Tag: content marketing

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Content Marketing

How to Measure Content Marketing ROI

Content is going to be a crucial part of any digital marketer’s long-term plan. While it’s been over 20 years since Bill Gates asserted that Content is King, the statement rings true to today.

Content, both the kind you create and the kind created about you, is what informs search engines on the quality and reputation of your business. Content is what generates the context people need to make the decision to support your business. Content is online word-of-mouth at an infinitely larger scale than one-on-one.

But there’s a big difference between good content and bad content, and there’s an even greater difference between good content leveraged properly, and good content gone underused. Let’s take a look at what it means to invest in a digital content marketing strategy, and how to begin measuring the return on those investments.

What’s the Point of Content Marketing ROI?

The return on investment is one of the most basic business management principles, and it’s probably the most important formula for anyone starting a business of their own. You need to be able to determine that you’re getting more out of what you’re putting into your business to survive.

If you put $100 into a stock one year and take it out the next at a value of $154, you’ve made a substantial return on your initial investment, even after accounting for inflation and transactional fees. If you pay $500 for an ad banner and run a pay-per-click ad campaign for several weeks, and the money generated from sales created by that banner is less than what you’ve put into it, then you’ve got a poor return on investment.

However, things can get a little more complicated when we’re talking about content marketing. It can be difficult to quantify the return on investment for a blog post, press release, or article, without affiliate products or a call-to-action to a specific service. If you created a piece of content to promote the launch of a new service, then you can try to attribute at least some of the sales of that new service to the buzz generated by the content you’ve dedicated to it.

But most content is not going to revolve solely around product promotion. Good content is about proving your authority and value as a resource to readers, as well as generating leads and creating a loyal customer base. You want people to come back to you for more information, and perhaps a sale or two. And you know that, given the way most people browse the internet, they may take more than one visit to one page to become a converted lead.

So, what’s the point in quantifying the return on your investment in content marketing when not every single piece of content will track linearly to an increase in leads and clicks to products from that content?

The answer is simple: even if it’s hard to quantify the value of the content you’re putting out there, you must quantify it anyway. That’s the only way you know you’re putting out the right kind of content, or in the very least, are utilizing your content marketing budget properly.

Related: 6 Ways to Monitor Your Competition’s Content Strategy

Measuring Your Content Marketing ROI

So, we know that it’s important to get a grasp of what returns you’re receiving on your content marketing. But how do we measure those returns?

We start by identifying key metrics that either lead to direct sales, or contribute to more sales, such as improved search rankings (more traffic, more potential leads, more sales), improved domain authority and reputation (customer trust is paramount), and visitor retention (more time spent on your content is good news).

The Path to Conversion

The job of data analysis is to gleam useful information from mountains of data generated by every event, action, or use of a page. The job of an analytical tool is to make these tasks much easier. While tools like Google Analytics help you identify your most popular pieces of content and track lead generation, it doesn’t always tell you the full picture.

There are other content analysis tools that help you figure out what pages a user might have visited before they made their decision to purchase, or recognize a trend materializing in your most recent sales, one you might be able to profit off.

For example, if more people tend to access a certain type of your content during a certain season of the year, it might be a good idea to invest in producing more of that content around that time of year, as well as promoting existing content of that type.

Figure out what paths to conversion most of your leads take and what type of content tends to bring users into your lead generation funnel the most effectively.

Content Marketing, SEO, and Authority

Not all content needs to be linked directly to conversions to be a worthwhile investment. You need to consider the impact your content has on backlink generation and search optimization, as well.

For example: a certain article might not be getting the most associated leads, but it has contributed to an improvement in your overall domain authority due to being linked to by multiple other high-ranking websites. This is a valuable piece of content! Authority is important, because it’s one of these metrics that search engines like Google use to rank content on the internet for any given keyword phrase or search term. Increase your keyword reach!

Money and Time

What content does your audience engage with the most? If you have a piece of content with a great title, but the content might be outdated, you might get good traffic on it but with a high bounce rate.

People quickly realize that it isn’t what they’re looking for. Conversely, you might have another piece of content that keeps readers engaged, but doesn’t have the most effective title, causing lower visitor numbers.

Optimize and revisit your existing content to update old information, expand and improve on successful or thriving content, and make the most of something that has already started snowballing, versus just sheer quantity.

Google Analytics and Other Tools

Tools are a human’s best friend, but you need the right ones for the job. Google Analytics is an important tool in the repertoire of any online marketer, and it is vital for SEO relevant data. But when it comes to figuring out the ROI on your content marketing, it helps to broaden your horizon.

In addition to utilizing Google Analytics to track your website’s improvements in terms of traffic, keyword growth, as well as bounce rates, utilizing other tracking tools will help you form a more complete picture of how any given piece of content is helping you improve traffic, get long-term visitors, generate leads, and finally garner sales. Tested and proven tools include those developed by HubSpot, SEMrush, Buffer, Parse.ly, and Moz.

Having a team of experts to work with is an immense boon as well. An experienced team of content marketers and SEO professionals can help you utilize your full budget in pinpoint fashion, cutting your losses and improving your return on investment.

Got questions about making the most of your content marketing strategy? Give us a call.

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Content Marketing

Incorporating Infographics in Your Marketing Strategy

We all know a picture tells a thousand words, but infographics are even more efficient. The right infographic can turn facts and data into arguments, turn potential leads into sure sales, and can reduce complex data points into actionable information in multiple different contexts, from product info to political activism.

But infographics are still a relatively delicate art. A poorly drafted infographic can boil down to a pretty picture without a point, and it’s easy to overburden the reader with too much information and lose them. Like an article or a professional photograph, infographics need flow, they need a central point that viewers are drawn to, and they need to be intuitive.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that infographics are best left to political campaign marketers or environmental agencies. You can use them in your own niche or industry to illustrate how your product or service differentiates itself from the rest, or to create a compelling argument for why you’re the reader’s right choice. Let’s take a look at a few reasons why infographics need to play a role in your marketing strategy.

The Value in Infographics

Infographic use has risen strongly in the last few years, with a staggering 67 percent of marketers making use of them in a B2B context alone. One in five surveyed marketers say that their strategy is “nothing without visual content”, and half admit that it’s very important.

The main ways in which an infographic immediately brings value to a brand or product is by:

  • Improving shareability
  • Creating better backlinks for you
  • Building up traffic and search ranking
  • Increasing brand credibility
  • Providing an easy measurement for brand and product engagement
  • Allowing the reuse of old material
  • Turning complicated material into highly readable content

When used well, infographics help you produce shareable content that customers can easily understand and help drive better traffic to your pages, build backlinks for your long-term SEO, and bring in an amazing ROI in terms of both leads and sales.

[smgquote author=”Chris Rice, SEO Manager”]
Infographics can help increase the reach of your content and the visibility of your brand.
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Provided you’re doing infographics justice by utilizing them the right way. Let’s see what that might look like.

The Dos and Don’ts of Infographic Use

A good picture gets people to stop and think, a mediocre picture is immemorable, but a bad picture can even inspire disgust. The quality of your infographic says a lot about the care you put into your marketing materials, which is why you need to pay equal parts of attention to the contents of the material, as well as its style.

Poor sourcing, lack of facts, and outdated statistics are just as egregious as mismatched fonts, a bad layout, and visual clutter. Thankfully, the dos and don’ts for good infographic use are simple.

Use Infographics for Supplementary Content

One of the easiest ways to implement infographics into your marketing material is to use them to drive home the point of a larger blog post, status message, or article. An infographic can be used to summarize the points or facts outlined in your blog post and explain why your product or service is important in your given niche.

