribution in less time. More attention will focus on the strategies that make it possible to do more with less.

A Surge of Multimedia Content

We’re seeing multimedia work its way into content, but in the coming year, we’ll see it move, reorganize, reply, and customize more than ever before, in interactive charts, audio, and video. The more hands-on the content is, the more meaningful it will be to the audience.

Content Strategy

Fluid, Adaptable Content Strategy

Marketing is constantly changing, which makes your strategy key. When it comes to content marketing, your strategy must be able to respond to changes in consumer behavior, technology, and industry. Develop a strategy that is fluid and adaptable, with content that’s sophisticated and centered around a single idea anchored to the medium’s native function.

People-Driven Content

Brand marketers will continue to humanize the brand by attaching people to the content they are creating. Brands will power their content with people to build relationships at scale.

Emphasis on One-to-One Conversations

Using the content libraries they create, marketers will focus efforts on building one-to-one conversations. We’ll see marketing departments and customer service departments align more closely to establish the infrastructure to see strategies work at scale.

Content Tools and Technology

AMP for Email Changes the Face of Email Marketing

AMP has changed how the mobile web works, and we can expect it to transform how email works, too. Using AMP for email will allow marketers to create interactive and dynamic email marketing messages that behave like web pages, reducing friction and ultimately boosting conversions.

Leveraging AI and Machine Learning

AI and machine learning are being used in content marketing today, as some brands are toying with using it to completely replace the need for human content creation. However, because it remains out of reach for most brands, we can expect this year to be the start of figuring out how to leverage the technology as a complement to content creation, rather than a replacement for it.

It’s also important to use these tools to promote a relationship and personal engagement with your audience. There are brands out there using it to blast their messages in spammy ways to prospects who aren’t ready or willing to hear it. Quality matters more than quantity.

Embracing Voice Activated Content

Though some brands are working on it now, most haven’t developed a voice strategy. As the prevalence of these smart assistants continues to grow, businesses will have to get back to the basics and review their content. At that point, we can expect to see companies working to optimize their existing content to support voice search.

Everything Else

Focus on Ethical Marketing

Beyond complying with regulations, the focus will shift to marketing with respect and earning audience attention. By asking their audience for the information that they need and protecting the details that are shared, and helping people rather than targets or customers, marketers will see better results.

Doubling Down on Trust and Transparency

In the age of fake news and tons of political noise, trust is becoming even more critical in marketing. Content marketing will need to work harder to establish and maintain trust with audiences.

Personal Branding

More marketers will start to see that all the content marketing advice out there for brands is good to follow for their personal brands as well. As such, they’ll begin to regularly market themselves too, instead of when they are seeking a new opportunity.

What you think we can expect to see out of content marketing this year and beyond? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Content Marketing

Types of Content Marketing You Need

There are several types of content marketing you need to effectively align your brand with your customers. These include blog posts for thought leadership, videos for engagement, infographics for easy information digest, and case studies to showcase success. Email newsletters maintain regular communication with audiences. Interactive content like quizzes and polls boost engagement, while e-books and whitepapers provide in-depth information, establishing brand authority.

When it comes to content marketing, it can be difficult to know which types will make the biggest impact with your audience. That’s why familiarizing yourself with the options that are available to you before you start building your strategy is key.

In this post, I’ll be covering 10 types of content marketing. While it may be tempting to try and work all of them into your strategy, the simple truth is that depending on your industry, audience, and goals, they may not all fit. And that’s okay. You don’t want to invest resources into creating content that won’t serve your overall marketing efforts well.

Ultimately, it’s the type of content marketing that promotes your business effectively that you need to include in your strategy. There’s nothing wrong with experimenting with different types from time to time, of course, but when first getting started, test a few types and go from there before adding or removing elements.

1. Blogs

Having a blog on your website is essential. It helps customers when they are looking for answers, improves your search engine optimization efforts, and in general, provide a low-cost method for growing your organic traffic.

As you create blog posts, remember the following:

  • Use a cluster model or pillar approach for organizing your blog topics
  • Optimize the content for SEO
  • Keep content focused and relevant to the product or service you offer.

2. Videos

Videos are a wonderful way to quickly engage your audience. Research shows 72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service through video. If that’s not enough for you, data also shows that by 2022, video will make up for 82% of all consumer internet traffic, 15x higher than it was in 2017.

Videos can take many forms – from explainers and webinars to video blogs, live streams, and presentations. You don’t always have to have a person on camera, which is helpful for the camera shy and those on a limited budget.

3. Checklists

Checklists are valuable for a lot of small business customers. They give a step-by-step method to solve a problem, and can be created in multiple formats to make them shareable on your social media platforms, or sent to your email list.

Want to make sure all your content marketing efforts are hitting the mark before they are released to the world? Create an internal checklist to use with your team so it’s easier to make sure your content always fits your audience personas. Use a tool like Beacon to make creating these things easier. It can also make ebook creation easier, which I’ll get to in a bit.

4. User-Generated Content

User-generated content, or UGC, is a great content marketing method because it gets your customers involved. People respond to other people like them, so it’s more likely to get them interested in your business.

It’s particularly useful for those in the beauty/fashion niche, because people post photos of their nails, hair, and outfits to their followers, often tagging the products used. When you’re tagged in a high quality image featuring your product, you can share it with your audience, too.

5. Testimonials/Reviews

Like UGC, customer reviews and testimonials are content that comes straight from your audience. If you’re in a niche market, testimonials provide a short clip about what makes your company stand out from the competition.

You can add customer reviews on your website or in emails… whether written or in video form.

6. Whitepapers

Whitepapers are often confused with eBooks, and the two are actually different. While both are forms of lengthy content, whitepapers contain more data and information. Whitepapers have more attention to detail, and serve as a big part of the research phase for the majority of buyers.

7. eBooks

An eBook really isn’t anything more than long-form blog content. It’s not a novel or a multiple-page ad for your business. Instead, they are a way to give your potential customers valuable information about something relevant to them and to your business. It gives them something for free, yet shows them your company’s expertise and knowledge about how to solve a problem for them.

8. Infographics

Are you in an industry where statistics are essential? Instead of potentially boring your audience with an information dump, use infographics to break it all down into more digestible pieces of content. The infographic is the perfect vehicle because it combines eye-catching graphics with processes or statistics that would be difficult to read and absorb in a standard text format.

With tools like Canva and Visme, it’s easy to create infographics without spending a ton of money working with graphic designers. And thanks to promotional options such as directories and social media, you can spread your message quickly.

9. Memes

Though they are a relatively new form of content marketing, you can easily create memes that are relevant to any audience in any industry. The key is an image that’s set to culturally relevant text and timed well. If you can time it right and align it with your social aesthetic, you will definitely see an increase in traffic.

And with tools like MemeGenerator, you don’t need to be a graphic designer or to hire one to get the job done.

10. Case Studies

Case studies are an effective way for those in the B2B space to demonstrate how their product or service will help future prospective customers. Using case studies allows a buy to see another customer’s journey from start to finish, and see what their results were like. By showing what you’ve been able to do for other customers, you’re more likely to convert someone to a paying customer. In addition to written case studies, you can use case study videos and video testimonials/reviews to really make the most of your content marketing efforts.

Categories
Content Marketing

Why Your Videos Aren’t as Successful as Your Blog Posts

The increasing popularity of video content is sending many marketers to join in on the party. After all, we see many shiny new things come into play – remember Vine? And it’s easy to want to jump to the next big thing. The difference is, we have plenty of data to support the fact that video marketing is here to stay.

HubSpot research shows that more than 50% of consumers want to see more video content from the brands they know and love, so it’s no surprise marketers are eager to please. Data also shows six out of 10 people would rather watch videos online than television – and mobile video consumption rises by 100% every year.

All that said, optimizing video content for search, much the same way you do for blog posts and other text heavy forms of content, is a big difference in whether your content is seen or not.

Like many other marketers, you’ve decided to embrace video marketing and spend some of your budget on creating video content, but you’re just not seeing the SEO results. You’ve gotten great results with the majority of your blog posts, but just don’t understand why you can’t get the same for your video content.

There are many reasons why your videos may not be getting the search engine attention they deserve, but for the sake of brevity, let’s cover some of the biggest ones.

Lack of an Optimized Transcript

Are you aware of the fact that most videos on Facebook are watched on mute? This alone is a good enough reason to use transcripts.

But, transcripts are more important than that, because even though they help the hard of hearing and let people consume video without bothering the people around them, they also make your videos easier for the search engine bots to crawl. As a result, there’s more content to rank.

When you create your video transcript, your keyword usage may look a little different than you’d see it in a blog post. This is because written verbiage sounds a bit different when it’s spoken rather than read. Take the time to build your transcript around conversational keywords and phrases. You’ll be fine as long as you understand user intent.

In video marketing, you’re generally trying to rank for long-tail keywords. The number of YouTube searches that start with “how to” are growing by 70% year over year.

Lack of a Visually Interesting Thumbnail Image

Looking at the thumbnail image itself, there isn’t much of an importance to it in terms of the SEO value it offers. The title, description, tags, etc. are far more important. But, if you’ve one everything right to make sure your video is ranking, the wrong thumbnail could sabotage your efforts. Why?

The thumbnail is the thing that will give people their first impression of the video. As such, it plays a role in determining whether or not to watch the video.

According to a Backlinko study of more than one million YouTube videos to see what they could learn about video SEO. The main takeaways include:

  • Videos with more comments ranked higher
  • The number of shares a video had strongly related to page 1 ranking.
  • Likes play a major role in how a video ranks
  • There is a slight correlation between the channel’s subscriber count and video rankings.

If your thumbnails are turning people off, that’s going to stop them from viewing the content, so you won’t get many comments, shares, likes, or subscribers. That’s why it’s worth taking the time to create a custom image for your video thumbnail, using something like Canva. Research shows videos that have custom, relevant thumbnails get 30% higher play rates than those without.

Videos Don’t Properly Align With Your Web Pages

Let’s turn the focus to your website for a moment. Getting your webpage to rank for video content is a challenge since there are many factors to consider. There are a number of reasons why web pages with video content struggle to rank.

The largest issue comes from the page itself with both blog posts and pages with video.  You cannot rely on SEO-friendly video alone to carry the full load of ranking. The page the video lives on must be optimized, too, because if it’s not the search engine bots are likely to crawl the page in the first place, regardless of how awesome the video is. Consider these factors:

  • Is the page fast to load?
  • Is the page secure?
  • Is the page content, other than the video optimized for the keywords?
  • Is the video relevant to the rest of the content on the page?

It’s best to place one video per page, because Google typically won’t index the more than one. If there are multiple videos on a page, make sure the one you’re trying to rank for is first.

Using the Same Approach With Video and Blog Posts

If you’re getting a lot of success with your blog posts, it may seem logical to build out your videos in a similar way. Though the message in a blog post and a video can be the same, the delivery is much different.

WIth a blog post, you can provide a ton of context, examples, detailed analysis, and more. With video, that’s not always possible.

YouTube confirmed a while ago that watch times and completion rates play a role in how content is ranked, so if your videos are similar to reading a long blog post, you’re likely to bore your audience and harm your completion rates.

Streamline your main points and get to the key takeaways quickly when you’re creating video. Map out your important parts and spell them out in the video.

Research shows videos between one to two minutes retain about 75% of their viewers, but videos that are in the four to five minute range keep less than 60% of their viewers.

This by no means suggests you should keep all your videos really short. It just means you need to focus on cutting the fat wherever it’s possible.

People’s attention spans aren’t like they used to be, so it’s easier to lose video viewers than you may think. Keep your message clear and to the point.

Ranking your content, especially videos, is important to your overall marketing strategy. The good thing is that the attributes that make your blog content successful transfer to your videos – but the fine points about how to get the job done for the videos are a bit different.

Focusing on these four elements as you create and optimize your video content will get and keep you in the search engine’s good graces.

Categories
Content Marketing

How to Generate 100+ Blog Content Ideas in 30 Minutes or Less

Coming up with blog content ideas can be a giant pain. This is especially true if you’ve been blogging in your niche for years like I have. Instead of trying to come up with ideas from scratch all the time, I’ve learned to use outside sources for inspiration – based on what other blogs are covering, what people are searching for, and what’s popular. Using these three cornerstones, I’ve been able to generate 100 or more content ideas for my blog in half an hour or less. And now? I’m going to show you how to do it, too.

For this exercise, I’ll be using “starting a business” as the niche, but feel free to substitute your niche or any keyword related to it as you complete the exercise with me.

Spend 10 Minutes Finding Blog Content Ideas

What are people searching for? When we create a blog post, we want lots of traffic, and that means we need to write about things people are searching for. To do this, we need to know what kinds of questions people are asking about our niche, so we know what they want to read about.

That’s where some Google searching can be our best friend, thanks to auto suggest searches. But, with Google, we’re limited to a handful of results at a time, and it can be really time consuming to extract all the data to make it into a usable list of topic ideas.

That’s where Answer the Public comes in. It’s a free tool that generates a report of questions people are asking in Google.  We’ll pop in “starting a business” and scroll to the “Questions” report.

That’s 113 questions in a data visualization. Thankfully, Answer the Public will also give you the list format, so it’s easier to see and figure out what you want to start with.

