Category: Content Marketing

Writing is a necessary part of content marketing, and even if you’ve got a team of writers working for you, you may find yourself writing some stuff on your own. And if not, feel free to share this advice with your team, to help them improve their productivity.

Create an Idea Capture System That Works for You

You never know when the inspiration for a new article will strike. It’s a good idea to create an idea capture system that works for you – whatever it may be. You could track everything in Evernote. You could simply open your WordPress blog and create a draft post for use later. You could add it to your editorial calendar with some sources (that’s what I do), and choose where to put it later. Whatever you choose, make sure it’s something that you can easily fit into your workflow. You may try a few ideas before you decide what actually works for you.

Organize Your Ideas Before Writing

Whether you’ve taken then time to research your topic or not, the writing process will go smoother and faster if you’ve taken the time to organize your ideas before you start writing. One of the best ways to do this is with an outline. If the idea of outlining something drives you nuts, you could also use a mind map to organize your ideas. FreeMind is a free tool you can use for mind mapping. I don’t use them often since I prefer the outline option, but it’s all about finding what works for you.

Find Your Most Productive Writing Time

Everyone has a certain type of the day where their energy is better for writing. Some of us are more productive in the morning, while others are more productive at night. I find I get more done when I work early in the morning – because most people I know who would want to talk to me are still sleeping. This way, I can work with as few potential distractions as possible. Generally, if I try to write later in the day or at night, the energy just isn’t there.

If you work from home and have children or a significant other to care for, or other things that deserve your attention, it’s important to make a firm commitment to creating time and space to write. The time needs to be sacred, and unless there’s an emergency, nothing else should get in the way. Get rid of distractions and just write.

If you don’t have the space to have a dedicated office, at least do something like put on headphones to signal to your family you’re “in the zone” and can’t be bothered unless someone is bleeding or dying.

Don’t Be Afraid to Walk Away and Reset Your Brain

When I sit down to write, and I feel like I’m forcing every single word, I know it’s time to take a break. I often feel pressure to get everything done by a certain time, which convinces me to remain in front of my computer. But if I’m churning out a whopping 50 words an hour, I’m not doing myself any favors. I’ve found that it’s better to get up and do something else – sometimes even going to take a nap – and then come back to the computer refreshed. When I come back, I can finish my article within an hour or two, whereas forcing it could easily have taken me three times as long before.

Make It a Choice – Not a Chore

When writing feels like a chore, you’re just not going to want to do it. Change the way you talk to yourself about it. Instead of saying, “I have to write two blog posts today.” Choose to say, “I want to write two blog posts today.” It helps keep you on track and makes it feel less like work.

Use Automation

Rewriting the same thing over and over, or relying on copy and paste becomes a time suck. If it only takes you two minutes to add your bio at the end of a guest post, you could have started a paragraph on a new blog post.

That’s where TextExpander comes in to save the day – and millions of keystrokes. Though it can take some time to setup your custom keyboard shortcuts for your most frequently used text, it’s worth it in the long run. You can use it for things like common words and phrases you use often in your writing, your biography, your email sign offs, and more. It’ll even keep stats to show you how much time you’ve saved! Other similar apps include Breevy and TypeIt4Me.

Turn off Automatic Spell and Grammar Checks

Seeing the red squiggly line is a pain because it tempts you to break your flow and correct it right away. If you turn off the “as you go” checks, you can focus on getting the words out, and then go back and check everything at the end.

Don’t Edit Yourself While Writing

Similar to how you would stop to correct a misspelled word or typo while you’re writing and it breaks your stride, you should worry about editing everything at the end. If you stop what you’re doing to add more detail, you’ll risk going into various rabbit holes, and ruin your productivity. When you’re finished with an article, edit by reading from the bottom up – as this will help you catch things you wouldn’t necessarily catch if you were reading from the beginning to the end.