Take an example from pool companies utilizing infographics to represent the amount of money lost and subsequently saved between neglecting and refurbishing a swimming pool multiple times per year, versus weekly and monthly maintenance, or a pool supplies company weighing the pros and cons between different pool detergents, such as chlorine and bromine.

These posts are often filled with chemical facts about maintaining an equilibrium between mineral contents, alkalinity, and chlorine levels – representing this information visually helps readers better understand the main points of comparison and can help them make a better decision based on their location, pump type, or pool lining material.

Don’t Overcomplicate

Infographics should always strive to ultimately present whatever point the article or post is making in a simplified and concrete manner. In other words, it should be clear at first glance what’s going on in the visuals of an infographic.

However, we can sometimes get caught up with what we’re making and forget to see things from the perspective of some fresh eyes. Always make sure to test your graphic on a few different people in the office before publishing it, to make sure your point gets across. If you want a layperson’s insight, forward it to a friend or family member, too.

Visualize the Numbers

Infographics usually represent a lot of information in the form of numbers and fractions. It helps to visualize those numbers rather than leave them whole. Not only does that help readers quickly skim the facts and still get the point, but visual representation will often have a much greater impact than a flat number.

Don’t Post Huge Infographics on Limited Spaces

If you’re planning to create an infographic for Instagram, remember the limitations of the average Instagram post, and more specifically, the limitations of the average mobile phone. Similarly, if you plan to create an infographic to reuse across multiple different platforms, always double check to see what it might look like on those platforms.

Do Create Multiple Versions

You can take a single infographic idea and create at least three different successful versions as part of your content marketing strategy – one of the on-site content it’s paired with, one for your weekly newsletter or email, and one for an Instagram carousel post.

It is a little bit of extra work, but you do end up with thrice the amount of reward for the same level of research and basic drafting. Change the layout, keep the colors and theming, cut down on the data to present only the basic facts, and voila.

In Summary

At the end of the day, good infographics can inspire audiences much more than any form of written content – whether that’s an inspiration to donate to a cause, spread a message, or consider an important purchase for themselves or their company. Mastery of visual content in your marketing plan can turn the tide and put you ahead of the competition. Including different types of content within your content strategy can yield higher results than exclusively text-based content.

It doesn’t hurt to get help in that regard. Let us work with you to develop an eye-catching and interesting marketing campaign that helps viewers better understand your product or service.

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dont use this category

Improve Your Content by Avoiding Overused Stock Photos

An unbroken block of text is not user-friendly. Good spacing, layout, and font choice can go a long way towards making text look better. But you need more to keep the eye interested, especially when trying to present content online.

Statistics show that readers are 80 percent more likely to read your content when it’s paired with an image. Good and relevant image choices are also incredibly useful for SEO purposes, helping you boost your ranking significantly, provided they’re set up correctly. And no, stock images don’t hurt your chances of getting on Google’s great side, because if they counted as non-original content for ranking purposes, most websites wouldn’t rank.

But there are other issues with stock photos, particularly overused ones. Cliché, unfitting, or plain boring stock images might not hurt your SEO, but it can hurt your reader’s interest, and cause you to lose out on an opportunity to do something creative with the visual medium on your content.

Use Original Material Whenever You Can

This point is important, and not always an option for some companies. But if you are in the process of gathering material for video content, press releases, company publicity, and visuals for the office and team, consider making an investment in some homegrown stock photography.

Prop your own staff and location to produce some evergreen office and coworker images, or industry-specific photos to use for your own needs, time and time again. Not only does it supplant the need for a stock image budget, but you can save the time spent looking for the kind of visual content you need by making it yourself.

Create a Story with a Character

One way of conveying a deeper interest in utilizing stock photos to tell a story throughout your content is to try and purchase multiple stock photos with the same model. Most stock photography companies and studios hire stock photo models to pose for hundreds of different disjointed shots.

Sometimes, when strung together, these shots tell a humorous or nonsensical story. Consider the wild tale of the Distracted Boyfriend meme stock photo, wherein the couple eventually goes through a messy breakup, and it’s implied that the jealous girlfriend ends up together with the very woman her ex was distracted by. A surprising twist!

But by cherry-picking images that suit your needs, you can potentially make use of a single model as the “character” you’re using to illustrate an example in your content.

Be Cheeky with Your Choices

While it depends on the industry and the audience you are catering to, there’s usually no harm in taking the opportunity to be a little cheeky with your stock photo choices.

For example, instead of the typical image of two angry people on a couch, you might preface an article on family counselling with an image of a wolf gently biting their annoyed sibling.

Unconventional, interesting stock photo choices that get a light chuckle or moment of pause out of a reader can help your article or content stick in the reader’s mind for longer than usual. And that is ultimately what you want – a good first impression.

Make Sure Your Photo’s Point is Clear

We’re not trying to restrict your creative freedom – but we do want to point out that if there’s anything you should really, desperately avoid, it’s visual clutter. A picture of a bunch of things isn’t going to be doing you any favors.

The same goes for any other form of visual clutter or lack of clarity. Don’t be too busy with your image. Don’t use something far too colorful, where the message or point of the photo gets lost in the aesthetic. Unless, of course, the aesthetic is the point.

You want stock photography with a purpose that is instantly recognizable. Something where pretty much everyone at the office, when polled on what the image is supposed to show, gives the exact same answer. An apple. Paper with slipped ink. A smiling coworker. Two friends embracing. If it’s clear that multiple people are misinterpreting the image, then it may be time to pick something else.

Choose Images That Make Immediate Sense

The specific subject matter you opt for is almost irrelevant. Picture quality and composition is what really matters. A lot of clever photo choices rely on metaphor and tongue-in-cheek humor – but the key behind creating visual comedy like that is that it must be obvious. Everybody should be in on the joke!

But this lesson doesn’t just apply to cheeky images. A lot of stock photos have an unnatural air of cheesiness that doesn’t make much sense after the first glance, like people rejoicing in front of a brick wall, or the classic girl laughing with salad. There’s an entire page on the Internet dedicated to exposing stock photo cliches – and it’s a good opportunity to familiarize yourself with a few common pitfalls to avoid.

Good stock photo options are a lot like good written content. Relevance matters, and originality can go a long way.

Less is More

At the end of the day, don’t be afraid to work with very little to do a lot. You don’t need a new stock photo for every third sentence – hell, you can probably get away with one or two images per post, tops, and no more than three per webpage. You can cut it down even more if you commit to a clean, minimalist aesthetic with your web design, or incorporate other in-house visuals into your content.

Thinking about the visual experience of your pages is just as important as the quality of your written word, if not more so. People’s eyes are drawn to color and visuals, and a well-placed, comedic, and effective stock photo can do more to help an article or product stick in a reader’s mind than five overused cliches, or a thousand words.

Need help working high-quality visuals into your online content? No worries. Get in touch with us, and we’ll help you translate your brand and ideas into great visual and written content.

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Content Marketing

Content Marketing Trends to Watch For in 2022

As we’re ringing in the new year, it’s becoming clearer what 2022 will have in store for us.

Content marketing is ever-changing, with new trends constantly emerging on the horizon, some closer than others.

While we’re likely still years away from fully matured content marketing via AR and VR (through the likes of Instagram and Metaverse), the following content marketing trends are sure to play a vital role in the coming months, and can be implemented right now.

Capitalize on Your Data

Data security and privacy will continue to be hot topics as privacy watchdogs argue for stronger and stronger user protection, while advertising tech giants like Google and Facebook come up with new ways to target users without infringing on their privacy.

The future will require businesses to rely more heavily than ever on data that their own users willingly divulge, also known as first-party data.