This is an amazing way to start, of course, but we can only pull a report for one topic at a time, so if you want to get results for multiple topics, you’d have to spend time pulling reports for each. Though it’s not really a big issue for a lot of people, it is a time waster if you’ve got a lot of topics in mind.

Plus, there’s no real context about how popular the individual questions are. We don’t know how many people are asking each of the questions, and without that information, we don’t really know if it’s a good idea for a blog post.

If you want to stop here, that’s fine, of course, but I always recommend finding out what your best options are in terms of popularity. Do this with the Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer or SerpStat. Enter a few of your topic ideas, then look at the Questions report.

You’ll get a list of the questions, several thousand or more, depending on your niche. They’re all sorted by search volume. It’s a good idea to limit the results to the ones with the highest search volume – so adjust the “Search Volume” filter to 500-Max,, because no one really has time to sift through thousands of results, do they?

Because the list is dependent on the seed keywords you start with, using generic keywords tend to give you more generic results. Spend about 10 minutes scanning the results and weed out duplicates. You’ll be able to narrow down the list quite a bit.

Topics include things like:

  1. Loans for a small business start up.
  2. How to start a consulting business.
  3. How to start a cleaning business.
  4. How to start a photography business.
  5. How to start a business with no money.

These things are useful, of course, but what about the latest news and what the competitors are doing? That’s where the next step comes in.

Spend 10 Minutes Finding What’s Working for Your Competition

Come up with your list of competitors when it comes to your niche. When it comes to business, sites like The Balance SMB, Business.com and Small Business Trends come to mind. If you can’t think of many, you can use the Ahrefs Site Explorer’s Competing domains report to get a whole list of competitors. If you don’t use Ahrefs, you can use Serpstat. Or, you can use a related: search in Google..

Now that we know who our competition is, you want to take a look at the kinds of posts that are making these blogs successful. Manually, you can do this by browsing each site and taking notes about the kind of content they’re publishing. But, this step takes a lot of time and doesn’t tell us whether people are really interested in the topics.

You can use the Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. Enter the competitor’s URL and then look at the Top Pages report. This will show you a list of your competitor’s web pages, sorted by monthly estimated organic traffic, so you can find out which topics are getting the most searches every month.

Take a look at the page URL and top keyword columns for an idea as to what topics the audience really loves. Think beyond exact keywords, too.

Glance through the list and you’ll be able to add more topics to your list.

Spend 10 Minutes Finding Popular Articles

This is similar to the strategy we just used, but instead of looking at the competition, we’ll look at what’s popular to get inspiration. Instead of pulling topic ideas from a specific website at a time, you can do this with Ahrefs’ Content Explorer, or BuzzSumo.  Enter a topic and get a ton of results based on performance such as social shares, search traffic, and referring domains. You can check to see what the most popular pages are within a certain time frame, within a certain domain, etc.

Once you go through this, you’ll have even more blog content ideas to use that will keep you busy for a few months at least.

Happy blogging!

Categories
Content Marketing

Checklist for Creating Valuable Content

**This post was selected as one of the top digital marketing articles of the week by UpCity, a B2B ratings and review company for digital marketing agencies and other marketing service providers.**

Content is what makes the Internet such a useful tool, whether you’re trying to learn a new skill, or kill some time in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. But valuable content is what turns prospects into customers and makes businesses money.

You can spend hours creating a piece of content you believe is stellar – only to have it fall flat with your audience. You can crank out a few words on a whim, and find that it went viral overnight. There’s a certain amount of luck involved, but with the right focus and effort, you can tip the scales in your favor.

How? A checklist to make sure you hit all the major points before you ever hit publish – whether you’re working on an article, a video, or a podcast.

Atul Gawarde, general surgeon and author of The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right says, “Good checklists, on the other hand are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything — a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps — the ones that even the highly skilled professionals using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.”

What Are the Markers of Valuable Content?

For all digital content, regardless of format or delivery, to be considered valuable, it must be:

  • Discoverable (people have to be able to find it).
  • Readable (people have to be able to read it/listen to it).
  • Understandable (if people can’t understand it, they can’t get value from it).
  • Actionable (it must give actionable advice to help people achieve something).
  • Shareable (it must be easy to share with others who may also see its value).

Bring All Decision-Makers Together

Before you can begin using this, or any other checklist for that matter, you must understand how to use it. That means getting all the stakeholders involved. In his book, Gwarde references how a hospital in Detroit used a checklist to insert an injection port, used to reduce the number of times a patient has to be stuck with a needle. Because these lines can often be infected, a physician from another hospital created a checklist and asked the Detroit hospitals to participate in a study to evaluate the checklist effectiveness. Each hospital that participated in the study was given a project manager and an executive who would visit at least once monthly to listen to complaints and help solve issues.

The executive was involved because some of the staff issues were things only the executives could fix, such as providing the correct sized curtains and the right kind of soap. Getting the executives involved meant that the Detroit hospitals were able to reduce injection port infections by two-thirds.

Looping in the executives on the challenges you face in content marketing and offering solutions, you can make a difference. Anyone who has the power to allocate or change resources and policy needs to be part of the meeting you call together about creating and using a checklist.

Share the Checklist With Your Team

Your checklist should outline what must happen to keep your readers interested in your content because that’s the only thing that you have control over. Think about what will keep people reading to the end of the content – visuals, usability, and the structure of the information.

Get everyone who’s involved in your digital strategy team working together to create and make changes to your checklist as you need to. If there are other checklists, combine them however you can to maximize their effectiveness.

Make Your Content Discoverable

How you do this varies a bit depending on the type of content.

Web Page Content

Use headings throughout your content to break it up and make it easier to read. Strategically place keywords in those headings for extra potential search engine ranking. You’ll see this article is done with H2s and H3s where appropriate.

Optimize the meta data for each page according to the content and keyword you’re targeting. This includes the title, keywords, and description. Remember the description is like a free sales pitch – it should entice people to click through from the search engine to your content.

Include alt text on all images and photos so they appear in search. Describe the image so the visually impaired will be able to “see” what the image contains.

Include links to other relevant pages on your site so you increase the value the search engine bots assign to your pages. Include relevant links to other websites to provide additional value to your readers when and where necessary.

Video Content

Post the video on YouTube and Facebook to increase the chance it will be seen. Tag the content relevantly to make it easier to find. Include possible keywords in the video title. Provide a detailed summary that uses relevant keywords. Add subtitles to the videos for improved usability (the majority of people watch videos without sound).

Audio Content

Distribute the audio content in various formats including WAV and MP3 so it’s available to different audiences. If potential customers don’t have the required format to listen to the audio file, limiting it to a single format hinders reaching your goal of creating and distributing the content.

Beyond this, create a detailed summary and title for where the content can be downloaded. For some delivery methods, that’s the system it’s stored in such as iTunes. For others, it may be the page where you post the file.

Post each audio clip on a relevant content page so the text and audio support each other and your SEO efforts by demonstrating relevant content to the search engine bots.

Make Your Content Readable

It’s imperative that your valuable content is readable to users, because text is the primary way people consume information. When considering whether or not your content is readable, remember that readers scan until they find what they need. The best web articles respect the reader’s time.

  • Use an inverted pyramid style of writing that includes the most important facts at the top.
  • Chunk your content so that you keep the paragraph short limiting them to three to four sentences in a paragraph and no more than three paragraphs under a single heading.
  • Make use of bullets and numbered lists to help people consume information quickly.
  • Create and use a style guide so that language is consistent. This helps your readers avoid confusion.

Make Your Content Understandable

When topics are complex, developing valuable content that readers understand is particularly challenging. As such, it’s important to focus on writing on an eighth grade reading level or something that is appropriate for your audience. Run your text through a readability tool to find out the grade level.

Regardless of which industry you’re in, you can create understandable content by:

  • Developing readability tool for each of your different user audiences so you can match the level of content complexity to the user’s ability to understand it.
  • Choosing the right content type – some topics will be better suited for video or slideshow rather than written text.
  • Providing context. Even in situations where it may sound condescending, explained basic concepts to your users because you never know where someone is jumping in.
  • Applying a standard reading level to all content for each project and stick to it. Is this should be based on market research and customer personas.
  • Giving the reader valuable information whether it is new information or a different way of articulating existing ideas.

Make Your Content Actionable

You’re creating content because you want the people who read it to take some sort of action. You can make sure this happens by:

  • Including an obvious call to action.
  • Making it easy for users to ask questions and comment, both publicly and privately. You can allow blog comments or direct people to your social media platforms to reach you directly.
  • Including a list of actionable items at the top If the content is long. For instance, if you are writing about weight loss with the ketogenic diet, provide three bullets that define the ketogenic diet and how to follow it at the top of the content.
  • Providing links to relevant content or choose a plug-in for your content management system that provides options for other content that users have liked.

Make Your Content Shareable

It’s no secret that people trust recommendations from other people more than they trust friends. This means you must make a concentrated effort to get users to share your content with their connections. You can do this by:

  • Asking your readers to share the content at the end of each piece.
  • Providing a reason to share.
  • Aim to provoke an emotional response.
  • Make it easy just share by including share buttons at the bottom of each piece.
  • Allow users to make the share personal.

I hope this checklist helps you out and your quest to create better, more valuable content. Let me know how it works out for you and if you think there is anything else I should add.

 

Common Questions About Content Marketing

How is content marketing different to SEO?

Content marketing is a broad strategy that targets users across various channels (search, social, email etc) and engages users as they move between them. Without these channels, nobody would be able to see your content and a key part of your strategy is understanding which channel(s) to deliver each piece of content on and how to target users on them. SEO is about making your content as accessible as possible for search engine users and helping it perform effectively. This starts with optimizing your pages and content for visibility in the searches that matter most but also involves broader, technical factors that affect how people engage with your pages (mobile optimization, loading times, etc).

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the strategic process of building valuable relationships with audiences through various types of media. This is where you craft the stories and messages that capture people’s attention and guide them along the consumer journey until they become another happy customer.

Why is content marketing important?

Content is the substance of everything people do online before making a purchase – from the very first search to the moment they hit the buy button. Without content there are no web pages, search results, online reviews, demo videos or anything else that helps people make buying choices.

What are the benefits of content marketing?

Above all, the key benefit is guiding people towards buying from you with confidence. When there are hundreds or thousands of other businesses like yours that people could buy from, content is how you differentiate your brand and show them why they should be doing business with you.

How do you measure content marketing success?

As with any kind of marketing strategy, you need to be able to measure your results to prove its success and find opportunities for improvement. Before you can do this, you’ll have to know exactly what your content marketing goals are and which KPIs illustrate success or failure.

Categories
Content Marketing

Sentiment Analysis 101: Why It Matters

Are people talking about your business online? Do you know what they are saying? What about how to analyze the sentiment of the conversations so you can make better marketing decisions?

In this post, I’ll show you more about what sentiment analysis is and the various ways you can use it to better serve your customers. Sentiment analysis goes beyond social listening on social media platforms and explores mentions of your brand anywhere online – from review websites to search engine results and more.

What Is Sentiment Analysis?

According to Techopedia, sentiment analysis is, “a type of data mining that measures the inclination of people’s opinions through natural language processing (NLP), computational linguistics and text analysis, which are used to extract and analyze subjective information from the Web – mostly social media and similar sources. The analyzed data quantifies the general public’s sentiments or reactions toward certain products, people or ideas and reveal the contextual polarity of the information. Sentiment analysis is also known as opinion mining.”

How to Use Sentiment Analysis to Improve Your Business

With sentiment analysis, businesses can track how people are receiving their brand and how popular it is, perception and anticipation of new products or services, your overall reputation, and rant detection.

Prevent and Manage a Public Relations Crisis

You can track online mentions in real-time, making it much easier to identify a potential PR crisis as it unfolds so you can get ahead of it. If you see an increase in negative sentiment, you can take a deeper look into things, and if you determine it’s needed, take the action to defuse the situation before it escalates.

Word gets around quickly on social media, and negative comments will always gain traction much faster than positive ones. If you don’t deal with the unhappy customers quickly and professionally, they may share their unhappiness on their social media profiles with their friends and the general public. And when that happens, you could have another stream of people coming to your brand page to share their thoughts with you, too.

A lot of social listening tools out there send notifications of new mentions and then allow you to use filters to show only specific sentiments, so you can prioritize the comments you need to address first and which ones you can wait on. Because you’ll get alerts in real-time, it’s important to have customer service available to address things as soon as possible. For larger brands, this means a near 24/7 staff keeping an eye on things – and for smaller brands, it means checking as often as possible during your business hours. Failing to catch things quickly allows them to escalate before you even take notice of the first negative mention.

Learn About the Competition

While you’re in the process of monitoring of your own brand mentions, you can also use it to track your competitors’ mentions to see how your business compares. Negative sentiments toward a competitor can sometimes offer opportunity for your company. If for instance, you find something missing in their product, you may find a way for your product to fill the void.

Paying attention to where the competition is getting positive mentions can also help you find areas where you may need to improve.

Find Influencers

When you see that the same people are talking about your business, you can start to take notice of potential influencers you may want to work with on an influencer marketing campaign. Some sentiment analysis tools will assign influencer scores to online mentions so you can filter mentions based on the strength of the influencer.