Leave Flexibility in Your Editorial Calendar

Your editorial calendar is a valuable tool as it helps you know when you’re supposed to write what. But, if you stick to it exactly as it’s written, you could find yourself struggling to churn out the words. I recommend looking at the week as a whole, or even the month as whole, and writing the piece that you’re most interested in getting done.

This one, for instance, was fourth on my to-do list this week, but I chose to write it first, because when I sat down to write, it was the one that jumped out at me. As such, I have been able to move through it faster than I would have if I had chosen the first one on my editorial calendar for the week.

Play Games to Help You Learn to Type Faster

Many writers struggle with thinking faster than they type. When your brain is churning out ideas at lightning speed, but your fingers are moving at a snail’s pace, it can be hard to meet your timing goals. You’ll finish your 30-minute block with only a fraction of the page filled with words.

Learning to type isn’t as monotonous as it used to be. There are a number of sites online that have games, lessons, and tests to help you improve your speed. Take 15 minutes at the beginning of your day to work on these games and warm up before you sit down to write.

• FreeTypingGame.net: This site is full of free games, lessons, and tests to help you improve your typing skills.
• WordGames.com: This website is full of games that will challenge you to type as fast as you possibly can. If you’re one that has to look at the keyboard while typing, this can help you learn to type faster while looking at the screen, rather than at your fingers.

If you find that you do a lot of your writing while on the goal, you can find free apps that help you learn to type faster on your tablet or smartphone.

• TapTyping: This app works on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch to help you learn to type faster on those devices. The app is free, but if you want to unlock everything, you can make a one-time payment.
• Typing Master: This is a typing game that works on Android devices – smartphones and tablets. It not only improves your typing skills on the Android keyboard, but also lets you compete with other players.

Even if you already type fairly fast, there’s a chance you struggle with accuracy. What’s the point in typing 100 words per minute if there’s a bunch of typos you have to go back and correct? Using these games can also help you improve your accuracy rates, so there’s less to edit in the end.

And if you can’t seem to master the craft of typing on your mobile devices, you can always use Google Docs and the voice typing function on your phone. Sure, it’s not perfect and you’ll have to speak with a fairly uninterrupted flow, but you can always come back to it later for editing.

Challenge Yourself: Set Timers

If you notice it generally takes you two hours to produce 1,000 words, set a timer for an hour and challenge yourself to beat your normal word count. When you know you’re racing the clock, you’re more likely to stay focused on the task at hand.

Write Down Your Plan

Research shows you’re likely to do better if you take the time to write things down. At the end of your day, write down what you want to accomplish in terms of writing for the next day. See how well you met your goals and adjust accordingly for each day.

Break the Process Down into Smaller Chunks

If the idea of writing 1,000+ words for 4+ pieces a week terrifies you, break it into smaller chunks. Here’s my process:

At the end of the week when I’ve completed everything for my editorial calendar, I look to the next week.

I create the documents for the next four pieces. Then, I put in placeholder text for my intro, conclusion header, and conclusion.

When that’s done, I conduct a few minutes of research for each piece and copy and paste the links at the bottom of the document. I save them all and walk away for the weekend.

When it comes time to write again, I open the document I feel like working on the most, then open the sources I left in the bottom. I read through everything, create my outline, and then start writing.

At the end, I’ll find the places where I need more information, and go back and add things, then edit. It makes it easier for me, and I end up getting everything done faster by batching the creation and early research. That process may not work for you, but you’ll find something that does. For instance, you may want to focus on your headlines, then your intro paragraphs and so on.

Don’t Interrupt Writing to Find More Research

If you’re writing and find something that you feel could benefit from more research or material, don’t stop what you’re doing to go find it. You may find yourself on YouTube, three hours later watching videos that have nothing to do with the topic at hand. Instead, leave yourself a note. I like to bold the text and change the color to red, so I remember to go back in my editing phase and don’t accidentally publish something with my personal notes in it.