Things like consumer surveys, sign-up details, and additional profile information can help you track and understand who your audience is, what they want, what they’re looking for, and what they care about. It will help you shape your ad campaigns, figure out the right messaging for your target audience, and make the most of every cent spent on your content.

Important steps to take include consolidating, organizing, and analyzing first-party data, while making use of the new ways in which advertisers are being accommodated following the eventual removal of third-party cookies from the web’s largest browser.

Continue Improving Your SEO

Another important avenue for improvement continues to be search engine optimization. While SEO is decades old at this point, the proper guidelines and requirements for “good” SEO change every few months. The basics largely remain the same: good content, keywords matter, and topic relevance.

But this year, and in the months to come, Google and other search engines are making a greater effort of focusing on user experience and readability, while punishing sites that hinder users, are awkward to read or navigate on mobile devices, or inundate visitors with advertisements and useless pop-ups.

Continue to invest in better SEO by partnering with a firm that keeps on top of these things. Google alone utilizes thousands of different factors when ranking websites against each other, and its algorithm goes through over a thousand different changes and dozens of major changes per year. While the basic principles matter the most, the nitty-gritty details can spell the difference between ranking first and appearing at the bottom of the page – especially in competitive markets.

Branch Into New Content Avenues

Page content, engagement on social media, and the occasional YouTube video can all prove vital in bringing in more traffic, generating leads, and turning visitors into potential customers. But 2022 calls for an even greater diversification in content, especially if you want to keep up with the competition.

Evaluate the usefulness and potential of short-form video content, influencer marketing, and podcasts. These three have exploded in size and impact over the last few years, especially during the pandemic.

Not every business is cut out for short-form video marketing, or a podcast. But many companies are already successfully leveraging these growing content niches and making the most of their new audience. Don’t be left behind.

Market and Sell Directly Through Social Media

E-commerce was undoubtedly the biggest winner in 2020 and 2021, and there’s no sign that that growth is stopping anytime soon. That’s part of the reason why tech giants Meta, Google, and even Twitter have continued investing in the ability to buy and sell on their respective platforms.

Users will be encouraged to shop via search engine results (both Bing and Google partnered with Shopify and other e-commerce platforms to entice retailers), social media platforms like Instagram, and even browse catalogues and ask product-related questions directly through instant messaging apps like WhatsApp and Messenger.

If you’ve been falling behind on your social media presence, now is the time to play catchup. These platforms might become major sources of revenue for small-to-medium businesses selling their products online. If you’re a retailer who hasn’t capitalized on e-commerce growth, it’s time to take advantage of its ease of access and current profitability

Improve Your Chat Service

With more online shopping comes the need for more online chatting. Meta’s popular messaging products, including Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram’s direct messages, have integrated customer-facing chat options and product information in the past year, making it easier for businesses to answer customer questions, and for customers to ask questions.

Work on your customer-facing chat options on WhatsApp by improving your product catalogue, adding frequently asked and answered questions, and engaging with customers in a friendly and timely manner.

Make the Most of Short Video Content

With the staggering success of TikTok and the birth and rise of YouTube Shorts, it’s clear the video content is continuing to push towards bite-sized pieces of information and entertainment.

Can you leverage that success and translate it into more sales for your business? That depends on your industry and product. Unlike longer-form YouTube content, where a lot of the value lies in ad money, YouTube Shorts pay next to nothing because of their length.

However, they do rake in far more views because they’re incredibly digestible, and people go through so many of them at a time. This makes them more valuable for their indirect value, leading customers to your product or concept, or showcasing your business and service. The same can be said for other short-form video content, whether on your own page or on platforms like TikTok.

Contrast and Compare

Regardless of what content marketing strategy you implement in 2022, nothing you do will truly be worth your time if you don’t try to contrast and compare.

Prepare to spend weeks to months analyzing the effectiveness of a certain type of content before you abandon it or invest more heavily in it. Wait for SEO changes to have an effect on your traffic before you re-evaluate your content strategy. Give your business’s shot at YouTube or TikTok some time before you judge its efficacy.

While seeing anecdotal evidence and exploring use cases can help give you ideas, it’s important not to draw one-to-one parallels between what other businesses experienced, and what might happen in your case. Experimentation is important, especially if you want the greatest return on investment over a long period.

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Content Marketing

Core Web Vitals: WordPress, Drupal, Duda or Wix?

The results are in! For at least one kind of race, that is. Content management systems, or CMSs, play a vital role in making it easier and easier for companies and individuals to develop compelling, responsive, and easily navigable websites on the Internet.

We’ve made leaps and bounds in website design and convention since the inception of the World Wide Web, and innovations in web development are showing no real signs of slowing any time soon.

Yet that doesn’t mean that a fair share of the Internet’s content, even some of the most popular content, is hosted on websites that are generally subpar when it comes to the standards of the modern user.

To incentivize pushing away from poor accessibility and towards a new age of web convenience, Google has reiterated and solidified its Core Web Vitals, a series of user experience and interfacing criteria that can affect ranking in Google search results.

Recent data taken from a Core Web Vitals Technology Report shows which content management system (or web publishing platform) offers the best in performance and user experience, on a generalized level. The four competitors on the market are WordPress, Drupal, Duda, and Wix. So, let’s look at which performed the best.

What are the Core Web Vitals?

Before we begin, it’s important to summarize what Google’s Core Web Vitals actually are. They are three basic criteria that serve as metrics for website performance, in the field of user experience. These are:

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The speed at which the majority of a page’s content is loaded. Ideally 2.5 seconds or less.
  • First Input Delay (FID): The responsiveness of a website when interacted with. Ideally, the website should provide feedback on the first user action after 100 milliseconds or less.
  • Cumultive Layout Shift (CLS): A measurement of visual stability, of common website errors or inconveniences such as content shifting around as it’s being loaded in, and visual consistency. Aside from inconvenience, this can lead to users clicking things they didn’t mean to – causing serious damage.

Results of the Core Web Vitals Technology Report

The Core Web Vitals Technology Report is compiled from the CRuX and HTTPArchive Lab Web Technology Detections datasets of CWV performance across CMS services. The report took a look at how the four largest web publishing services generally handled CWV criteria, by analyzing eligible websites and sorting out ones with a passing score.

The final rankings after a year of compiling data stand at:

  • Duda (69.3 percent)
  • Wix (55.3 percent)
  • Drupal (50.2 percent)
  • WordPress (31 percent)

You can review each platform’s individual metrics here and here.

WordPress interestingly started ahead of the competition, but quickly lagged behind once commercial alternatives (and open-source rival Drupal) started making concerted efforts to invest in responsiveness and CWV.

Does this mean WordPress is a bad CMS, or that any of the others are a much better option in every way? As always, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Each of these web publishing platforms offers a unique value proposition and caters to a different audience.

While there is significant overlap, Duda (for example) is more focused on providing a website building platform for professionals, versus the wider offering and customization behind WordPress.

A lot of these changes are also rather dramatic. Commercial platforms like Duda and Wix were known for being behind WordPress on SEO and page speed, but picked up considerably in the last year.

Will WordPress Stay Behind?

Another important core argument to consider is whether or not these findings will be true in a year or two. Can you afford to go through the work it takes to completely change the platform your website is built around for what might be transient gains? While WordPress is the largest and most uncoordinated CMS service among the ones tested in the CWV data collection effort, it’s also important to note that they are well aware of this.

We’ve established that being open source is not a hindrance for good overall performance and consistent performance gains when observing Drupal, so the fact of the matter remains that WordPress simply hasn’t made a coordinated effort to focus on CWV at the time, unlike many of its competitors. It’s probably unfair to judge a platform on a single metric like performance, especially given that it isn’t as though your entire ranking on Google hinges solely on how fast your website loads, or how responsive it is.