Instagram is by far one of the most popular social platforms for influencers, and you can identify potential influencers by looking at the comments in the positive mentions feed. If you’re feeling up to the task, you may even be able to change the mind of influencers who have left negative comments.

Before reaching out to any influencer to talk about partnering together, take time to vet them. Any influencer you choose to work with needs to have a high engagement rate – regardless of the size of the following. The more engagement in terms of reactions and comments (real, meaningful ones) you see, the more their audience is paying attention. The larger the audience, the less engagement influencers typically get, so don’t be afraid to give smaller audiences a chance.

Leverage Customer Feedback to Improve Service

Sentiment analysis makes it easier to find out what people like and don’t like about your brand, products, and services. It also helps you see what people think from the moment you launch something new – whether it’s a new campaign or a new product.

If you find a generally positive sentiment in regards to the new product, celebrate it and show your appreciation. If you’ve recently redesigned your mobile app and find that most people hate it, get ready to change it. Customer input may not always be what you wanted to hear, but it’s critical to respond to what they say so you can learn more about what they want – then give it to them.

Using sentiment analysis can help you get a consensus about what your customers are thinking so you can take action on relevant suggestions. For example, you can use customer feedback to inform future product designs by making improvements to the features they didn’t receive well and enhancing the features they love.

When you start using sentiment analysis to get a better look at the way people feel about your brand and its products or services, you’ll be able to make your marketing budget work harder for you by making smarter investments with your resources.

Categories
Content Marketing

Strategies for CTAs That Convert

Set of eight modern gradient buttons with shadows. Read more Buttons. Vector illustration

Looking at your website analytics, you see there’s plenty of traffic coming in, but that nice chunk of traffic isn’t showing in your conversions.

What is the problem? Chances are, it’s the most important element of your site – your call to actions (CTAs) are the offender.

The good news is, you don’t need some magic spell to make your visitors convert. All it takes is applying some basic principles, testing the results, and then refining according to what works best.

Take a look at these strategies to help you increase your conversion rate.

CTA Strategy #1: Follow the KISS Principle

KISS stands for Keep it Simple, Sweetie. When you give visitors too many choices, you overwhelm them, which in turn kills your conversion rate. The more choices a visitor has, the higher chance they have of becoming distracted and moving away from the action you want them to take. By simplifying everything, you make it easier for people to see how to take action.

Ways to simplify the CTAs on your site include:

  • Removing navigation menus from the landing page.
  • Including a single CTA.
  • Making the CTA Clear – using copy and layout.

CTA Strategy #2: Personalize Your CTAs

At this point, you’re driving plenty of traffic. You’ve simplified the landing page and you have clear CTAs. What else can you do to boost your conversion rates?

You can personalize your CTA button text. Rather than “free download” for your free report, you can change it to something like: “Show me how to….” where the text after “how to” refers to the content of your report.

So, how can you do it? Think about your target clients. Think about the value that your download or product offers the audience.

To personalize your CTA:

  • Focus on the value you’re offering customers. What’s in it for them?
  • Tie the unique selling point to that value.
  • Tell your site visitors why they should want to take the action you’re trying to get them to take.

CTA Strategy #3: Use Color

Before your audience can convert, you must have their attention. Tell the audience where you want their eyes to go by using a powerful CTA – in terms of colors, shadows, gradients, fonts, and kerning.

Ultimately, there’s no single answer as to the best color you should use for your CTA button. One thing we do know for sure is that you should not use black, white, gray, or any muted color. Why? Because these are not bright enough. They don’t stand out from the background, and won’t grab attention. If you’re not careful, the use of color in your landing page may even steer the vistor’s eyes away from the CTA.

So how can you decide the best color to use for your CTA button? Much of your decision should be based on the current branding and colors you’re using. It must be a color that stands out from the background, but doesn’t clash with it, and it should grab attention.

If you want to see if a certain color grabs attention, use a tool like ButtonOptimizer to create multiple buttons. You’ll use the glance test to see which one grabs your attention.

Once you’ve created all the buttons, lay them all out and look at them for a second, then see which one is most noticeable.

It may seem like hype, but studies show color influences everything from how we perceive the ambient temperature in a room to our mood and behavior.

You can test the color of your CTA button to see how it affects conversion rate by leaving all other elements on your page the exact same. Test multiple colors to determine which one has the highest conversion rate.

CTA Strategy #4: Stay on Message

Clarity is crucial. Give your site visitors a reason to take the desired action. If you’re trying to get them to subscribe to your newsletter, offer a free report or something of value in exchange. If you’re trying to get them to shop in your store, offer a discount for first time customers, or a free trial of your product.

Make sure the CTA is direct – telling the user exactly what it is you want them to do. If you want them to join your mailing list, use something like, “Subscribe Now” and if you want them to shop, “Shop Now” is fine.

You should always start your CTA with directive words, such as order, buy, or subscribe.

Now that you have an idea of what you should change on your landing page and the difference it can make, you can make those changes on your site to see how it affects your conversion rates. Test one step at a time with your new CTAs and run split tests to see what works. If you change the copy along with the button color at the same time, it will be hard to determine whether it was the color change or the change in copy that made the difference in the conversion rate. Testing a single element at a time will make it easier to develop the “perfect” formula for what works best for your audience.

Test positioning of the CTA on the page, the copy around the button, the color, the copy on the button, and even the offer itself. Run each test for at least a few days to a week so you can be sure to get enough data to see what works best.

Once you identify the winners from each test, combine them all together and measure the results. You can continue to test and refine until you are happy with the outcome.

Categories
Content Marketing

Developing a Visual Content Strategy

Developing a strategy is complex, and for many of us, anxiety inducing. It’s not easy to figure out where to start and how to proceed. Too often, content marketers are out there working without a strategy, or working within one that is far too restrictive. When things don’t work out as planned, it’s necessary to go back to the beginning and reassess the foundation of the strategy. This is difficult because it means giving up on good work in progress, work that would be nice to complete, but ultimately distracts from the bigger picture.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, only 32% of B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy, and 51% of those marketers say that creating visual content is a priority they are focusing on in the coming year.

You don’t want to, and can’t likely afford to, waste work – so the right visual content strategy can prevent this. But what makes a good strategy? You need a strong foundation, but something that gives you the flexibility you need to move – you need agility. There’s a difference between being agile and winging it – so here’s a six step process you can use to guide you.

Step One: Identify Your Core Purpose

Understand who you really are as a company and what you’re after. Your business purpose is not the same as your measurable objective, and it’s not to double your business or increase your leads by a certain percentage.

Get to your purpose by answering: Why does my business exist? If it disappeared tomorrow, what would be lost in the world? If you achieve what you’re building, how is the world different?

Spending time on this task is crucial because it informs your company culture, which powers content creation and efforts in many other areas of your business.

Once you figure out what your core purpose is and have tweaked it to the point where everyone is excited about it – it’s time to move to the next step.

Step Two: Refine the Audience

If you’re building a business and content around you, it won’t connect with your audience. By shifting the spotlight away from yourself as a company to the customer, you’ll build trust, relationships, and ultimately increase conversions. Build your content not to impress co-workers, but to impress your prospects.

If you’re a growing company and have a huge overall market for the products or services you’re offering, that’s great – but it can be problematic. If you’re defining your market broadly, such as people who lie to eat food, you’re trying to be too many things to too many people.

This is why you must segment your audience into smaller pieces. For instance, rather than focusing on everyone who likes food, you could begin with a focus on a certain geographic location who want to lose weight and eat healthy, but just don’t have enough time to cook.

Narrowing your focus shouldn’t be confused with thinking smaller. With agility in mind, you focus on the work that makes the biggest impact at the moment, while still keeping your larger purpose in mind.

Identifying a market segment you can address immediately lets you run experiments to get the information you need to continue expanding in the future.

When you know who you’re specifically targeting with your offers, you can create content to speaks to them directly. This builds a core audience of people who love what you do and will help you grow so you can choose additional customer segments in the future.

Step Three: Identify Your Customer’s Unmet Need

As a marketer, it’s easy to spend a lot of time thinking about what people want. Once you know who your audience segment is, you should do research to find out what they want – rather than working based on what you think they want.

You must find the things your customer needs to do, but cannot get done. Conduct market research in the form of surveys and focus groups to get this information. Build a list of questions to help you get inside the mind of the customer. Find out what their main pain points and frustrations are, and any other issues your product or service can help solve. Your content is how you’ll communicate your solutions.

Use everything you learn here to create detailed customer personas. Having these fictional people in front of you can help you with content creation. It’s as simple as writing as if you were speaking directly to that person.

Step Four: Choose the Best Distribution Channels

The hardest part is out of the way now. You know who you’re dealing with and know how to empathize with them. Now, you’ll have to find out where they are when they’re not busy with work and hobbies. This way, you know what channels to focus on when you distribute the content you create. If your audience isn’t on Instagram, don’t waste time and money creating content specifically for that platform! Only invest resources in platforms where you know your customers are. Use your analytics to determine which platforms bring traffic to your site and start there.

Think about where you are currently publishing your content – and the benefits of each channel. Consider how you’re promoting your content and ensure you’re following best practices to get your content in front of as many eyes as possible.

What do you hope the next step will be after viewing your visual content? Craft a buyer’s journey that will transform your content marketing into sales.

What publishing partnerships have yielded the best results in the past? Which new ones would make a big impact? Everyone wants to be on a site like Huffington Post and things they have a great story worth publication there, and if you do, that’s awesome. But look for other ways, too. What would happen if instead of focusing on that, you tripled down on a content partnership with an influencer that caught your eye last year?

You should keep these things in mind from the beginning of content ideation. All components – the subject matter, format, and distribution channel will contribute to your overall success.

Step Five: Create Your Visual Language

Your visual language is how you’ll communicate your message to your audience. Will you strictly follow your brand guidelines, or will you experiment from time to time? Your visual language should include your voice, your brand identity, a flexible and scalable design system, and clear visual hierarchy.

Step Six: Generate Ideas for Content

You’ll want to generate a lot of ideas for content at once, so you always have something to be working on, and there’s always something ready to push out in line with your campaigns. A good piece of content should be told from a user’s perspective or experience, explains how value is created for the customer, is as specific as possible, has business impact, provides some form of value – no matter the size or form.

Visual content helps your brand exponentially online. It builds brand awareness, trust, credibility, and more. Building a strategy ensures your content creation efforts are never made in vain. Whenever you get stuck, start at step one and re-evaluate.

Categories
Content Marketing

10 Reasons You Need an Editorial Calendar

It doesn’t matter if you’re planning social media posts or planning to roll out new website content; no marketing strategy can be successful without a plan. You always need an organized set of goals dictating what your brand’s online message will be, how those messages will evolve throughout the year, and how they will be communicated.

Enter the editorial calendar. You know you need one, and you’ve probably been avoiding the project altogether – but holding off in its creation could be doing you more harm than good. We want to help you get back on track and get this year really rockin’ with great results. So let’s make it happen, shall we?

Time Savings

One of the reasons business owners avoid editorial calendars is because they take time to set up. The reality is that this is true of all new projects. Once you have it up and running, it begins to function like a well-oiled machine.

Sure, it takes time to find a great format, figure out workflows, and make adjustments to the process. Once that’s done, though, your biggest (and how easier) project will be to load up content titles and ideas for each of your projects. You’ll also find you’re no longer wasting time scrambling to come up with last-minute content for items that were missed because they weren’t on a visual calendar to start with.

Consistency

A quick look at your editorial calendar will help you figure out where you’re falling flat. When you create your initial calendar, it sometimes helps to look back a month and plug in what types of content you published. Did you randomly publish a couple of blogs, ten Twitter posts one day and then none for a week, or one YouTube video in what was supposed to be a two-part series? Having a strong editorial calendar in place will help you to establish a consistent publishing pace.

Sticking to the 4-1-1 Rule

Nope, we’re not dialing “information” for help. We’re talking about the 4-1-1 rule of marketing. This rule states that out of every six posts, there should be four pieces of entertaining or informational material for each one “soft” promotion (like an event) or “hard” promotion (like a sale). It keeps your audience interested and engaged without overwhelming them with advertisements and hard sells. Your calendar will help you to keep your ratio in check.

Ease of Planning Themed Content

Do you usually plan big promotions around specific holidays or events? An editorial calendar will allow you to target the big day and then map out the content you want to run in the days, weeks, or even months beforehand. Some promotions are fast-hitting while others require a slow build with increased levels of content as you hit the peak. Editorial calendars offer the visual space you need to map things out.

Ease of Planning Evergreen Content

Evergreen content isn’t tied to a specific time of year; it’s always relevant, no matter what season you’re in. Search engines love this type of content as it works well with keywords and doesn’t become outdated quickly. It’s important to make sure you’re adding evergreen content to your content marketing strategies, sprinkling it in between your themed content.

Diverse Content Scheduling

Having an editorial calendar makes it easy to see what type of content you have scheduled at any given time. You get to see content type, subject matter, categories, associated clients, and just about anything else you need to list, too. You’ll never end up posting two infographics in a row again, and you won’t spend too many days in a row on the same niche subject.

Worried about having a stroke of genius and not being able to fit it in? Using a calendar doesn’t mean you have to trash your title ideas; it means you can drag and drop them to different dates so your readers don’t get bored.