Create a Small Ritual

Getting in the habit of doing a few things before you sit down to write can help you be more productive. For instance, I always have a meal or a small snack. I pour myself a drink – whether it’s coffee, tea, or water. And I always go to the bathroom so I’m not racing my bladder, or getting interrupted when I’m in the middle of a killer session where I’m knocking out words super-fast.

Writing Is a Skill – Learned and Improved

While some people are naturally better at writing than others, the fact is it is a skill that can be learned. The more you do it and the more you work on it, the faster you can become. The faster you become, the more your quality has a chance of suffering, so the key is finding a balance. When you’ve mastered the art of speed and quality, you can use that newfound time to focus on other areas of your business, or expanding your content marketing efforts.

How long does it take you to write? Are there any other tips and tricks you could share? Tell me about them in the comments below.

When it comes to B2B, content marketing is an entirely different beast than for the B2C market. Of course, the purpose remains the same – you want to create content that draws in a bigger audience for your business, content that strengthens your brand, and ultimately increases your leads and sales. The only thing that makes it different is it is content made by businesses, for businesses; it is not the typical consumer-facing content. As such, the content absolutely must be useful above all else. Can it be humorous and entertaining, too? Yes, of course, but without utility, it’s worthless. Does this mean B2C content doesn’t have to be useful? No, but there’s a bit more freedom with it.

1. Identify Your Audience

Before you’re able to provide the content your audience needs, you must first learn as much as you possibly can about said audience. You’ll segment your audience by the stage of the funnel they are in, but each audience is made up of various individuals. We’ve talked about buyer personas before, but in this case, we’ll talk about developing reader personas.

Use your Google Analytics data to determine more information about your audience. Of course you can see basic information like gender, age, and location, but there’s a bit more detail that can help you along. When you take a closer look, you can also see topics they’re interested in. If you notice these topics aren’t necessarily central to your business, it’s still important information to keep in mind. It gives you a way to expand your content into new areas that are still somehow relevant subjects, that will keep your readers interested.

When you see the summary of the interests data, you may be surprised by what you learn about your readers. At this point, you can safely begin to draw conclusions about who they are, allowing you to speak to them more clearly with your content.

It’s important to note that the percentages you see in the affinity categories is based on a samples of your overall traffic, therefore, it’s not necessarily exact data. This will be based on the amount of traffic your website receives.

When you’re identifying your audience, make sure you can answer these questions:

• What do they expect from my content?
• How should I interact with them?
• How are they interacting with each other? Or are they?
• What motivates their buying decisions?

2. Keep Ideation Fresh and Consistent

One of the challenges of content marketing, regardless of niche, is coming up with fresh content ideas consistently. When you’re just getting started, it’s easy to come up with all kinds of ideas. But once things are rolling, and you’ve covered everything you came up with in that initial wave of excitement, it becomes increasingly difficult to produce quality content. You’ll eventually reach a point where you feel like you’re running out of ideas. That’s a completely normal part of the process.

When it comes to beating writer’s block, you can of course look at your existing content for ways to repurpose and expand upon it. But, if you’re looking to find new topics in your niche, or want to know more about what people are sharing and talking about on social media, BuzzSumo is a quick and easy way to do this.

With it, you can see real-time data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. You can see which topics are trending in a niche, the most popular writers on a website, which topics are doing well on major publishing outlets, which topics are doing well on the competition’s site, and more.

With this information, you can create content that presents a new angle on a topic, or provides a counterpoint to a popular opinion about a topic that’s relevant to your business. But as you generate new content ideas, think about user intent. You already know more about your audience because of the demographic data from Google Analytics, but you must also anticipate not only what they what they want they read, but they want to accomplish by reading it.

Readers are only asking themselves one thing – “what’s in it for me?” And your job as a content marketer is to show them. You have to use your content to convince them you’re the better option than the competition… and one of the ways you can do this is by showing the benefits of using your product or service instead of the competitor.