But that doesn’t make it irrelevant, either. And WordPress are aware of that, too. They’ve responded by hinting at the potential for a coordinated performance improvement effort in the near future, as per a comment by WordPress core contributor and software engineering manager at Google, Thierry Muller.

He goes on to say that: “to better understand which area are hurting most WordPress sites, we* have conducted analysis on the 100 most popular themes and various real WordPress sites (from small to large).

“The results of our analysis are that the largest offenders are Modern image formats, Responsive images followed by JavaScript execution time, Unused JavaScript, Render-blocking resources, Redirects, Long cache TTL. This analysis (or further analysis based on other criteria) may inform well inform our roadmap.

“Depending on the number of contributors we will be able to work on multiple projects simultaneously. By “we”, I mean my team at Google.”

Can You Afford to Get Hung Up on the Details?

There’s a great argument to be made against losing the forest for the trees. This information might be great for someone trying to get a new website off the ground in 2021.

But ultimately, obsessing over the average core web vital scores for websites built on your CMS or platform of choice does not necessarily translate to actionable data for your project’s own performance, or more importantly, for the quality of your content and the quantity of your traffic.

There’s more that goes into making a good pie than baking it well. You still need the right ingredients for an amazing pie dough, ripe fruit, and a great recipe. Do not let core web vitals distract you from creating value for your existing customers and potential leads, as well as readers everywhere.

If you’re having trouble allocating resources and prioritizing development for your website and digital marketing efforts, let us help you out. We can go over your performance metrics together, review past campaigns and draft new ones, and bring you better results through a data-driven effort.

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Content Marketing

8 Tips on Creating High-Quality Content

What is the true key to creating high-quality content? Is it word count? Keyword density? Or, even, originality? The answer is no, no, and surprisingly, still no. High-quality content is many things, but most importantly, it’s incredibly difficult to quantify.

Google generally promotes content on the basis of a few important factors that count towards search engine optimization, or SEO.

As with most things in life, there are about a dozen tips and techniques that can be considered low-hanging fruit, and thousands of factors that improve your ranking in miniscule ways.

Creating high-quality content is somewhere in between, on one of the branches that might be higher up on the tree yet are still within reach.

The importance behind content quality goes beyond what Google’s algorithm thinks of your site. There’s the human factor, too – high quality may be subjective, but there are a few objective ways of distinguishing between different sources of information, and it’s in these objective ways that we begin to see why some people are more likely to use one page or site as a resource over another. Here are a few of them.

What Are People Looking For?

Reader interest is important when quantifying quality. While a piece of content can be good, its usefulness to others is what makes it a high-quality resource. To that end, try to figure out where the Internet might be lacking.

It could be that there isn’t a concise guide to raising a specific type of succulents in subtropical weather. Or, if there is, then there isn’t a good long-form guide to the topic instead.

Figure out what topics of relevance to your business are inadequately explored or explained online and create your own resource for them.

Focus on Readability

It’s not enough to compile an infodump for unsuspecting readers. There needs to be structure, intent, and even rhythm. Good typography matters too. Keep sentences short. Don’t ramble on for too long and soliloquy. Use stories, parables, or examples to help reiterate something or provide a break from dry information but avoid getting lost in analogies.

Yes, grammar and formatting are important as well. But while most readers won’t be professional literary critics, people can tell the difference between something that’s informative, and something that’s both informative and pleasant to read. They’ll probably remember the latter.

Keep a Finger on the Pulse

In other words: research, research, research. Once you’ve figured out what people are looking for, it’s time to find out what else they might be looking for.

Search and trend analytics are immensely useful here, as they help you figure out what people who searched for any given term are most likely to search for in addition to that first search.

Don’t Worry About Being Completely Original

It’s nearly impossible to be “completely original” on the Internet. That does not mean you should plagiarize other content wholesale.

But think of content online as more of an exercise in creating a kaleidoscope of information from existing resources and references and providing your own unique input to bring in a touch of something new.

Even if that touch is something as simple as taking information from a number of disparate sources and formatting it in a way that’s easy to navigate and understand and provides a single page for people to use as reference in the future.

Do More Than Just Write

We aren’t talking about video content or infographics, although those are important topics in their own right. We’re talking about breaking text up with multimedia, from short clips used as reference, to GIFs and images for humor or visual information.

On one hand, the use of multimedia can help improve readability and provide a break for readers of a post. On the other hand, it allows you to represent a point made in text through an image, and reinforce an important tip or quote. This is especially important in information-dense or difficult-to-understand topics such as medicine and research.

Review and Improve Older Posts

As your website matures and your content begins to take on a certain style or flair that sets you apart from the competition, it’s worth taking the time to rehash old topics, revisit old posts, and renew old information.

While you can’t go back and drastically edit an old video on YouTube, you can take the time to edit and improve old blog entries, articles, or other forms of content on your own site.

Note that Google tends to rank pages that are older and have a considerable history of traffic quite a bit higher – leveraging this and improving on the information on your older and most successful content can help you retain new visitors and improve the trustworthiness of your site.

Don’t Ignore the Data

One of the worst things you can do is continuously put out content without taking the time to examine how certain editing and production trends are affecting your metrics. Toy around with different formatting styles and ideas.

Figure out what’s reaching people the most. Use impressions, views, clicks, and leads to gauge whether your new approach is successful or a step backwards – whether it’s a change in editing, a different tone in your videos, a different writing style, a different topic, less or more text, less or more pictures, and so on. You can even do this in real time through A/B testing.

Find Your Niche

At the end of the day, there’s a lot more you can do to make your content better. But is it what people want out of your site? Identify what brings you the most interest from your readers or viewers and invest in that idea.

Don’t think of it as something banal as chasing eyeballs – at the end of the day, you’re putting your time and energy into producing content that people want and are looking for, whether just for entertainment, information, or both.

It’s worth repeating that you should take the time to revisit old content at least once a year, if only to figure out what exactly made some posts much more successful than others.

Is it the editing? Is it the use of multimedia? Is it formatted differently? Is it the topic, the content itself, the references, the research, the readability? Some videos, posts, blogs, or images are a bit like catching lightning in the bottle – and trying to force it a second time might not go as well. But we can still learn a lot from our successes.

Categories
Content Marketing

Personalization: The Future of Content Marketing

The future of content marketing is increasingly focused on delivering personalized experiences across various platforms. As audiences seek more tailored and relevant content, marketers are shifting towards strategies that cater to individual preferences and behaviors. This evolution involves using data-driven insights to create content that resonates on a personal level, ensuring engagement and effectiveness in a landscape where customization is key.

Does your child spend the better part of their free time on YouTube? Have you ever seen someone spending more time watching streamers on Twitch than shows on Netflix? Do you have a TikTok account?

If your question to any of these questions is yes, then you’re already aware of the macro-to-micro revolution in digital content. People are tuning in to individual creators and channels at a far greater pace than any company, brand, or group.

This doesn’t mean that luxury brands and established household names are necessarily losing power – but it does mean that media and content consumption is shifting towards a personalized experience.

Purchasing decisions, interests, and to a degree even political ideas are being molded by a growing class of talented content producers. And try as they might, a lot of brands that have tried to pick up on the trend haven’t reached the same level of authenticity or one-on-one engagement that individual content creators have.

The ability to make viewers feel almost like friends – to the point that some people have begun voicing concerns over a growing parasocial phenomenon – reveals an incredible potential for a brand-new type of content engagement for digital marketers and online brands. The personalized kind.