Quick Adjustments

Another benefit of the content calendar is that it’s easy to pick something up and move it to a different date. Let’s say there’s breaking news in your industry and you want to fit in a new blog post on the subject. You merely have to browse your editorial calendar, find the day you want to publish, and maybe reschedule the original piece for a different day; a task that will be easy because you can simply pop the original piece into an empty spot on the calendar. You won’t have to pull your hair out wondering how to rearrange your scribbled post-it notes.

Budget Considerations

Marketing costs money. Most companies have a very specific dollar amount budgeted per month, quarter, or year. Content types may vary in price, which can make it difficult to know what to budget when you’re first starting out.

Think about the contingencies involved with creating each content type on your calendar. Maybe you can create videos in-house but need an outside graphic designer to do your infographics. Knowing your budget – and having it openly displayed on an easy-to-read calendar – will ensure you’re spreading your marketing dollars out wisely. Your goal (and result) will be that important campaigns get what they need each quarter.

More Traffic and Engagement

Having an editorial calendar isn’t just about mapping out a better content strategy. The entire process has a trickle-down effect, bringing more traffic to your website and social media platforms. Regular, consistent efforts result in ongoing increases in traffic as well as engagement. You’ll end up with more email sign-ups, more targeted leads, and a better overall ROI.

Planning Ahead, Looking Back

While it’s great to know what you’re going to publish in advance, it’s also incredibly helpful to be able to look back at what you’ve already done. Your marketing team should be tracking the metrics associated with every blog, newsletter, and social media post you put out in the universe. You’ll be able to look back at the reach, open rates, clicks, and engagement levels to determine which subjects were more popular with your audience. Creating more content around those same topics will help you to skyrocket your results.

Look, it would be false to say it isn’t a bit of work to set up an editorial calendar. But once you have it in place, we really think you’ll be amazed at how easy your content marketing strategies are to plan. Give it a shot and let us know how it goes!

Categories
Content Marketing

Website 101: How to Review Old Blog Posts for Relevancy

You work really hard to come up with quality blog content for your website. That’s really awesome! Way too many businesses overlook their content and miss out on the incredible opportunity it brings.

Unfortunately, even those of us who do focus on content forget to review older posts for relevancy now and again. And even best pieces of evergreen content need to be reviewed after a few months or years.

The world changes. Laws, guidelines, research, and technology are constantly evolving, so what was once top-notch information can sometimes become outdated.

In this post, we want to help you stay relevant (and maybe even be iconic, too). From how often to review to what to look for, you’ll find it all right here.

Review One Month at a Time

A lot of businesses build content around a theme. This is fantastic, but it can accidentally lead you to create content that no longer fits because your theme is no longer relevant. This kind of issue is common around major world events and holidays.

Review your content a month at a time. It will allow you to nip this issue in the bud before it turns into an expensive disaster, especially if related to a holiday or to your business. You may find your content may be even more relevant if you rework it to remove the themed element, updating it to be useful throughout the entire year. If so, make the necessary updates and republish.

Are Your Posts Still Useful?

Glance through your inventory of blog post and make sure they’re all still useful to your potential readers. Do you have instructional videos or DIY tutorials for products you no longer sell or for services you no longer support? If so, it’s time to move those to your unpublished archives.

Keep them somewhere safe if you think you’ll offer that particular item again in the future. Otherwise, get them off the site to avoid creating confusion.

Check Your Statistics

Check the statistics for all of your blog posts. Which have great click-through rates, or low bounce rates? Which have almost no views and/or clicks? The amount of views, clicks, and even how long people stay on the site reading can help you pin down what works best.

Your goal is to keep the best and use these “themes” in future content.

But what about blogs that don’t perform well?

Don’t automatically discount them.

Make sure you take some time to evaluate what happened when writing and marketing the posts that didn’t perform well.  Were you a keyword newbie? Did you lack the skills to market or promote your post via newsletter or social media?

Posts that just stink can be trashed. Those that need a little love, on the other hand, can be rewritten, updated with new visuals, optimized for SEO, and promoted as fresh content. Not every idea that performed poorly was bad; you may have just failed to incorporate the right marketing elements.

Check for Duplicate Content and Plagiarism

It happens. Some people plagiarize on purpose because they’re lazy. Some simply don’t know better. Still others accidentally use ideas without thinking or even copy their own  ideas without citations. Google doesn’t care; they still see it as plagiarism either way.

Detecting purposeful or unintentional plagiarism takes just a few seconds and a few cents. Use CopyScape to run a simple check on the content on your site. You’ll be able to quickly and easily see if your content was copied from another website. If it was, remove it immediately and rewrite it with original wording and ideas.

If you’re wondering about partial plagiarism – such as phrases the tool catches – here’s a good rule of thumb. If it’s more than five matching words, it should probably be rephrased, rewritten, or cited with a source link to the original. The main exceptions are names (people, places, businesses) and industry “lingo” not easily translated.

Condensing Topics

Do you have a lot of old blog posts that are really just different posts about the same topic? Maybe they repeat some pieces of information, yet manage to provide unique insights in other areas. Decide if it’s more beneficial to combine all of the ideas into one easier-to-read post or even a FAQ instead.

Having tons of good content is good for your site – that’s no secret. But the inside truth is that even one piece of amazing content performs better than 10 smaller, less-useful articles in most cases.

Improve Your Writing Skills

Practice makes perfect, right? There is not a blogger on earth who was perfect when they first sat down in front of the keyboard.

Look, your ideas may have been great, but your execution was probably a little clunky at first. That isn’t an insult; it’s just the truth in any creative endeavor.

By now, you’ve had time to make a few mistakes, grow, and learn, too. Your grammar is better, your flow is perfect, and you just speak to the audience better.

Why not make that carry over to older posts by reviewing and editing them?

Review all of your posts from a simple standpoint — one of improvement. Update each so that the voice is current. And, in the words of Marie Kondo, toss anything that doesn’t “bring you joy.”

Look for Ways to Repurpose Your Content

Content that doesn’t need revision doesn’t need to sit unused. There are plenty of things you can do to repurpose your already existing library of work.

  • Re-promote the work. Share it on social media or send it out in your newsletter, especially if it’s relevant to the time of year, upcoming season, or a current event.
  • Republish the post on a different platform. This will not create a duplicate content problem. Sites like Medium and BizSugar are great places for businesses to start. Link back to the original post (Originally published on xyz) to send traffic back to your site.
  • Use the text to create social posts, especially if you have a lot of tips and tricks. Don’t republish the entire blog as a post. Pull relevant bits of information and pair them with great visuals.
  • Create infographics with the research you’ve already done. You can add them to your posts and/or use them to cross-promote the blog post on different platforms.
  • Record video content based on the information presented in the blogs you’ve written. Embed them in the blog posts; or, use them separately on YouTube and other social channels.
  • Design a case study. Have you had an experience that highlights the content you wrote about previously? Write a case study that links to the original blog post.
  • Use your titles as inspiration for guest posts for blogs related to your own niche. You’ll attract readership while also giving back.

Your blog posts are the result of a lot of hard work and effort. Don’t let them sit collecting dust just because they’re aging. Take a close look at what you have in your archives on a regular basis. You may find room for improvement or ideas for brand new spin-offs. Either way, your site will continue to grow and thrive!

Categories
Content Marketing

Which Content Types are Best for Local SEO?

Which Content Types are Best for Local SEO? For local SEO, content types like local news, community events, and location-specific guides are effective. Including customer testimonials and case studies specific to the area enhances relevance. Optimizing for local keywords and integrating location-based services like Google Maps also boosts local SEO. Regularly updated, regionally relevant blog posts can further improve local search rankings.

“Content is King.” Okay, it’s kind of getting to the point it goes without saying, right? It’s definitely something we’ve said over and over again right here on the blog.

But here’s what you may still be missing: content types are really what defines how useful your content really is. Pick the wrong type of content for the wrong platform and you’re left with content that’s more like a pauper than a prince!

Unfortunately, it isn’t always easy to figure out what works best; there’s a lot of variables involved. Even your own industry and niche can have an impact, as can the platform or technology used to spread the message. This is even more true for local SEO where content marketing efforts are typically highly targeted to your location.

We want to help you take the confusion out of picking the right style of content. Walk through this guide with us and you’ll learn about the most common options – as well as how (and when) they’re useful.

Press Releases

Press releases have two main benefits: first, you can publish them online for distribution through different press release networks. Hopefully, you gain exposure from a local news outlet. You can also publish a PR on your website’s blog or news page for an onsite boost. Press releases make it easy and fast to announce major changes (and they’re also super for announcing changes to your business, awards, and new service offerings).

If you go with this option, include your city and state in the press release. The content you create will most likely be picked up by either online release groups (for SEO link juice) or by local papers.

Speaking of those local papers? There’s no reason you shouldn’t submit your PRs to their editors. They’ll often agree to run the story, especially in smaller towns where small to medium businesses are a big part of the local culture.

Local Interviews

People LOVE getting information from familiar faces. Sure, any one of us could turn on the TV and see a national news anchor interview a big name. There’s just something unique and special about seeing a local business owner with another local expert; or a local news anchor.

Most citizens are proud of their town, city, or village; if given the chance, they will opt to support other local businesses and citizens. Offering informative content (this can be on TV, YouTube, Facebook live, or even in writing) is a great way to connect on a more intimate level. Get out there and get involved with some familiar faces. Or, attend some local events and interview the people in your town. They’ll appreciate the attention and you’ll appreciate the free publicity that follows.

Website Optimization and Business Listings

While you likely don’t view it the same way as your onpage content and blogs, your Google Business listing is critical to local SEO. You specifically want to focus on making sure your listing shows in the local search pack. This is a little tricky, though. It takes a combination of properly completed business profiles and properly optimized website pages to keep your website visible in the pack.

Some people believe that GMB isn’t worthwhile; they think that it’s just too competitive. Yes, people can click to see other business aside from the top three or five, but showing up in that initial search enhances your odds of being seen.

Schema Markup

Schema markup is behind-the-scenes content gives your website structure. The data it contains makes it easier for the search engines to understand where you are located and what your focus is. It’s so useful that many people consider it a valuable part of every new web design or evolution.

In addition to your schema markup, you should ensure your title and meta tags and descriptions are up to date. Every little bit counts in clearly showing the search engines exact geographic location information.

FAQ Pages

Do not skip this critical piece of content. First, people love the short, bite-sized pieces of information that end up on FAQ pages. It makes it easy for them to scan a page and find a quick answer to what are usually common questions. Often, if they have a question, they’ll head there first to figure it out.

There are two other incredibly important benefits, though. The small pieces of information found on FAQ pages are excellent for optimizing your page’s Featured Snippets and potentially, terms associated with the quickly-growing voice search market, too. Keep your answers short, sweet, and conversational; they’re more likely to be picked up by both forms of search if they’re concise.

As for that voice search we just mentioned? Don’t overlook it thinking it doesn’t apply to local SEO. It’s the most common way people search when they need to find local business, activities, and hours.

Specials

Dedicate a page on your website to your specials. It doesn’t matter if you have a standing special for new visitors or if you change them out on a weekly or monthly basis; add specials anyway. It makes your visitors feel special!

You might offer a 20 percent discount on a certain service to the general public. Or, maybe you offer a 25 percent for anyone who shows ID with an address in your exact same town. Whatever you offer is sure to be appreciated as long as it somehow ties into your location. That’s smart marketing!

Social Media Content

Of course, social content is still lightening-hot and useful for local businesses. While your target audience won’t be as broad as, say, a national organization, you can still generate quite a bit of buzz and interest online.

Encourage your fans to use the check-in feature when they visit your business (the perfect opportunity for a discount). Or, start a group loosely related to your business that isn’t primarily promotional. You can also try using social media to create a group dedicated to connecting other local businesses. Work together to promote different holidays or special events – they may be your competition, but they’re also your neighbors.

Blog Content

You thought we’d never get to this part, right? Yes, blog content (like this very post) still matters in local SEO. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the best ways to make sure you are adding fresh new content pages to your site on a regular basis.

As for topic choices? The sky’s the limit. Talk about local news impacting businesses, current events that relate somewhat to your niche, or write tutorials so people better understand how your products can solve problems in their lives.

Vary your content choices but don’t get too far off track. For example, there is no reason for a local insurance agent to publish blog content about politics – unless, of course, he’s talking about special insurance concerns at political events. Avoid controversial content  topics as much as possible unless they are directly related to your niche.

Local businesses have unique challenges when it comes to competing with those with a broader reach. That said, you can still have a lot of fun creating unique, useful, and SEO-friendly content that will keep your site ranked and visible, whether you stay onsite or branch out to other content platforms and social outlets. What are your favorite ways to market local businesses online? We’d love to hear your SEO tips!

 

Categories
Content Marketing

Interactive Content Marketing: What It Is and Why You Need It

Content is king, right? Yes, it is…but no two pieces of content are every quite the same, and few are created equally. The web is evolving and the best type of content for today’s modern marketing world is interactive.

We know. We know. We’ve been telling you about creating great content for ages and now I’m throwing around a new term. The truth is that if you spend any time on social media, you’re already exposed to interactive content marketing on a regular basis. But there’s so much more to this complex issue than just “hey, this is really cool.” Here’s what you need to know!