As you come with ideas, always try to answer these questions:

• Is this something my audience would like to read?
• Is this a topic that would be useful in at least one stage of the purchase path?
• What questions does the content need to answer?
• Does this topic align with the overall marketing strategy?

3. Test Your Content Before You Create It

Testing your content before you go through the full creation process allows you to see which topics will do well in terms of engagement. This way, you’re only investing time in topics you know will resonate with your audience. I recommend using Twitter for testing purposes, since Facebook has made organic reach so difficult to obtain.

If there’s a topic you have in mind, you could find a similar piece, and tweet it, and then see what happens. You could find an infographic and share it. If it does well with your audience, consider writing a blog post based on it, and then publishing that. Chances are you’ll see much better engagement results than you would if you just used the old “publish, promote, and hope” approach.

4. Focus on the Lead Magnet

Your lead magnet – the thing you’re giving visitors in exchange for providing their contact information – needs to be a high value item. It should provide information you can’t find elsewhere on the internet, and information your target audience finds useful. Any number of things can be a lead magnet, from an eBook or free industry report, videos, audio, templates… the options are nearly limitless.

The lead magnet doesn’t have to be long, complex, or take you a long time to create. All that matters is that it solves a specific problem with a specific solution for a certain segment of your market. Your prospects must consume the magnet for it to have any kind of impact.

5. Promoting Your Content

If you’re relying solely on organic methods to get eyeballs on your content, you’re not going to get the best possible ROI. An advertising budget is essential to building traction on Facebook, especially since organic reach has been on the decline.

Social media is still a critical piece of the puzzle for the B2B sector, since you still have to build relationships and foster engagement. In the B2C world, we sing the praises of automation and scheduling updates with tools like Buffer and Hootsuite. While these tools are still an option, there’s another solution, specifically targeted at those in the B2B space – Oktopost.

With it, you can create and manage social media campaigns and editorial calendar with automation. You’ll also get analytics information to help you see what social activity translates to leads for your company – along with social engagement, audience and content analytics. It also includes content discovery and custom RSS feeds to make content curation easier, along with social listening so you can see who’s talking about you on social media and what they’re saying.

There are numerous ways to promote and amplify your content – including search engine optimization, email marketing, influencer marketing, paid advertising, and even having your employees promote the content. Regardless of which type of promotion you use, you’re helping your content reach a wider audience, that’s still relevant to your business. Each promotional tactic helps increase the chances of building engagement, brand awareness, and customer loyalty naturally.

6. Analyze Campaign Results

You should always be looking at metrics to see how well you were able to reach your KPIs and goals before you jump into additional campaigns with more content creation. Let’s say you created an eBook with the intention of increasing your email list subscribers and generating leads. While the eBook helped you get more social mentions, you find it didn’t help you get the leads you were hoping for. Because of this, the eBook campaign wasn’t successful, at least not at this stage. This could be because you were using the wrong goals, wrong distribution, or the wrong audience. At this point you’d need to re-evaluate your strategy to make sure your results expectations are in line with the rest of your content marketing efforts.

If you’re not already, consider using additional intelligence tools to get the most of your data. An average of only 2% of your site visitors will actually leave contact information and become a lead, but that doesn’t mean you have to lose out on the other 98%.

That’s where marketing technology like Leadfeeder comes in. It works with your Google Analytics account, and lets you see who’s visiting your site, whether they leave contact information or not. By matching the IP address of the visitor’s computer to companies on LinkedIn, Leadfeeder makes it possible for you to see the companies that are interested in your products and services. From there, you can see if you know anyone at the company, or reach out to someone in your network for an introduction.

7. Remain Consistent

No matter what you do, it’s important to produce a steady stream of content. Create a mixture of blog posts, infographics, eBooks, white papers, case studies, reports, and other types of content to educate and inform your audience. What matters isn’t the volume of content, but the consistency and quality. Though your strategy and approach may change, consistent content is key.

What is your experience with B2B content marketing? Share in the comments below.