Explaining Personalized Content

Does this mean your brand needs an influencer? Well, no. Influencers and content creators have their own important place in any niche or industry, be it gaming, tech, fitness, engineering, beauty, lifestyle, cooking, and so on.

Part of their authenticity is that their relationships with brands is always one at arm’s length. Viewers understand that their favorite content producers need sponsorships and partnerships to continue to finance their passions, but that at the end of the day, they can still trust them to speak their mind.

But in the growth of the influencer, we see something completely new unfold – the potential for one-on-one conversations between brands and consumers.

Personalized content leverages growing advances in video editing and video production to help brands develop templates for their video marketing campaigns that utilize costumer data to create a unique video pitch.

What does that mean?

It means that your bank might give you an end-of-the-year thank you video, detailing in summary what you bought that year, the financial decisions you made, how your business has helped the company reach new milestones, and how you can continue to help them via personalized credit based on their purchasing and banking history.

It means that a school campus can give a mock tour of its facilities, including a quick peek at what a student’s dorm might look like with their name on it. It means content that changes based on who is watching – like an ad for a tourist agency promoting a hotel, but omitting the hotel and focusing on other amenities if the customer has already got a reservation.

We already have real life examples of this from Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, University of Waterloo, and Facebook – you might have already seen some kind of Facebook retrospective in the past, where Facebook takes your new and old friends, your posts and pictures, and helps you celebrate your year, or a special milestone.

How Does Personalized Content Work?

The future for this kind of content is looking very bright. We can already mix and match different scripts based on whether certain customer information is missing or available. We can use or omit certain images and visual keynotes, or use images provided by the customer – ala Facebook – to create a personalized video experience.

But so far, a lot of these techniques – the kind that sift through massive amounts of customer data – rely on two things:

  1. Very, very sophisticated machine learning.
  2. A mountain of customer data that has been willingly supplied to you.

Most companies have neither. However, that might not be the case in a few years. Even so, you don’t need a lot of data to create a personalized video.

Taking note of a few key customer choices during the registration and purchasing experience, for example, allows you to change your pitch to adjust to how a customer behaves, and what they did and didn’t do – based on what they have or haven’t bought, or what they did and didn’t favorite.

If you’re running an online storefront, for example, you will be able to create unique, personalized video ads for customers based on what they bought, and what other users with similar shopping patterns also looked at.

We already have something like this in most e-commerce platforms – it’s just a matter of taking the existing data and putting into an attractive and personalized video format.

Of course, clean and accurate data is incredibly important for this kind of near-future and present marketing. If your business is already in the excellent position to store and analyze user data – especially if you have a storefront, allow users to register, send out newsletters, pose questions through surveys, and analyze their purchasing decisions and user activity on your site – then you will have what it takes to start taking advantage of personalized content soon.

How soon? The tools to do it already exist. However, a lot of the most sophisticated stuff is coming out of proprietary systems developed by marketing teams for larger companies trying to explore the potential for this kind of new content (its potential is great, if you’re curious).

Creating and Using Personalized Content

We’ve already discussed YouTube’s (and Google’s) expanded video building tools in the past, and other tools like Vidyard further specialize in personalized video content. While rudimentary, the tools for this kind of content will continue to develop and mature rapidly in the coming years – until you can start to connect to these services and feed them your data via API, and automatically begin importing and incorporating user data into your video marketing material.

While it’s still ostensibly the future of video marketing, there is a lot you can do to gear up for the next step in digital advertising. It all starts with sensibly gathering user data, incorporating personalization tools into every step of the sales process, and making the most of good data.

Categories
Content Marketing

What is a Content Gap Analysis?

If you find that your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts are lacking, it may be time to conduct a content gap analysis. This helps you find missed opportunities for your SEO strategy – and if you hire us to handle it for you – is something we’ll do on your behalf.

One of the most common questions we get from our clients is, “How do I figure out what to write about?” While we’ll also handle your content needs if you want, we understand that many people want to write their own blog posts, but still want to make sure the content serves their overall goals.

Of course, turning to SEO keyword research can help you determine the topics to cover on your website, but there are always other, potentially more lucrative opportunities out there. And that’s what the content gap analysis does – helps you find the “gaps” in your content so you can develop ideas that bring more traffic to your website, provide value to your audience, and ultimately, convert more visitors to paying customers.

What is a Content Gap Analysis?

If you’ve ever gone through a process to find holes in your current content, then you’ve likely performed some kind of gap analysis. This process involves finding missing pieces of content that could align with the stages of your target’s buyer’s journey.

It starts with your existing content, which allows you to see places where you may lack valuable assets that could guide users through their journey to purchase your product or service.

Chances are, you’ll also find new keywords to target that you’re not already using with your existing content.

To do a full content gap analysis, you’ll audit:

  • All pages of your website, including landing pages
  • Blog posts
  • Social media content
  • Any downloadables and other content assets like ebooks.

Step One: Mapping Your Content to the Buyer’s Journey

Not every visitor who comes to your website will be ready to make a purchase. Most of the time, they will simply be looking for information, Price shopping for their best solution, or looking to compare their options.

So that you’re ready for every visitor regardless of where they are in the buyer’s journey, you need to create content for each stage – whether they are just now figuring out their need, looking at their various decisions, or ready to make a purchase from you.

Lots of brands focus on creating informative content that draws into the audience and then money pages to convert the users into buyers. Though this approach works, it does create gaps for people who are considering their options may fall through the cracks.

Conducting your content analysis requires you to identify whether you have content for all stages of your buyer’s journey including awareness, consideration, decision, and success.

Awareness content targets keywords that are related to a particular problem your audience faces. The content serves to address the problem while providing valuable information. However, the goal is not to immediately convert the visitor into a customer.

During the consideration stage, people are comparing various solutions for their problem. They may read reviews, “best of” posts, or comparison guides. At this stage, you can create content that compares your product or service to your competition or present your brand as one of many solutions in a Round-Up post.

At the decision stage, you’ll find your money pages including your service pages, sales pages, and more. It is the final checkpoint before someone contacts you or makes a purchase from you. These pages are more branded than your consideration and awareness content.

But the journey is not over once a customer makes a purchase. You’ll need to add success content to reassure customers that they will reach their desired outcome. This may be as simple as a thank you page or as complex as a sequence of follow-up emails to connect them with ongoing support or ask for a review.

Your content gap analysis helps to identify whether you have content at each one of these stages for each one of your website’s offerings whether that is services, products, downloads, form fills, or something else entirely. The goal is to prevent users from having an opportunity to fall through.

That means you need to take a look at all of your existing content and map out which stage of the process that goes to. If you find that you have a lot of content in one area, it will help you focus your efforts on flushing out the content in the other stages of the funnel….but first, make sure you know what your customer does to arrive at the buying decision. Mapping the journey helps.

Step Two: Market Research

One of the best ways to come up with content ideas that are in line with what your audience wants is to ask them. Reach out to people in your target audience and conduct a market research survey. You can use Google Forms to create a quick and easy anonymous survey to send.

Ask things like:

  1. What questions do you have about [topic/keyword]?
  2. What are your biggest struggles related to [topic/keyword]?
  3. What solutions have you tried in the past?
  4. Why did these not work for you?
  5. What are the top three things you are looking for in [product or service]?
  6. Where do you go to look for solutions like [product or service]?
  7. What deciding factors do you use to choose between solutions?

The survey answers provide you with a lot of content ideas, all of which address the real needs and concerns of potential customers.

Step Three: Analyze Current Content

Your brand likely shares content across a variety of platforms but you want to be sure the content on your website aligns with the buyer’s journey and doesn’t leave gaps. Check all URLs on your website and determine how or if they align with each stage.