What is Interactive Content Marketing?

Interactive content is personalized, fun, and appealing. This type of content is geared towards engagement, but not just likes and shares; it’s all about getting people involved in any way you can. We’re looking for people to leave comments, engage in conversations, and even show up at events.

It’s not just about social media, though. Finding other ways to make your on-site content more engaging will help keep visitors on your pages longer.

According to CoSchedule, at least 90 percent of consumers surveyed said they actually wanted to see more interactive content. What’s so compelling about it? Ultimately, it captures attention by asking for the visitor’s input. It’s also highly visual, which is critical to your success.

Types of Interactive Content

There’s a lot you can do with interactive content. The only real limitations are your beliefs about whether or not you can create something different (and maybe your tech skills).

Even if no one in your marketing department has the tech skills necessary for the right components, you can hire the job out or use different forms. There is really no reason to skip interactive content creation, especially if you want a strong content marketing campaign.

Create Quizzes

Quizzes are everywhere – literally, everywhere. Just take a look at Buzzfeed’s quiz section here. What banana are you? What Disney princess are you? Granted, these are a little silly, but you’re just as likely to stumble upon more serious quizzes on sites like Facebook or even company websites.

People love them. They especially love them if they think you’re going to try to guess something about them or if you’re going to tell them something they don’t know about their personalities. Often, they like to feel tested on topics they may or may not be very familiar with (especially if they beat their friends at it).

Just about 96 percent of people who start quizzes or contests on BuzzFeed finish them. That’s a huge number – a number you very likely don’t see with any other piece of content on your website. Tie your results in with a little bit of related info about what you can do for them and you’ll see some interesting results.

Create Your Own Hashtags

People love feeling like they are part of a community – as if they are participating in something special. Hashtag campaigns drive awareness, create brand visibility, help with tracking the success of your content, and boost your followers. They’re excellent for Instagram and Twitter and can be incorporated on Facebook as long as you use them sparingly.

Hashtags like #ThrowbackThursday or #MondayMotivation are great, but they are way too generic. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use them; incorporate them on top of brand-specific hashtags instead.

Here’s an example: Coke encourages #ShareACoke. Charmin has used #TweetFromTheSeat, and Lay’s runs flavor contests under #DoUsAFlavor. Audi ended up picking up #WantAnR8 as part of their marketing campaign after a user tweeted them to tell them how badly she wanted one of their cars.

Create More Video

Video. Video. Video. It’s the new location, location, location. Video is where it’s at. Consumers love videos – and not just short ads, longer informational video pieces, too.

Have something humorous to share? Use it! Use video on social and on your website, especially on your landing pages. You should incorporate video year-round, too, not just during the holidays and the Super Bowl.

Hundreds of brands are using video right now – some of them use it very, very well. Taco Bell has been using video since 2011 and has come up with some great campaigns, with Facebook video driving over 90 percent of their video views. Poo Pourri is another brand making great use of video content. Hey, it’s a taboo topic, but they make it hilarious and useful. Who hasn’t worried about stinking up a bathroom at some point?

Other Interactive Content Formats

Stuck for ideas? Here are some other content types to consider:

  • Interactive Infographics are easy to create. Simply use your favorite graphic creation tool to come up with an infographic and then use a tool like Displayr to add elements, like text statistics, that appear when people scroll over certain parts of your design.
  • Surveys and polls are great but have to be fun. No one wants to fill out a simple survey about their age, gender, and favorite color. Customize your polls with radio buttons or colorful images to represent the options. If you’re on a Facebook page or group, you can even upload images next to your poll options. You can use tools like SurveyGizmo to embed custom creations on your website.
  • Webinars are great for engagement, especially if you really do them live and interact with your viewers. Google Hangouts is a great option for businesses on a budget, though there are tons of other options available. You can even record and save your webinar and upload it to YouTube for future reference.
  • Mobile apps and games definitely count as interactive content. Gamified apps keep your audience connected with you on a regular basis. You can offer custom content for app users, share important tips and updates, offer extra app-specific discounts, and more. Be creative and make sure you are offering content that is specific to the app.

Make Your Content Useful

The key to successful interactive content is not to just create content for the sake of creating content. Engaging and useful content will keep your users coming back for more and will inspire them to purchase from you when they are ready.

This isn’t to say your static content isn’t valuable, either. It is, and you should continue creating what you can. But if your budget allows for it, you should definitely consider creating interactive content geared towards your largest target demographic.

Don’t stress over creating 100 percent new and unique content, either. You very likely have tons of existing content that could simply be spruced up with some interactive elements.

Are you excited and driven? It’s time to get your marketing team together and start creating. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Categories
Content Marketing

7 Emergency Measures to Resuscitate a Dead Content Strategy

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: content is king. A strong content marketing strategy is paramount to your online success. The New Year is only a couple of months away, which means it is time to take a cold, hard look at whether or not what you’ve been doing so far is working for you or flip-flopping around like a fish out of water.

Are you getting sales or leads…or do you need to make a big change? If your content strategy is flat, we can teach you how to bring it back to life again.

Why Your Content Strategy is Failing

Before you can fix your content strategy, you need to figure out what’s going wrong. You should see year-over-year improvement when you compare your results. If you can assess your sales and your marketing plan and feel as though you “held your own” or saw “small improvements,” your strategy isn’t working. A strategy that is simply holding you in place isn’t a good thing.

So why might your strategy be failing?

  • You didn’t have a clearly defined goal other than to create great content. What was missing? Measuring conversions, social increases, or leads to an email list and figuring out where to improve.
  • You don’t really know your audience well enough, so the content you created didn’t resonate well. Are you working with a customer avatar or persona? If not, you should be.
  • You lack consistency. You aren’t creating regular content on a daily basis, whether it’s on your social channels or on your website. This is common, but it’s also super damaging to your strategy.
  • You aren’t on the correct platforms. You are creating content targeted to the right audience, but you aren’t putting it where your audience can actually find it. Can’t fit a square peg into a round hole!
  • You are completely ignoring SEO and keyword research. This is the core of every content strategy and needs to be properly implemented if you want to succeed.
  • Your content isn’t good enough. Be honest with yourself. Is it? A quick trip to your Google Analytics page will let you know how long people are staying on your pages. If they’re bouncing away, something is wrong.

Every marketer struggles to get content right sometimes, even the experts. There’s no shame in dialing back and realizing you need to review. In fact, the people and organizations who succeed most often are the ones who see it as “upgrading” and “evolving,” instead of simple failure.

Repairing Your Content Strategy

What if it’s all just failing? You’re stressed, but don’t give up. Your content strategy is salvageable no matter how bad it is right now. You may need to go back to the drawing board, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Businesses have to shift gears all the time.

Ready to get started? Let’s jump in.

Reassess Your Audience

Start by assessing your audience. Are your customer personas properly targeted? Are you looking to the correct age groups and demographics and actually solving the problems they have with your product or service? If not, figure out what changes you need to make so that you have a clearer idea of who your audience really is.

Find Your Audience

Once you know who your audience is, figure out where they’re really hanging out. Are they on Facebook, which typically caters to 30-to-40-somethings, or are they in the younger demographic, which prefers Instagram? Nail down where they spend the most time and focus on that platform first.

When Do They Consume Content?

Alright – you found your audience. Now what? First, figure out when they hang out and when you’re most likely to reach them. Should you be holding a weekly Twitter chat or should you be recording regular YouTube videos released at specific times? Keep activity and time frames in mind and do your best to cater to them.

Readdress Your Keyword Research

Take some time to readdress your past keyword research strategies. Are you still targeting the most relevant keywords or do you need to start looking for some new targets? Should you incorporate new short and long-tail keywords into your strategy? Are there new buzz-words that relate to your niche? Make sure your content is focused on the words and questions people are really asking when they search for you online.

Struggling to figure out just what your audience wants? Try AnswerThePublic.com; just enter a few keywords, and the site will send you back questions from live search results so you can drill down to the right topic.s

Develop a Strong, Consistent Workflow

Every member of your team should be involved in the content creation workflow, all the way from brainstorming to creation right through to publication. Successful content marketers have amazing project management skills.

You don’t? That’s ok. Either learn how to create a workflow or add someone to your team who can take the lead. The more organized you are, the easier it will be to churn out quality content without risking negatives.

Map Out Your Content Strategy

Take some time to really sit down and consider the strategies you’ve been using in the past. Should you be tailoring your content to different times of the year (not only as they pertain to holidays, but as they pertain to your business), or is there a certain season you should push harder than another? Are there particular events you should be marketing around? This is critical information that can help you plan more effectively.

Map out all of the occasions for which you should be creating content. Your content strategy can and should be a living, breathing document — and that means it is subject to change. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just needs to reflect a plan.

Explore Content Types

Text-only blog posts are a thing of the past. There are tons of content styles you could be using, including video, longer-form text with images, infographics, and podcasts.

Content type mixing works best when you utilize several different formats over time. Do your best to diversify over the weeks, months, and years you’re planning for.

This approach also creates a unique opportunity to cross-promote. For example, you may not be utilizing video right now (but you should be; it’s powerful). One simple video can be repurposed on several platforms. Make a LIVE Facebook video, save it to upload to YouTube, and then embed the YouTube link into a blog post with a written transcript. Just one video gave you content for three platforms!

Similarly, a great infographic belongs on your website but can also be shared on Facebook and other visual platforms. Think of similar diversifications when you plan.

Step Up Your Frequency

Were you getting a surge of traffic from your past content…only to suddenly see your traffic drop off? Odds are you need to fill in with more frequent content to keep things moving along. Your readers depend on you to give them something of value on a regular basis, whether that’s via email, on your blog, or on your social platforms.

For social posting, daily is best. Real long-form content should be published at least weekly, if not bi-weekly or even daily (depending on your readership). That may be hard to do in the beginning, but you can start slowly and work your way up.

If you’re a one-person business with little time, you may need to start with a new piece of content monthly. That’s okay! The important thing is that you start – you can always branch out further later. Your goal should be to publish every two weeks, and eventually, weekly for optimal results.

It doesn’t matter if your content strategy is completely DOA or if it’s just a bit “unwell” at the moment, you have the power to fix it. Figure out which areas you are falling short in, make the necessary fixes, and monitor your results on a regular basis. You can, and will, turn your content around. We believe in you!

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Content Marketing

7 Quick Fixes for Long-Form Content That Fails to Engage

 

We have plenty of proof that Google loves long-form content. When content creators get it right, it can significantly influence both engagement and SEO. It’s also much more appropriate when addressing in-depth, complicated topics, and surprisingly, one of the fastest-growing forms of media consumption on mobile devices.

But content creators don’t always get long-form content right. Instead of writing inspiring, interesting content that leaves the reader motivated to keep reading right until the end, they fall into the trap that more words automatically means better content. The goal becomes the word count, rather than engaging the reader, and the end result is dry, boring, and drones on for far longer than it should.

Fixing issues with long-form content that fails to engage is surprisingly easy once you understand how (and where) to use it. In this post, I’ll teach you a few fast fixes to help you get your longer content back on track.

Fix Grammar and Flow Errors

Okay, sure – this sounds oversimplified at first, but it’s great advice for every content creator and marketer. Whether you’re writing yourself or hiring someone to write, you should have someone review the content before it’s published. Nothing throws off engagement quite as fast as content with glaring grammatical issues with staccato, stilted text.

Good content should have an almost lyrical feel, with frequent sentence length changes, that makes sense. UMass has a fantastic primer here, if you want to learn more about how to prime your sentence structure for success.

Don’t Write Long-Form Content

Wait…what? Yes, you read that right. Good content does not necessarily equal long-form content, even if Google tells us it usually prefers more words. Your goal is to write for your audience as concisely and simply as you can. SEO comes secondary to this goal.

If you can say it in 200 words, say it 200 words. If it takes 2,000 to make it clear, that’s fine, too. Need to split it up into multiple posts so people don’t get bogged down? Make it into a series of easy-to-digest posts.

Make It More Interactive

Long-form content’s biggest issue is that it can become tedious and boring to read, especially if the content itself just isn’t that inspiring. This is especially obvious in the manufacturing and industrial sectors where content may come down to highly technical, dry topics.

Getting interactive with your readers can help to perk it up. Pose a problem. Explain what you would do. Ask your audience to tell you what they would do. Or, host an AMA on Reddit (or even on your own site). Have your readers ask questions, then respond to them within the same content piece through updates. Make your audience a living part of your content and they’ll respond by getting more involved.

Be More Relatable

If your content is cold, dry, boring, or poorly matched to your audience, they’ll stop paying attention before they ever escape the intro. We see this most often when businesses over-focus on keyword density, chasing topics that appear awesome for SEO, but really don’t meet the needs of the audience at all.

Being more relatable is comprised of two main goals: make your content feel more “human,” and make sure you’re writing what your audience actually wants to read. If you’re only writing for SEO, you’re writing for machines, not people.

Ask the Audience

Stuck for ideas? There’s nothing wrong with polling the audience to see what they want to learn, discover, or know from your content. This is a fantastic time to send out email marketing blasts; include a small poll at the end and ask for their feedback. Use that feedback to come up with new content formats, topics, or subjects that pull more engagement, whether it’s an answer to a burning question or a simple segue.