Content marketing is an important part of online marketing these days with 88% of B2B marketers using it as part of their overall strategy. Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing, but generates three times as many leads, and conversion rates that are nearly six times higher, making it a cost effective way to promote a business. The fact is, you can’t really have too much content marketing, if you’ve got the right strategy in place to support it.

But, without that strategy backing up your efforts, too much content can backfire. Churning out blog posts, articles, and social content for the sake of adding content to your archive may sound like a good idea, especially if you’re starting from scratch, but too much can be detrimental to your end goal.

One study showed that as brand generated content increased by 78%, interactions per post per 1,000 followers fell by 60%. The study looked at 8,000 brands across five major networks for a year between 2013 and 2014. The more content was there, the less engagement it received. The study also revealed that 43% of professionally marketed blog posts received fewer than 10 interactions. This tells us it’s important to strike a balance in your content load, spreading it across each network as your audience indicates they are ready and willing to consume it. Does your audience love Facebook, but they’re not really all that much into Twitter? Focus more of your content marketing efforts on Facebook, without completely neglecting to build a Twitter presence.

If you find your content archive is quite large, but your engagement is not consistently improving, it’s time to make some adjustments to your content marketing strategy. It doesn’t mean all the time and effort spent on existing content is a waste – it just means spending a bit more time getting it right.

Audit Your Existing Content

Look at what you already have on your website. Is it old and out of date? Either scrap it or edit it to make it more current and relevant. Is it low quality? Either scrap it or edit it to drastically improve quality and value.

It’s a good idea to review your content marketing strategy on a regular basis, to keep the content in line with your strategy and goals. Take time to review it at least annually, to ensure that all your efforts are worthwhile.

Consolidate Your Content

Look at all the content that serves a similar purpose, or covers similar topics. Consolidate that into a single piece, or more focused section on your website. Update the content as necessary. If you find that you have a significant amount of content dedicated toward one particular topic or issue, consider repurposing it into an eBook or downloadable report you could use for opt-ins.

So, that brings the question, how many times can you use the same topic? If you have a keyword you’re trying to rank on that you know you’re going to need to repeat in multiple posts to have a shot at achieving page one rankings, it’s easy to get repetitive.

To get around this, take a fresh approach to the topic each time. If you’re not providing a fresh perspective with value to your readers, then you’re going to start sounding like a broken record. If you’re marketing a brand of spaghetti sauce, you can only write so many general articles on tomatoes and sauce before people stop reading.

If you’re stuck with a generalized keyword and you want to avoid getting too repetitive, consider the five stages of the buying process:

• Awareness: In this stage, people know they have an issue and they’re looking for answers. For the spaghetti sauce, these would be topics like what is in the spaghetti sauce, how it can be used beyond mixing it with noodles for lunch or dinner, where you can find the sauce in stores, the stores that carry the brand, and more.

• Consideration: At this stage, customers are evaluating the various solutions on the market – all the spaghetti sauce brands available. They’re looking at things like the ingredients, the sugar content, the price points, the size of the product. For this stage, produce content that highlights the different features of your product.

• Intent: Now’s the time to appeal to consumer logic, focusing on emotion to encourage them to choose your product compared to the competition. Here, write content about who benefits from your product – the busy mom who’s too tired to make a sauce from scratch, the grocery shopper on a budget who wants a gourmet taste without the price tag. You can also write about what your product can do and how it works.

• Purchase: At this stage, you’re encouraging people to buy from you. Here’s where you can promote discounts and coupons for your spaghetti sauce, and provide a store locator so customers who don’t want to order online can go pick it up in store. It’s also a good idea to include a printable form people can take to their local grocery store to ask their manager to carry it. It helps expand your distribution, and helps the customer feel like they played a part in getting your brand into a location that is convenient for them.

• Repurchase: At this stage, you want to encourage your customers to come back to you. You want them to stay in contecact with you and learn more about your niche. These posts are best suited to offer the client information about a keyword that they are unable to get anywhere else.