Then, you can determine whether you are missing content to bridge the gap between stages where needed and make adjustments to current content to make them better match one stage or another.

For instance, if you are a business coach and you have an article titled “How to Start a Business” and your immediate call to action is to “hire me” with a link that directs them to your contact page, you may be deterring people who aren’t sure they need a business coach yet.

Instead, you may want to link to an article like “Consider This Before Hiring a Business Coach” or “Finding the Best Business Coach for Your Needs” Nurture them before you hit them with your pitch.

You can also find gaps on your site using SEO tools to see what keywords your site currently ranks four. Then, search for those keywords so you can find related keywords that you may not be targeting with your existing content.

Step Four: Look at the Competition

Looking at what your competition is doing and considering how your site measures up is a great way to find more gaps. If your competitor uses a funnel that is more or less the same as yours, take a look at the content they’ve created to lead users through the funnel.

  • Is the content immediately directing readers to a contact page?
  • is there other content that nurtures the users before they buy?

It goes without saying that what works for one site doesn’t always work for another so you don’t want to copy your competitor’s strategy. You want to see where you may have issues within your own strategies that you can come up with something better than the competition.

SEO tools make it possible to see what keywords your competitors are ranking for so you can align these with new content ideas.

As a small business owner, it is common to make the mistake of focusing more on your money pages to push the sale or the informative blog posts to draw in readers.

While you need both, you do also need content to bridge the gap between each step of the buyer’s journey from where they are first aware of their problem to the point where they are making a purchase decision.

The content gap analysis is the key to finding those holes in your current content strategy so you can create new content assets that generate traffic and funnel users through to purchase.

It also provides an opportunity to find new keywords to target based on what your competitors are or aren’t targeting.

After you complete your content gap analysis and create the necessary content based on its results, you’ll have valuable content that nurtures everyone from your cold first-time visitor to someone who is eagerly ready to work with you.

Categories
Digital Marketing

Actionable Content Marketing Tips to Build More Traffic

Research from the Content Marketing Institute shows that 91% of B2B businesses use content marketing to reach their customers. And when it comes to the b2c sector, 86% of those marketers think using content marketing is crucial to their overall digital marketing strategy.

The Content Marketing Institute also shows that 72% of marketers say their content marketing efforts increase engagement and that it has increased the number of leads.

Your content is worth optimizing because 95% of people only look at the first page of search results so if your content appears on the second page or after, the majority of people will not see it.

Most of the content marketing advice out there is general and does not give you actionable tips you can use to see a return on your investment. This list gives you a solid place to start.

1.    A New Spin on Gated Content

Gated content requires a subscription or an email address to access. You can grow your email list with these kinds of posts by creating a small selection of normal blog posts that only your email subscribers can get access to. When someone clicks on one of these posts, a pop-up should appear that asks for their email.

This approach can help you grow your email list while playing up the “exclusivity” part of some of your content, without having to charge people to read it.

2.    Attack Content Decay

If you’ve produced content for a while, chances are you’re losing traffic as a result of content decay. Simply updating and relaunching your old post can dramatically improve your traffic. If you’ve been blogging for some time though, it may be hard to tell where to begin with updating your old posts. That’s where the Animalz Revive tool comes in. It’s a completely free tool that will analyze your Google Analytics data and provide a list of posts that you should refresh.

It’s up to you whether to relaunch the post like it’s brand new or if you want to quietly update the content. Either way, you should see an increase in traffic to the post. The more posts you revamp, the more traffic you can capture.

3.    Use Templates to Mimic Past Successes

Templates are helpful when it comes to scaling up your content marketing. Whenever you start a new post, avoid opening up a blank Google Doc. Instead, work from one of your proven blog post templates. When you sit down to write a blog post, use the template to help you get all of the important parts down on paper.

After you’ve done that, transfer it to a Google Doc and start writing. Working from a set of templates Makes it easier to scale up your publishing schedule. Where you used to publish a new post once a month, with this approach, you can publish a post every two weeks.

You’re not sure where to start with creating templates, take a look at the most popular posts you have and determine if they are of the same type. For example, if you noticed that your most popular posts are case studies, you’ll definitely want to create a case study template to use in the future.

4.    Create Stats Pages

Creating a stats page is a wonderful way to build backlinks without needing to do a lot of outreach. Those pages are optimized around your “topic + stats” keywords and the people who tend to search for those kinds of keywords are journalists and bloggers.

Typically speaking, when they use one of your stats in their article, they’ll link back to your stats page.

5.    Reverse Engineer the Competition

When it comes to digital marketing, there is certainly a place for originality and creative thinking. But, it’s okay to copy what your competitors are doing and you don’t need the Google analytics password to do it. There are a number of tools that show you what is already working for someone else.

For example, if your main focus is link building, Detailed.com provides you with a list of where the top blogs in nearly every niche get their links from. Knowing this, you can craft a strategy that helps you earn links from those places to making it easier for you to compete.

Not sure what to write about? You can use BuzzSumo to see a specific site’s most shared content, to give you an idea of what resonates with their audience so that you can develop your topics accordingly.

6.    Use the PBC Formula

Backlinko says the PBC formula is when you quickly preview what your post is all about. Then, follow it with a list of benefits that someone gets from reading your post. And finally, you finish the introduction with a brief call to action. Why does this approach work? your blog post introductions are important because they are the first thing people see when they land on your post. However, the majority of blogpost intros are way too long. Using the PBC approach keeps your intros lean and gives the user exactly what they want or need to keep reading the post.

7.    Focus on Trending Topics

Trending topics are those that are popular, yet haven’t reached a super competitive point. If you’re tired of using tools like Google Trends, there’s a free tool, Exploding Topics, that’s helpful. In the last six months, covering the business and marketing categories, the “exploding” topics include local SEO, regenerative agriculture, YouTube hashtags, customer persona, and UX writing.

What’s cool about this tool is that you can set it for a wide variety of time frames – starting with one month and going all the way to 15 years. You’ll find that some topics are brand names, but if they are your competition, you can do an X vs. Y post to make use of the branded keyword and topic while still reaching your goals.

Let’s talk about other things you can do to improve your content marketing. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Categories
Content Marketing

Content Syndication 101

Content syndication, or publishing and promoting your original content on third party websites, is a crucial part of building authority and increasing your visibility. Whether you’re promoting articles, videos, or other kinds of content, content syndication networks are a valuable resource. They generally have large established audiences with high domain authority.

Content syndication can also help improve your SEO. It can drive traffic to your website much the same way SEO and paid search do. It can increase your product or service’s user base, help your linkbuilding efforts, and may even improve your own domain authority.  To get the most benefit, though, you need to be doing it correctly. Mistakes could backfire and negatively impact your search engine ranking.

The key to leveraging content syndication is to start with high-quality content. Whether you write it yourself, hire a freelance writer to craft it for you, or decide to let AI handle it for you, you can use any content syndication tool to promote it.

Content Syndication Options for Written Content

Medium

Medium is a free platform that lets you publish content, photos, videos, and audio directly. Users can comment and discuss the content directly on the platform. There’s also a monetization option.

Quora

Quora is a question and answer site that can help you build your personal and professional brand. By becoming an active member of the community, you can use your existing content to answer questions when and where relevant. You can include a link to the text of a full blog post, or a video that answers the question.

Reddit

Reddit is becoming a larger part of popular culture because it’s possible to reach tens of thousands of people every day. There is something for everyone on the platform, and anonymity is more possible there than anywhere else online – even though nothing online is every truly anonymous. It’s a community first and foremost, so it pays to become an active member in the various subreddits before you post your own content.