Optimize LFC For Mobile

Long-form content is long (ha, bet you didn’t see that coming). Unfortunately, its length also makes it more difficult for mobile users to digest. Extensive blocks of text can take up an entire screen, making it challenging to keep focused while pushing your readers to toss down a  “tl;dr” and call it a day.

Break your long-form content up using the bite, snack, and meal writing technique, This strategy works because it splits content up into easily digestible portions while also ensuring you address individual consumption preferences.

Here’s the layout:

  • Headline: Start with a simple, attention-grabbing headline that directly tells your readers that to expect. This article’s title is a great example: “Quick fixes for long-form content that fails to engage.”
  • Summary: Go slightly deeper (but don’t fall in). Write a short summary that explains the gist of your content, what it covers, and what people will learn if they keep reading.Don’t be afraid to shortlist headers or reveal “secrets” within your summary. The goal isn’t to tempt people to read more; it’s more about meeting busy (or lazy) readers where they are with a rapidly digestible format. Including a hook somewhere near the end inspires readers to continue, rather than making them feel forced.
  • Main Content: This is where you get down to business and get really in-depth. Use plenty of whitespace, ensure your flow is logical, and use flawless transitions to encourage people to keep going.

Use plenty of white space, and remember, a paragraph looks much longer on a mobile device than it does on a PC screen. There’s nothing wrong with two to three sentence paragraphs if they make sense in that format.

Chunk Your Content

In 1956, psychologist George A. Miller theorized that the human brain was limited in its ability to process information and commit it to memory. Here’s what he wrote in a paper on the subject:

“The span of absolute judgment and the span of immediate memory impose severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process, and remember. By organizing the stimulus input simultaneously into several dimensions and successively into a sequence of chunks, we manage to break (or at least stretch) this informational bottleneck.”

Today, especially in content marketing, we refer to Miller’s strategy as “content chunking.” It is especially critical in mobile long-form content, where text walls equal far too much input at once, preventing people from continuing on.

But how exactly can you “chunk” your content? What’s the secret? Start by utilizing plenty of whitespace. Then:

  • Create visual hierarchies
  • Use more headers and subheaders
  • Use short text lines of approximate 50 to 75 characters
  • Include bolding, italics, bullets, and lists to highlight critical terms
  • Make use of indented quotes to draw attention to important shares
  • Use media (photos, infographics, etc.) to break up long paragraphs or text

When you’re done, your content layout should present highly-visible, easy-to-detect chunks. Ask yourself how fast you could find a specific section or piece of content within a “chunk” when you’re done; chunks improve scannability, so your answer should be “just a few seconds.”

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Content Marketing

What is an On-Demand Content Strategy?

In today’s fast-paced world, we consume content much differently than we did just 10 years ago. Thanks to the advent of DVR, it became easier to watch our favorite shows on our own terms, rather than at their scheduled air time. And as more people cut the cord in favor of streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, network and cable TV is trying to compete with the introduction of their own apps that allow you to watch TV from your tablet and smartphone, on your own terms, without the need for a DVR.

Even music services are responding the same way. While you can still buy songs and albums to download and own, many services, such as Amazon Music Unlimited, Google Play Music, and Spotify are offering unlimited streaming, so you can listen to what you want to listen to, when you want to listen to it.

It’s all in response to people demanding the freedom to consume content on their own schedule, not on someone else’s terms. So, why not make your content available on the same terms? Your customers are already reading your articles when they have time, and watching your video when they have time. Every potential customer has a different buyer’s journey, so your business needs to provide the content they need, when they need it.

That’s why it’s important to build an on-demand strategy for your B2B content. This not only helps people find your content, but ensures your content assets have a longer life span and help boost lead generation.

Why is On-Demand Content So Important?

With the globalization of business, when you host a webinar or other live event, there is no time zone that will fit all geographic areas. A lot of your promotional activities, unless you’re strictly a local business, will be on the global level. Your social media promotions will reach international audiences – even with targeted ad campaigns there’s always the chance people from other countries will find you.

Data from On24 shows an average of 21.7% on-demand viewing comes from those who registered to attend the live event. Only 13% view live and on-demand. Another 18.5% of on-demand viewership comes from people who were not registered for the live event.

How to Create a Compelling On-Demand Experience

Many people believe that content has to be live to be interactive and engaging, but this is not the case. You can tailor the experience for all your content – including links to on-demand content throughout your website, with a mix of additional relevant content. Each page on your website can be optimized for lead generation. Do this instead of turning to the old-school approach of a “resource center” where people can find more information, and you’ll get more out of your content.

Repurpose your content. You can take the live webinars and turn them into multiple content assets. Not only can you make the webinar available for on-demand viewing later, but you can turn it into an eBook or report you use for lead generation, post a small clip of it to Facebook or use it in a Facebook ad, and so on.

Developing Your On-Demand Promotional Strategy

After an event is over, you add it to your archive, but do you continue promoting it? Chances are you just start to promote the next one to try to boost live attendance, yes? Use a mixture of social media, your website, search engine marketing, pay per click advertising, emails, and other verticals to get the word out about your webinar, but just because the event is over doesn’t mean you have to stop promoting it. Just make sure you’re staggering your promotions of new vs. old content to avoid over-saturating and that you have adequate campaign tracking in place so you can monitor performance.

Use your live content to promote your on-demand content. During live webinars, provide the link to your repository where all your on-demand content is located. Ask your speakers to promote the on-demand content they are part of. Create links between live and on-demand content.

Syndicate your on-demand content by sharing it on YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other networks.

Running Successful Webinars

Webinars are a popular content marketing tool, with 60% of marketers using them as a tool for connecting with potential customers and building relationships. Webinars can help you generate quality leads, increase brand awareness and understanding of your products and services by up to 74%, so there’s no reason not to consider adding them to your overall digital content marketing strategy. When you consider this and they fact that a webinar can also help you show your expertise and authority in your niche, they are a win-win… if you plan correctly.

  • Choose a specific topic: To keep the webinar on track, you need to choose a specific topic. If you go too broad, you may have trouble narrowing it down to what to talk about. Too specific and you may not have enough interest. Remember, you can host multiple webinars related to a single broad topic. Whatever it is, make sure your audience is interested in it.
  • Create a solid outline for your presentation: Make sure you cover the things people want to know, while doing so within your time constraints. Leave time at the end of the presentation for questions from the audience.
  • Choose the right format: You can choose between: presentation, interview, Q&A, product demo, and panel. Presentation is most common because it’s a PowerPoint presentation shared while people talk.
  • Choose the right platform: There are numerous platforms you can choose, and the one that’s right for you depends on the equipment you have, your budget, and the number of live attendees you expect. Options include: ClickMeeting, Google Hangouts, GoToWebinar, and WebEx.
  • Test, Test, Test: Do a test run of everything to make sure everything is working as it is supposed to. Check to make sure your slides are in the right order, and the speakers are aware of what they need to say. Practice your introductions so you can read through them without stumbling over your words. Close applications that slow down your computer. Make sure the work-space is organized so you don’t have to search for it during the webinar, or have your pets behaving obnoxiously during the event.
  • Engage the audience before, during, and after: Create content to generate buzz about the webinar beforehand, so people learn about it and are excited about attending. Connect with attendees during the event on Twitter. When the webinar is over, continue engaging attendees with additional content. Have the before and after content ready to go when your webinar is ready, too.
  • Build a killer slide deck: Boring slides make for a bored audience. Build slides to match your brand, and keep them interesting with images and graphs of data that relate to your topic and the points you’re making at that stage of the webinar.
  • Promote with a dedicated hashtag: Choose an original hashtag to promote your webinar before, during, and after the webinar. You can use it to interact and engage with attendees. Mention Twitter handles for any speakers on your slides and during the event.
  • Leave the audience wanting more: Finish the webinar by sharing actionable advice, best practices, or some kind of call to action so your audience knows what to do next. Provide contact information for your company and speakers. Send attendees a recap of the event, with a survey asking for their feedback. You can also provide additional materials, or rewards like special offers only for those who attended the event live.

Conclusion

Webinars and live video make excellent on-demand content because they are easy for your audience to watch after the live event. Create an editorial calendar of sorts just for this kind of content to make sure you’ve got on-demand content worked into your overall content marketing strategy.

Over time, you’ll be able to build a rather extensive library of on-demand content to help bring in more leads.

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Content Marketing

How (and Why) Interactive Content Beats Text and Images Alone

Content marketing is an ever-changing game. Just when you think you have it all figured out, audiences change their minds, Google changes its algorithms, and you have to re-format everything to suit new needs. Sure, it can be frustrating, but when you get it right, the results are downright exhilarating.

We know that classic online content formats, such as plain text and basic images, are slowly losing steam over time. Audiences still consume them, and often, but it’s becoming harder and harder to get noticed. Generating higher-quality content is one answer, but it isn’t foolproof, and even the best demographic analyses can fail.

In this post, I’ll start by explaining why standard content methods are faltering. Then, I’ll tell you what interactive content really is, why it works, and how you can use it to improve engagement throughout your campaigns.

The Human Need for Engagement

As humans, we love to be entertained and engaged. From infanthood, we thrive on sights, sounds, and experiences that tickle our senses and grab our attention, right from the first shiny, noisy rattle all the way to rock concerts and gourmet dinners over a glass of fine wine in adulthood.

Engagement plays a critical role in how we learn, how we pay attention, and what we remember over time. It’s influenced by a combination of our emotions and our built-in fight-or-flight system in the brain.

(No, that doesn’t mean you have to scare people into converting.)

Neil Patel touches on the psychology of engagement here. He explains that engagement is all about making people excited, and that excitement has “strong physiological responses” that make us more likely to act.

In content marketing, we use the very same desire for sensory input and excitement to tempt our audiences into paying attention. The goal is to create memorable content that’s so enjoyable everyone wants to share the “experience” with someone else. That’s where the entire concept of a “hook” and “engagement comes from.

The Problem With Non-Interactive Content

The problem is that we live in an increasingly over-saturated online world; audiences are barraged with text and images all day long. Just like a baby playing with the same toy for hours at a time, or someone eating the same gourmet meal over and over, too much of the same thing starts to become boring.

The result? Audiences stop paying attention. They tune your message out, considering it just another part of the noise. They think “too long; didn’t read” and turn to your competition, who just so happens to be using newer, exciting content formats (including interactivity) to succeed.

On the marketer’s end, it’s even worse. Conversions fall, sales suffer, and you’re left struggling to figure out what went wrong (and where). And that’s right about where interactive content’s powerful ability to engage comes in.

What Is “Interactive” Content?

Interactive content is an umbrella term that refers to content formats requiring some sort of input or guidance from the consumer. I’m not talking about web forms, or multiple choice questions, or even simple button-clicking; I mean interactive storytelling that asks the user to be an active part of the message.

Defining Interaction

When we talk about interactiveness, we’re talking about content formats that require the user to give input at regular intervals in order to move on. It becomes a staccato back-and-forth player one, player two experience; deliver a small amount of content, ask for input, deliver a little bit more. In some ways, it’s like gamification because the user takes action to receive a reward (the next piece of content).

Making Content More Digestible

Alternatively, interactive content can also be about making difficult-to-digest or cumbersome topics more digestible. This includes simplifying technical topics, personalizing content flow for each audience member’s preferences, or creating a totally customized flow that uses the consumer’s own input to channel them into a sales funnel that’s more likely to succeed.

Multi-Sensory Engagement

Interactive content engages multiple senses. It solves problems first and sells second. It listens to the user, responds to what they have to say, and values why they’re there in the first place – all of which make it inherently more engaging.

Envision a user playing a web game. They’re receiving audio, visual, and tactile sensory inputs while they actively consume that content. This multi-sensory approach matters because science shows engaging the senses improves attention, memory retention, brand awareness, and even consumer loyalty.

Interactive Content Formats

Seeing is believing, and revealing the most common forms of interactive content can help you envision this content strategy in a more realistic light. This list is far from exhaustive or conclusive, but here are a few of the most common forms of interactivity marketers are currently using to reach more people:

  • Timelines – these are interactive “timelines” that progress through your message to drive home the idea of advancement. This includes click-through pathways for development and chronological reveals of how products or services benefit consumers over time.
  • Competitions – Good, old-fashioned competition is still highly engaging, which is exactly why voting contests and “share to win” competitions still show significant efficacy in marketing. This is an especially good form of interactivity on social media outlets, like Facebook and Instagram.
  • Interactive Infographics – Like traditional infographics, this format delivers complex information in a more digestible format. Input, ranging from simple clicks to self-provided numbers, give the user the power to explore the content at their own pace. See this example to see it in action.
  • True Gamification – True gamification is the process of taking everyday content and making it more fun by “gamifying” the consumption process. This includes user leaderboards, quizzes, and point/reward systems.
  • Polls – Adding a simple poll to the end of your content that asks users for feedback can be a very compelling form of interactivity, especially if you show results. Audiences feel heard and get the message that other people are paying attention when they can see other user responses, anon or not.
  • Interactive Video – Video content is killing it in general within the content marketing industry, but interactive video is even more effective. This can be as simple as YouTube videos directing someone to the next video with an annotation, or as complex as a fully self-directed video experience that leads users through information with clicks and input.
  • Guided Reveals – Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is a big deal. Guided reveals as the user to give input to “reveal” content, usually the answer to a proposed question or curiosity. The idea of never seeing what’s behind that panel creates an itch that’s impossible to scratch without moving forward.