Even if your website is built around a single keyword, don’t overuse the same topic. These types of websites don’t look professional, and as such, rank lower. If you’re dealing with a specific brand of spaghetti sauce, you’ll need to expand your content to cover news stories, or latest developments – like issues with tomato crops, health benefits of tomatoes – in addition to your general usage articles.

If you’re in the B2B market, this changes slightly, as buying cycles are a bit longer, and involve multiple departments. It may also mean there’s a longer period before the company comes back to buy again. For instance, if they’re buying new computers for the entire company, it’s going to be a large purchase that takes a while to receive approval, and they won’t be doing that again for a while. But, the company could still come back to you again to make other related purchases like printers and other peripheral devices.

Analytics: Content and Audience Evaluation

Next, analyze the performance of each piece of content over time. Get rid of anything that doesn’t perform the way you need. If you don’t get rid of it all together, then make revisions to anything you consider “underperforming.”

Conduct an audience analysis to see where the audience is coming from, and what pages they are leaving on. Learn what they’re exploring while on your site. Adjust your content with that information so you can make it better meet their needs, but more importantly, consider adjusting the placements so you know it gets in front of the right eyes.

This analysis will also help you determine the ideal posting frequency for your audience. Certain industries will require content more frequently, while others will be turned off by posting too much. Targeting niche markets generally means posting less because there isn’t as much competition compared to generalized niches. The smaller the group you’re targeting, the easier is to get away with posting less.

If you want to get an insider’s idea of what the competition is doing, so you can do it better, subscribe to their email list. You can see what topics they’re covering, the types of content they’re using to do it, and how frequently they are reaching out to their audience.

Content Optimization and Reorganization

Once you know the content you’re left with, it’s time to optimize it and reorganize it on the website to make sure it hits the visitors in the right stage of the buying cycle. Each visitor will have different needs throughout the sales funnel, so the content needs to be optimized to meet these needs, and then it needs to be easy to find and in line with the buyer’s journey.

You’ll want to share your content across social media once it’s published, but sharing it once isn’t enough. There’s a chance it’s going to get lost in the shuffle, especially with networks like Twitter that move quickly.

That said, don’t spam your following with links to your content all the time, especially the same post. Share it once when it is published, and then one more time a few weeks later. If at any point it becomes relevant again, publish it again. After that, focus on those inbound links, reader shares, and the search engines to bring you that steady traffic stream.

The Lesson: Quality Over Quantity

It’s not about the volume of content you are producing. It’s about how well that content you’re producing is resonating with your audience – the value it is providing them. Your brand is far better served with a handful of content assets every week or month that are providing high value than it is with a ton of poorly written content. If you’re flooding your networks with repurposed content, and then not taking the time to analyze your audience, you’re not going to be successful, plain and simple. To hit those successful marks, you must know exactly what your audience wants, and how to construct the content appropriately for each social network. Content may be king, but the strategy behind it is what really matters.

Think about two restaurants – side by side. They serve the same kind of cuisine. They have the same kind of atmosphere. One restaurant has a small selection of 12 items, selected using customer feedback. The other has a random and overwhelming number of choices. Management never takes the time to ask the customers if they enjoy the food, and continues to keep the kitchen on their toes. Which one would you rather dine in? Not only are the customers not as happy as they could be, but restaurant B is hemorrhaging money on unnecessary ingredients that go bad because no one orders half the menu. Content assets that don’t help bring in and convert leads cost your business the same way.

After you’ve completed your content audit, craft a strategy to handle your new content. Only write when you have something of value to say – if there’s nothing new, skip it. You’ll just end up axing it in your next content audit anyway.

If you come up with something valuable to say – are there people out there who would want to hear it? Segment your target audience, and make sure you understand who they are, what they want, and what they need. Without this information, you’ll never be able to understand how to reach them to convert them into paying customers.

What kind of adjustments have you made to your content marketing strategy in the past? How did this affect your results? Tell me more in the comments below.

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