Mix

Once known as StumbleUpon, Mix is a content discovery tool that allows users to submit your favorite pages, share content with friends and follow people and interests. You’ll be able to look at popular articles, videos, and photos. You also have the option to pay for advertising, if desired.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a blogging platform. There’s a dashboard with a live feed of blogs people are tracking. The posts are automatically displayed, and users can interact with then any time. There is space for all activities, so it’s easy to filter and manage according to your needs.

RSS Feeds

Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, is a way to compile a custom feed of content from your favorite websites, podcasts, and more. With an RSS feed reader, you can get headlines, update notices, and links back to content on your favorite websites.

LinkedIn (Freemium)

For those in the B2B space, LinkedIn offers a way to syndicate content with free and paid options. Paid syndication options include sponsored content, inMail, and display ads.

Facebook (Freemium)

Using Facebook Pages, Groups, and Ads, you can share your content with your current audience, while also drawing in new followers.

Outbrain (Premium)

Outbrain is a paid content marketing platform. You’ll be able to advertise your content on major media platforms like People, ESPN, and CNN. The platform has a global audience of more than 550 million people every month, so you’ll definitely be able to reach your target audience.

Quuu Promote (Premium)

WIth this paid content syndication option, all you have to do is submit your RSS feed and the platform handles the rest. The partner service, Quuu.co, has users who subscribe to various interest categories, where they’ll have content (that comes from Promote) to share on their social media channels. It integrates with Buffer, so people can completely automate their social media content – using real people to promote real content.

Taboola (Premium)

Taboola is a paid content discovery platform that provides placement on top websites. THe platform gives personalized content to 1 billion users every month.

Content Syndication for Video

Many platforms I covered above will also work for video, but if you want platforms that offer nothing but video, you’ll want to look at these two.

YouTube

Owned by Google, YouTube is one of the most popular websites online today. Because of the sheer volume of content on the platform, you’ll need to make sure it’s well optimized, so you can ensure it gets more views.

Vimeo

Vimeo is another video hosting platform like YouTube. It can help you reach more people, especially if you take the time to optimize it.

Content Syndication for Audio

For musicians and podcasters, these are popular syndication networks for your audio content. Even if audio content isn’t your main form, you can easily pay to have your blog content recorded, and then distribute it in audio format.

SoundCloud

SoundCloud lets you host your podcast on their platform, but if you don’t host it there, you can syndicate it so that people who prefer to use it for their podcasts can find it. Musicians can use it to share their tracks and connect with listeners and fellow artists alike.

Leveraging these platforms, you’ll expand your reach and grow your brand. To get the most out of syndication, use a mix of platforms and content formats.

Are you using any of these already? Did I miss any of the great ones? Let me know in the comments.

iTunes

If you’ve got audio content to share with the world, you can list it in iTunes, for free or for purchase.

Spotify

Spotify makes it easy to share your music and podcasts with hundreds of thousands of users every month.

Categories
Content Marketing

Exploring ToFu to BoFu: Investigating These Content Marketing Metrics

You spend your time feeling like a marketing rock star. You have content routinely rolling out, traffic growth is on point, and businesses are reading your email newsletters. Then you sit in a meeting and the VP of Finance asks if all the spending is necessary. The CEO questions the time spent on these endeavors. The only way to answer these questions are with content marketing metrics.

Tracking, Something Everyone Should Do

Tracking the ROI is important and sadly, not all marketers perform this vital task. You need to show the numbers to those who don’t understand marketing the way you do. Tracking your content in Top of the Funnel (ToFu), Middle of the Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu) levels is the best way to show the success of your efforts.  Each of these levels have different goals within themselves and you must find the right metrics for each. We recommend you build a metrics dashboard with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Facebook Pixel.

Content Marketing Metrics – ToFu

There are two goals with ToFu, branding initiatives and awareness. Branding initiatives is the focus of spreading the word about the company and its mission. This is easily achieved with recognizable branding that lends to your authority in your niche. Awareness is the understanding that you must consistently find new audiences who will become a steady stream of visitors to your company. You can have other goals but that will be dependent on your business and historical data. Even after you achieve these two goals, you still need a focus on your persona. If you are focused only on gaining new sets of eyes, you will not be able to convert them into buying customers.

To see how well you are doing with ToFu, these are the metrics you want to track.

Google Analytics:

  • New visits
  • Your percentage of new visitors – you should over around 68%
  • New direct visits – measuring the people who already know your brand and looking for you is important. They are the most organic, and profitable, traffic source.

Google Search Console:

  • Branded searches – truly defining if your marketing efforts are working. While the visitors didn’t look for your brand, they found you through a search related to your brand.

Facebook Pixel:

  • Pixeled marketing – building an audience for remarketing objectives.

These five metrics can be compared to historical data to relay how well you have grown in your goals. If you aren’t achieving your goals, then you know it’s time to try some new methods. This should all be visited on a weekly basis. You can add a few more metrics to dive deeper, but you can space them out monthly or quarterly. Consider content bounce rate, average session rates, and page visits to see what your people are responding to.

Content Marketing Metrics – MoFu

There are also two goals at this level, driving visitors back to your site and converting visitors to leads. It is easily one of the more challenging metric levels to deal with. To nurture your campaigns, you need to get leads. To be the most effective marketers can generate 50% more sales with a 33% decrease in cost, at this level. Here are the metrics to use in Google Analytics to see if you are as successful.

  • Visitor recency – the length of time between visits a visitor makes in a given time frame. Since the focus is getting your visitors to come back, this number is very important. A high number indicates you are doing excellent. A low number means you need to improve the quality of your content strategy and build up links for a better SERP rating.
  • Returning direct visitors – those who know your brand well and continue to come back. You are successfully fulfilling a need and they trust you to do so. Using that information to transform newcomers to returning direct visitors is key.
  • Leads generated – a bit complicated but necessary. You must set up goal tracking in Google Analytics to help measure this metric. You also need to have a written plan on how you are achieving your leads.

There are a few other metrics you can add for more insight and stay on top of your marketing game. Number of social shares, blog banner clicks percentage, and growth of retargeting lists are some of the best ones to add.

Content Marketing Metrics – BoFu

There is only one goal of BoFu, to transition your earliest leads into your loyal customer. While it does happen, it is rare for a visitor to turn into a buyer after reading one article. This level is about understanding the journey through the entire funnel. From the first website visit to conversions. Here are the metrics to measure:

  • Number of visitors leaving your offer/demo page. The offer/demo page has to be updated frequently to keep the interest alive. If your percentage is high, optimizing the page will increase your conversion rate and sales.
  • Conversions – the number that is the top priority out of all your metrics
  • Content that results in customers. Not a metric but it is important to know. You can apply that knowledge to future content to maintain the flow of customers. Your PPC team can also work to bring more traffic to those areas.

From here, you take the time to build your report. Two to three month’s worth of data is enough to analyze and prove your efforts are worth the time and money. Seeing the patterns not only give you insight on what is working, it reinforces your success. It will also show you the shift in trends that you will need to shift with. While some older methods still work well, the face of business to business marketing needs to be fluid. Stay true to your brand and the mission, that part will never fail you.

Categories
Content Marketing

Pillar Content 101: What, Why, and How

Pillar content, sometimes also referred to as cornerstone content, is a crucial part of your online presence. Imagine your website as a home for your business and the pillar content as the foundation the rest of the house is built upon. It is the underlying structure. Getting it right can make all the difference in your online success. Let’s take a closer look at what it is, why you need it, and how to create strong pillar content both your audience and Google will love.

What is Pillar Content?