So, let’s get down to the nitty gritty – how should you move forward with including more interactive content in your campaigns? You may be surprised, but I’m not here to tell you to ditch older text and image methods entirely. In fact, interactive content works best among traditional content formats because it stands out more. Use it to highlight the most critical portions of your message for best results.

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Content Marketing

9 Reasons You Should Be Going LIVE

Video content has become a critical component in any marketing campaign, but while pre-recorded video is helpful, there’s definitely something to be said for utilizing Facebook Live video to spread the word about your business and brand.

Live videos aren’t for you?

Wrong.

Live video is for everyone.

It’s easy to use, doesn’t require a fancy set-up (unless you want one), and provides an avalanche of benefits across nearly every industry and sector.

Super Unique Content

Live video streaming started to become popular a few years ago and we’ve seen several different apps try, and fail, to grab the attention of different audiences. As Periscope and other apps developed, Facebook felt the pressure to compete and the introduction of the Live feature put business owners in a unique position to create new, fresh content on a regular basis.

All you really need to do is come up with a plan or calendar outlining what you want to highlight or discuss. Then, make sure you actually hop on Live at the times you’ve incorporated into your strategy. The more you go live, the more people will be excited about seeing new, unique content from your brand.

Strengthening Your Personal Brand

People are inundated with ads day in and day out. They’re all mass-produced and scripted and don’t really give the public a good sense of the real people behind the brand.

Facebook Live videos solve this problem by forcing you to relax and be natural. Sure, you may feel stiff and awkward at first, but as long as you speak from the heart and avoid reading from a pre-written script, you’ll ultimately find people feel more connected to you and your brand.

Over time, your audience will ultimately become more open and receptive to your message, seeing you as a respected influencer. This change will later translate into a warmer reception when it comes to your sales pitches.

You Create a Sense of Community

The ability to interact with people who are watching your video not only helps with the aforementioned brand strengthening, but it also gives your viewers a strong sense of belonging. When you see their comments and mention them by name, they begin to feel as though they are a part of your brand’s unique community. Read their names out, thank them for watching, and answer their questions.

Live Videos are Permanent Content

Live videos don’t disappear once you’ve finished streaming. A simple click of a button once you’ve finished your video saves your content to your timeline for future viewing. This means that your video will not only get engagement and interaction from those who actually caught it live, but it will continue to show up in the feeds of other fans throughout the day as well.

You Can Repurpose the Content

You aren’t limited in how you can use your Facebook Live content once you’ve finished recording. You can share the video into your groups, embed the Facebook post within your blog, or even download and save the video for a little editing before a quick upload to YouTube. The more you share and repurpose your videos, the broader your ultimate reach.

Facebook Live is Designed for Longer Content

While you should still carefully plan the length of your day-to-day Live posts, Facebook’s platforms differ from most others in that it allows you to record for up to four continuous hours. This means you can leverage the platform as a source for streaming training videos, conferences, small gigs, and other event types. With a bit of planning, you can hype these events for optimal viewing.

Your Favorite 4-Letter F Word

No, not that word.

Free. The word is free.

(This is a family-friendly blog, after all)

Facebook Live is free. All you need is a mobile device, like a phone or tablet. You can even go live from a desktop or laptop if you have a camera set-up. The most you’re going to spend is time planning, making this an incredibly low-cost strategy for brands to incorporate. It’s also just about perfect for smaller businesses.

Live Videos are Catalysts for Future Content

Let’s say you go Live for a short period of time and discuss a few of your favorite ideas with your audience. Make sure you go back to the video later to take some notes. The concepts you introduced in your Live are seedlings for longer video tutorials, blog posts, infographics, and tons of new content you can use across your social platforms, websites, and email campaigns.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger agrees. He recently shared that he gets some of his blog content ideas from the questions his fans ask him during Live video streams.

Facebook Regularly Prioritizes Live Content

Facebook loves Live and will prioritize a Live video post, especially while it is still actively live, over other types of content. You’ll need to do a bit of experimenting to see how well it works for you, but both small and large pages notice huge jumps in engagement and interaction during Live broadcasts. These numbers are often much higher than they get with their traditional text and image updates.

Once your friends start watching and engaging, their friends start to see the video, too. The potential for organic reach is absolutely astounding.

The Wrap

Not a fan of the camera?

It’s time to get over it – or at least find someone within your organization who will.

No matter how you feel about it, the results don’t lie. Facebook Live is a very usable tool for creating creative content, whether you choose to record on the fly or create a long-term strategy.

Grab your camera, find a quiet room with natural lighting, make sure you aren’t echoing, write a short caption, and hit record. Don’t be afraid to tell your followers that you’re new at Live videos, either. You will surprise yourself with the amount of support you receive from a captivated audience as long as you’re making an effort. So give it a try, going Live once or twice a week. Don’t forget to come back here and leave a comment to let us know how it goes!

Categories
Content Marketing

Interactive Video: The Next Biggest Content Marketing “Buzzword”

 

Credit: EduBirdie

Content marketing is an ever-changing sector of the marketing industry. As the type of content and the way we consume content changes, marketers have to change the type of content they provide to keep up.

Newer social media platforms like SnapChat and Instagram are an excellent example; both evolved from the desire to let users take control and create their own content. They also specifically target users on mobile devices, making it easier for them to digest content from virtually anywhere.

YouTube is another great example of how content marketing has changed over the years. What started as a strictly indie operation has blossomed into a force to be reckoned with – a place to get noticed, get rich, and get entertained.

But lately, we’re seeing evidence of the next major shift – and its video content itself that stands to change the most. Interactive video marketing is this year’s biggest buzzword in the content industry; here’s what’s you need to know.

The Definition of “Interactive”

Before we launch into an explanation of why interactive video is so compelling, and why you should be using it to engage audiences, let’s talk about what the heck it really is. Like any other evolution in content marketing, there’s as much assumption and conjecture about the definition of “interactive” as there is fact.

First, interactive is defined as prompting the user to take action. In interactive video, this usually means the user has to take an action to give input in order to move the video along or to receive the next piece of content. It is, for all intents and purposes, a form of interactive storytelling that just happens to occur within video.

Viral marketing companies have been using interactive video to captivate audiences for some time. In fact, there are examples stretching back as far as the early to mid-2000s.

Remember this Terry Crews video, where you engaged in a battle of the bands with only his muscles? Most of you will, because the video went viral and stayed fairly popular for nearly a year in 2012.

Examples of Interactive Video

Old Terry Crews videos aside, interactive video now isn’t the same as it was in 2012. New technologies and platforms are making it easier for businesses to offer and create highly interactive videos with less effort, less budget, and better results. And users, for their part, are far more likely to engage with it because they have better access to fast data, easier-to-use devices, and a better understanding of tech.

To help you better understand what interactive video looks like today, and why it’s not quite the same as the interactive video of “yesteryear,” let’s look at a few more recent examples.

At its most simple, interactive video “Choose Your Own Adventure” style videos like this. It also includes Netflix’s new and ingenious video series for kids that encourages little ones to lead themselves through classic stories, like Puss in Boots, by clicking on the screen at specific points.

It also includes interactive stories that put the user in the driver’s seat like this Warner Bros. ad. Labeled a “gamified interactive promotional experience,” for their new movie, “Focus,” it lets the user step into the role of con artist to see if they’d make a capable criminal if given the chance.

Honda’s recent interactive ad for the Civic Type R. is another great example. It paralleled two different video experiences, the first a parent picking up a child from school, and the second, an undercover cop racing down the road at night. Viewers simply had to press “R” to flip back and forth, creating a unique allegory reminding them of the new Honda’s flexibility.  The campaign recently ended, so it’s no longer available, but you can see the video demo in person here.

Why Is Interactive Video so Compelling?

What all of these examples have in common is the fact that they put the user in control, creating the illusion that the viewer is fully in charge of their experience. An ad becomes much more than just an ad; it becomes an almost virtual reality, like a video game. Constantly prompting the user for input, or giving them “buttons to click” and options to flip back and forth engages more of the senses, meaning they’re more likely to remember what they see, recognize your brand, and take action.

There’s also the “cool factor:” it feels new, unique, and unlike what most other businesses are doing, especially on mobile devices. Like the latest tech toy, it’s shiny, exciting, and new – and audiences appreciate that effort to compel them, if only subconsciously.

Think about it this way: two businesses are competing for your attention. The first offers you a no-name chocolate bar wrapped in plain white paper. The second offers you a salted chocolate caramel bar wrapped in shiny gold foil with holographic glitter.

Which are you more likely to pay attention to the most?

Should You Use Interactive Video?

Now, let’s get down to what matters most: should you use interactive video, and if you do, how can you best capitalize on it in marketing campaigns?

The bad news: no, not every business should use interactive video. There are some instances where interactivity can be too complex and too technical, making it unsuitable for audiences. This is especially true for audiences who want rapid answers and older audiences who may lack the technical literacy to really understand how to use interactive videos and digest them.

Aside from that, the sky is really the limit and interactive video can really be a positive addition to your marketing campaigns if you use it right. Like any other form of content, quality matters; simply tossing together a series of clips without any thought put into it isn’t going to have the right effect for most people.

How Other Businesses Are Using Interactive Video

As for businesses who are already using interactive video, they know there are many, many fantastic applications. Most use it to:

  • Tell the story of a brand
  • Demo a product or service
  • Let viewers customize content
  • Create gamified experiences
  • Train or educate the public
  • Train or educate staff members
  • Engage in corporate altruism
  • Talk about important world issues

Last but not least: interactive video also gives businesses the power to track more data. Traditional video doesn’t really allow for robust analytics; it’s possible to record watch time, stop points, total watches, and maybe a few demographics.

Interactive video literally requires interaction; without it, viewers don’t progress. These clicks and personalized inputs create are more opportunities to collect valuable marketing demographics and responses, meaning you have more data on hand to help you better understand your audience and customize campaigns.

If we had to narrow this topic down to just a single important tip, it would be “it’s dangerous to go alone.” Don’t jump into interactive video as layperson without help; it’s a complex topic that relies on  marketing psychology and advanced technologies to achieve results. Hiring the experts to help you can really be the difference between wasting money and sending your campaign viral.

Categories
Content Marketing

4 Industry-Proven Methods for Better Content Creation

Neil Patel. Ann Handley. Joe Pulizzi. Lilach Bullock.

What do all of these people have in common? If you guessed marketing or entrepreneurial spirit, you’d be right, but that’s just the beginning of their stories. These four influential people are also four of the world’s best content creationists spanning across nearly every delivery format, including speeches, video, books, articles, and more.

They’re also all people who regularly share their expertise with other content creators, often for free. That outreach to the marketing and content creation communities makes us all better at what we do, and it’s a big part of the reason why we believe in “sharing the love,” too.

In that spirit, we put together some of our favorite content creation tips for marketing campaigns. If you find them useful, send us an email or connect with us on social media and tell us what you think. Your feedback is always appreciated.

Publish Often (And Regularly)

One of Patel’s most common suggestions is also the most simple: no matter what you’re publishing, you should be publishing often and on a regularly scheduled basis. This is true for social media platforms, articles, blog posts, email newsletters, email marketing, and just about every other form of content creation out there.

How frequently is “often?” Well, it depends on your business and the type of content you’re producing, but most sources say at least one to two times per week. Social media pages often benefit from a slightly faster publishing rate, while articles, blogs, and white papers can be stretched out a little bit further when you’re short on time.

As for what everyone else is doing, this study from 2015 highlights that nearly all content marketers now publish at least weekly, if not more often. But do keep in mind that you can potentially publish too much – multiple times a day, for example, is probably over the top.

Focus on Your Audience

“You do need to be audience-centric in your approach. You’ve got to make sure that you’re not wasting your audience’s time, and you’ve really got to respect that relationship.” This quote comes from Handley, who often advises marketers on how they can become influential writers themselves – even if they’ve never written a word. It’s sage advice that may seem too surface level at first, but in reality, touches on something marketers and writers often misconstrue: exactly what it means to be “audience-centric” in the first place.

There are two schools of thought here. The first suggests that in order to be audience centric, you need to pick a category and topic you think your audience is interested in and never stray from it. The other suggests you should loosen it up and mix up your content types and topics to keep people coming back for more.

They’re both wrong – well, not so much wrong as far too surface level to really explain what you need to be doing.

To be audience-centric isn’t as much about what you write or how you write it; instead, it’s about how much effort you put into getting to know your audience to ensure that you create content that they actually find useful. Get away from simply throwing down text or images to fill quota and use up SEO keywords and take some time to research your audience, what they find useful, and what they need. Then, structure your topics, categories and content around that, instead.

Don’t forget that content format also matters in usefulness. Someone who is busy and on-the-go will naturally gravitate to content that’s easier to see on mobile, such as video or simple graphics, than long-form text content. Experiment to discover what works best without increasing bounce rates.

Content Isn’t (Always) Sales Communication

This tip from Joe Pulizzi covers one of the most common and under-appreciated mistakes in the content world: assuming your content should always sell something or push your products and services. “That’s not content marketing. That’s just sales collateral,” Pulizzi shares. “We talk to the smallest and biggest brands out there…We say, ‘show us your content marketing’ and it’s all about the company’s products and services, their new widget, their latest award.

The problem with this approach is that most content channels are already oversaturated with similar messaging. We see it on social media sites, on websites, in apps, even embedded in YouTube videos now through video advertising. And that’s exactly what your content becomes when you make it about your products – a form of advertising.

To clarify, there isn’t anything wrong with content as advertising when your true intention is to advertise the product. Without it, there would be no such thing as product descriptions, sales brochures, or landing pages. But content-as-advertising should be a part of your content creation strategy, not its defining characteristic. And that means mixing it up and re-evaluating your content and how it serves your audience.

Pulizzi also says that content marketing should be about making yourself a leader within your chosen media channel. We share his sentiment that the best way to do that is to create “compelling, interesting” content your audience really finds useful and interesting. He suggests auditing all of your content and asking yourself:

  • Is it helpful?
  • Is it interesting?
  • Is it well-targeted to your audience?

Then, become one of your industry’s best “information providers” – someone who shares the latest and best information either first or in a more digestible format than everyone else. Your goal isn’t necessarily always to sell, but to compel.

Use (And Interact With) Your Influencers

Lilach Bullock’s area of expertise is social media, so her content tips are often targeted very specifically to sites like Instagram or Facebook. One of her most pressing themes is the idea that some of the best content doesn’t come from content marketers, but from the influencers they hire to create content. So, use influencers to your advantage if and when you can.

Think your business can’t afford to use influencers? You’re probably over-estimating the cost. Bullock mentions this in her blog post, The 4 Principles of Psychology, where she highlights that you don’t need to wait to lock down the “best of the best.” Instead, you should look for influencers who have at least a small reach and can somehow make a real difference in your marketing or your brand. If that’s a small-time influencer from your area of operation, that’s just fine, too.

Once you get involved in influencers, do your best to foster that relationship because it’s truly a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” arrangement. Mention them on birthdays or special achievements and don’t be afraid to interact with them. They’ll tweet or share you in return. And every time that interaction happens, you’ll both enjoy increased attention.

Categories
Content Marketing

Go Ahead, Love Your Media-Rich Pages Without Sacrificing Page Speed

Page speed and site speed: two important factors webmasters overlook way too often, especially in an online environment where we use more media than ever before. As the world shifts to a preference for images and video – or at least text content with images and video – a significant number of sites seem to be struggling to keep up in the area of speed. They stuff in tons of super-engaging media, yet struggle with incredibly high bounce rates that cripple conversions.

The problem with media formats like images or video (or even design technologies like parallax and animation) is that they’re inherently larger in size. Unlike text or even CSS, they take much longer to load by comparison.

Why is this a problem?

First, page speed directly influences conversion and bounce rates. If visitors have to wait more than a few seconds to access content, they’re significantly more likely to “bounce” away from the page and go somewhere else. But Google also considers site speed to be a critical ranking factor in search results, and that means a slow site speed could kill your SEO efforts, too.

Fixing Site Speed Issues

As a webmaster problem, site speed concerns aren’t going away anytime soon. In fact, it’s only likely to get worse as surfers and visitors demand more intensive forms of media and more interactivity on the sites they visit. It takes time for computers and devices to “catch up” to these increased demands. That leaves you, the site owner, in charge of determining balance between the need for media and engagement with the desire for speed.

Stripping back on media isn’t always the answer; in fact, it can worsen the problem by causing serious engagement issues (plainly put, your content becomes dry and boring). And that means you’ll bounce people for an entirely different reason. But sitting on a site speed problem or just ignoring long loading times? That’s not the right answer either.

In the next few sections, we’ll teach you a few of our most beloved page and site speed secrets, including how to improve your page speed, how to optimize your current media-rich content, and how to forge a stronger foundation for future media use that prevents unnecessary loading times.

Choose Your Host and Server Wisely

Whether you’re self-hosting on a server rack in the office or working with a company like DreamHost or GoDaddy, server performance issues can significantly hamper your site speed. A low-quality server or connection will cause the site to lag out and struggle to keep up with requests; this produces extra loading time for visitors.

Shopping for services? Check the offering for response times. Google suggests keeping your server response time under 200ms – the designated “average rate” for well-optimized websites. If your current response time is higher, it’s time to assess your server and find out what’s causing the issue.

Unfortunately, diagnosing server response times isn’t always easy. Even Google points this out in their Developer Resources, quoting “…slow application logic, slow database queries, slow routing, frameworks, libraries, resource CPU starvation,” and “memory starvation” as the primary driving forces behind server response issues. Your hosting provider and/or IT staff can help you troubleshoot server issues most effectively. If you’re self-hosting, it’s worth hiring someone to troubleshoot even if you don’t have someone on staff.

Ultimately, a high-quality server host with good support is best choice for most business websites. Small websites may do fine on shared hosting plans, but medium to large businesses should consider dedicated or Virtual Private Server (VPS) accounts instead. They’re more reliable, especially for media-rich sites.

Use Responsive Web Design to Optimize Speed

Everyone knows that responsive web design improves search ranking through Google. The search engine giant’s most recent update clarifies responsiveness as preferred, but responsive design can actually save you a few seconds in loading time, too – especially if you use it correctly.

Here’s the key. Forcing visitors to render images and video presented in resolutions larger than their device they’re using slows load times. For example, if someone lands on your website from a smartphone, yet the main page has a massive image in the background designed for a 4K monitor, a lack of responsive design will force them to load the image at its native resolution.

What should you do instead? Start by making all images and video responsive following Google’s best practices for responsive images (found here). Use grid systems, simple cropping, variable width options, and consider whether vector, PNG, GIF, or JPG is best for the type of content you’re delivering. Line drawings and graphs may be better delivered as vectors, while photographs work best as lossless PNGs.

If you’re targeting Chrome and Opera browsers specifically, .webP image formats are another optional file format that’s smaller, speedier, and experiences much less of a quality hit than other formats.

Follow similar options for videos – stick with formats like MP4 h.264. Be cautious about the size of the videos you place on your website, too; including just 5 MB of video on your homepage will significantly slow ddownloadingtime for all but people with the fastest internet. Place these videos on a separate hosting site (e.g., YouTube or some other CDN) and embed them in your site instead. If using embeds from sites like YouTube, avoid setting default resolutions above 1080p.

Show Above-the-Fold Content First

In responsive web design, above-the-fold content refers to any content that becomes immediately visible on the user’s screen when they visit your page. Exactly how much screen real estate is shown depends on the device being used to view the page, but you can expect it to include your initial navigation menu, sliders, calls-to-action, title, or main content for most website pages.

It makes sense to optimize sites to load above-the-fold content first; it’s what visitors see when they first land in. If you force the page to load this content first, it will buy you a few more seconds of loading time for the rest of the site while lowering the risk for them to bounce away in frustration.

Admittedly, this trick won’t lessen your overall loading time, but it can negate the consequences of a high loading time on a particularly media-rich website. Just don’t forget to make adjustments at each responsive level.

Minify Your Resources

Set the shrink ray down: no, we won’t mean minify as in “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.” In terms of website optimization for speed, minifying refers to cleaning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript codes to be as lean and efficient as they possibly can be. Think of it like living a minimal lifestyle, only in code.

The best way to do this is to go through all of your code and strip out unnecessary whitespace, remove unneeded comments, and rename variables to make them as small and concise as possible. Using CSS instead of images (when it makes sense) can also pare back on loading times. Live by the rule that, “if you can do it in one step, don’t do it in two.”

Additionally, reassess your need for bulky media that demands JavaScript and other bloat-inducing languages. There will always be a few situations where they’re needed, but there are often better options. The same is true for Flash vs. HTML5 and other outdated technologies.

Enable Cached Pages

Unless every piece of content on your site updates on a daily basis, you should enable page caching for visitors. Caching allows visitors to load media content once and then retain a copy of that content for future visits. Instead of being forced to re-load the content from the server on the next visit, which can take time, it loads from their own local machine much more quickly. This approach is especially useful for large resolution video, games, and web apps.

Google recommends setting cached pages to a minimum time frame of one week for assets that change and a maximum time frame of one year for static assets. You may need to tweak these numbers to better suit your website, but even a cache time of a few days can make loading times more fluid for repeat visitors.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed by your site speed issues? We get it. Web development and SEO “best practices” change at a breakneck speed. We’d love to chat with you about a few ways you get position yourself for success – just reach out!

Categories
Content Marketing

Are You Ready to Embrace Content as a Service?

According to Techtarget, content as a service, or CaaS, is a “web-based model for the creation, storage, management, and delivery of content, such as text, audio, video, or images.” It is a content management system, or CMS, that’s made available through a service provider, used for both web content management and enterprise content management.

CaaS providers handle much of the work as the content creators and website owners who manage everything themselves. They handle the storage, hardware, backups, and bandwidth as part of the service. CaaS is a single location for your content and the management system lets the content be stored and accessed through your mobile devices, apps, and computer.

CaaS won’t provide an all-in-one solution the way a traditional CMS like WordPress does, since it only manages the content, rather than they presentation of the content. Using CaaS allows you to have more freedom in how content is presented, delivered, and displayed.

Let’s take a look at the differences between CaaS and CMS, so you know what to use and when.

 

How is CaaS Different from CMS?

CaaS focuses on turning your structured content into feeds suitable for use by other applications and properties. It:

  • Provides content to the rest of the world with a REST-based API
  • Hosts your content repository in the cloud for easy universal access
  • Lets customer experience applications that consume content from the repository know when there is an update for the content
  • Provides distributed authoring and workflow for content administration
  • Provides structured formats for returning content with simple queries

Everything a CaaS does focuses on content management. Though it looks like it will do less than a typical CMS, it simplifies content management and provides additional flexibility since it has nothing to do with how the content is displayed. Instead, it hands the display function to other systems to allow them to deploy and display the content however they want.

It allows you to control your content and keep it flexible, because it’s no longer just something you put on websites. The more content distribution channels you star to use, the more important it is to keep the content flexible and adaptable.

It allows your business to keep all of your content in a simple place, and move whatever content you need, when you need it.

Content personalization is important these days, as 77% of consumers say they have chosen, recommended, or paid more for brands that offer a personalized experience or service. Using CaaS allows you to assemble your content dynamically, so you can personalize it when you need to, and have control over the level of personalization. You can use a custom set of rules, instead of customizing everything on a project level, so you can deploy everything faster, while still maintaining flexibility.

 

Challenges of Implementing CaaS

Separating content from its presentation presents a challenge in and of itself. There is a strong relationship between the two because a writer must know about a subject before they can write about it. An editor will still need to be able to preview the content before they can approve it. Marketers need to be able to see the entire landing page to write the best possible call to action (CTA). Copywriters need to see visuals and media that will be used to develop the right slogan.

CaaS will face a challenge because the content creator must know the context which the content will be used, to make sure it is remarkable. CaaS is all about adapting the context and providing the tools to do it. If the content is consumed as part of a service, it may have to be changed depending on context – such as the geographic location of the reader, the device it is being read on, and other elements.

 

When Should You Use CaaS Instead of CMS?

  • When You Want More Flexibility Over the User Experience (UX): The content here is separated from the presentation and display layers, so designers can build any user experience they can dream of.
  • When You’re Publishing on Multiple Channels: Having all your content in a single repository makes it easier to deploy the same content to multiple channels, like your website and apps, so you don’t have to create and maintain separate systems for each one.
  • When You’re Managing Mobile Content: You’ll be able to update your app content dynamically so you don’t have to resubmit the apps to marketplaces every time you make a change.
  • When You’re Working with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Chatbots: Getting your structured content provided through an API is easy to move around for use with AI and chatbots. The bots are able to consume the content via API since it’s easier to understand and more relevant than natural language and unstructured content.

 

Getting Started with CaaS

Any CMS can be made into a CaaS provider if you take the time to do enough coding. However, some platforms are easier to adapt than others. You can do one of two things:

  1. Create a web services layer into an existing CMS. If you’re not a developer, or can’t afford to hire one to handle this for you, you’ll want to use the second option.
  2. Opt to use a “headless”, cloud-based CMS that is native to CaaS architecture. Headless CMSs focus only on the back-end work – and don’t worry about the presentation and delivery of content. It’s essentially WordPress without the web delivery layer. That means there’s no template system, no HTML delivery, and no style and structure management.

There are a few headless CMS platforms out there – such as Contentful, DotCMS, or Hippo. Drupal also offers a CaaS platform.

 

CaaS is an Emerging Trend

Though talk of CaaS first began around 2014, it’s something that is catching on, and will continue to emerge as the internet grows and becomes even more focused on the Internet of Things (IoT). It’s not a practical solution for every business – particularly those that are just putting content out on their website, or producing a content heavy resource that doesn’t need a lot of formatting for presentation. But, for those who are running apps alongside their websites, it is a better way to handle everything.

Are you using CaaS or will you consider it in the future? Share your thoughts with me in the comments below.

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