Your pillar content will consist of several structural elements. It is easy to try to go for too much, but for the best result and most efficient use of resources, focus only on distinct, critical areas you want to be recognized for – what your business specializes in.

Regardless of what you deem your pillars to be, those pieces of content have to be solid. The more exhaustive, the better. You can break it down into small pieces of content to fill all your channels to draw in people from different channels. For instance, you can repurpose that single pillar piece into a series of blog posts, emails, infographics, social media updates, and more. I talk about ways you can do this in my post on repurposing content. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel every time.

Imagine that you’re a dentist’s patient, and you know that because you haven’t been in a long time, you’re going to lose some teeth. You want to learn more about dental implants, but you don’t really know much about them.

You decide to do a quick search of Google, and this is what you find after scrolling past the ads and local office results:

You decide that because Perio.org is clearly an organization related to periodontology (or gum health), you should start there – and click the link.

Here you find that this content is from a trusted source, the American Academy of Periodontology. Not only can you use this to find out more about dental implants, including the types that are available, but you can also get an idea of whether or not you’re a candidate, more about the procedure itself depending on how many teeth are to be replaced, and what you can expect afterward. Plus, there are links to other relevant issues surrounding gum disease and treatment.

This resource page is an example of a pillar that you need to create for your brand.

So how do you determine what your content pillars need to be? Reverse engineering – and taking a look at the competition.

Know Your Brand

Your brand determines a great deal about the core topics your pillars need to cover. For example, you’re a cosmetics business specializing in all-natural makeup.

Understand Your Audience

Who are they? What do they want? What do they need? What are they interested in? How do they consume content? How do they prefer that content be presented? What do they need to convert?

In our cosmetics company example, an analysis determined the average customer is a female, with a concern about the environment, who still wants to look great. She fails between 30 and 50 years old and lives in a suburban area. She uses as many eco-friendly products as possible in all areas of her life, and when she finds makeup she loves, she sticks with it.

Map the Customer Journey

You know the endpoint. Think about what steps the customer would take to get from the beginning to the end – working backward. Remember, it’s not a linear path, so you’ll need content for each distinct phase, but that can be found in numerous ways.

The endpoint is a customer buying cosmetics online, or if you also operate a brick and mortar store, to come in and shop. To get them there, you’ll need awareness content to help them learn about the benefits of natural makeup, application techniques, and so on. You’ll also need content for those who are familiar with it, such as makeup looks, demo videos, and more.

Start with a Broad Topic

Your broad topic in this case is all-natural makeup – and there is plenty to cover here. For instance: Lipstick Shades for Different Skintones.

Start with a detailed guide about how to choose the perfect shade of lipstick for your skin tone. Include videos, how-tos, and images.

Build Out with Contextual Topics

From there, consider a dive into how to choose the right lipstick for incredibly fair skin, finding the right lipstick to make your teeth look white, and choosing lipstick for cool and warm undertones.

Fill the Base with Subtopic Content

These could be anything from celebrity makeup looks, how-to videos, tips from the most well-known makeup artists, seasonal trends, different shades within a certain color, lip-liner advice, gloss vs. matte finish, etc.

Why You Need Pillar Content

Content pillars not only provide support for your overall content plan, but they also help you to be found in search. Using one piece of content, you can generate multiple subtopics to support the core topic, but also capture the interest of your various customer personas.

Pillar content helps:

  • Improve your site structure and internal linking
  • Strengthen your overall search engine rank
  • Enhance the user experience

How to Craft Stellar Cornerstone Content

When you start building out your content strategy based on pillars – you may feel overwhelmed, and that’s okay. The easiest thing to do is to focus on creating your first topic cluster. Create a pillar page that serves as a deep dive on your core topic. Keep it ungated. You can a guide with a downloadable resource (as we did with the customer personas post – there’s a worksheet you can download to help you.)

Conduct Keyword Research

Keyword research helps you find what people are searching for, so you can work those words and phrases into your content. Longtail keywords are especially important and may give you subtopic ideas to work in, as well. Consider the user intent behind the keyword phrase and create content that matches it.

See Where You Rank Against the Competition

Search for those keywords you think are most relevant to your brand and product to see where you rank. Take a look at the sites that are ranking for them and compare their content to yours. Make a plan to make yours better.

Dig Deep  – and Think Like the User

Go into as much detail as possible. Put yourself in your user’s shoes. What would they want to know? Answer as many questions as possible.

Evaluate Current Content

You don’t always have to start from scratch. Look at the content you already have and see what edits you can make to turn it into a higher quality pillar piece.

Promote with Social Media

Your great content won’t matter if no one knows it is there. Promote it with social media. Run ads on Google and Facebook, or YouTube, depending on the nature of the content and your audience. Share it wherever and whenever possible.

After a while, evaluate your content strategy to see if it’s working. You should see an increase in organic traffic, and even better, conversions. If not, revisit your strategy to make changes. Continue building out additional pillars for all your other major areas.

Categories
Content Marketing

How Monitoring Online Activity Helps Produce Better Content

Monitoring online activity is pivotal in producing better content. By analyzing user engagement metrics, social media interactions, and search trends, content creators can identify audience preferences and pain points. This data-driven approach allows for the creation of more relevant, engaging content tailored to the audience’s interests and needs. Such targeted content enhances user experience, boosts engagement, and strengthens overall content strategy effectiveness.

Marketing isn’t about shouting from the rooftops – it’s about listening. Here’s how monitoring online activity produces better content.

When I say “monitoring online activity,” I am not talking about using spyware and keyloggers to see what people are doing online. I’m talking about relying on analytics from your website, social media channels, social listening tools, and search listening tools to help you learn more about the audiences you’re creating content for.

Daily, there are more than 3.5 billion Google searches. Annually, it’s 1.2 trillion. Lots of people are asking Google questions, much the same way they’d ask a friend or family member. Questions like:

  • How to crack an egg without breaking the yolk?
  • Is it okay to wear white after Labor Day?
  • How to test a steak’s temperature without a thermometer?
  • Why does my dog eat grass?
  • How many feet in a mile?

But, thanks to the advent of smart speakers and voice search, more than 20% of all searches haven’t been seen before.

Chances are you’ve spoken to Google like this in the past week, and, likely, you’ve also asked something a bit more personal, too. Many questions you face every day aren’t worthy of crowdsourcing to social media because of fear or embarrassment, but Google can still come to the rescue because of the “anonymity” of the white search box. You may ask things like:

  • Am I depressed?
  • How do you ask a friend out on a date?
  • Am I pregnant? (This is one of many widely searched questions, actually.)

Social Listening vs. Search Listening

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you’ve heard me talk about social listening before. It’s the process of using social media to “listen” to what people are saying about your company, brand, products, services, etc. You can use it to find out what people have to say about your competition, too.

Search listening, on the other hand, is a form of research that dives into what people are sharing with Google. With its insights, you can better understand what your audience really needs, what motivates them, and how they behave. Going beyond SEO to understand search behavior can have a major impact on your marketing results, but many marketers fail to do that. SEO is about the words that go into the search box, and search listening is about understanding the people who are putting them there – either by voice or typing them into the box.

Keyword Research vs. Audience Research

Keyword research is focused on “right now” and is literal and tactical. It shows you the most common words and phrases people are searching for around a specific topic and provides search volume to help you decide if you want to try to target the keyword or not.

Audience research, on the other hand, is focused on the future and strategy. You spend time crafting personas for your audience and comparing those personas to who really is visiting your website – who your customers really are.

Monitoring online activity helps you create content that speaks to your audience, and that’s also easy for them to find because of keywords and other SEO efforts. You need both keyword and audience research to succeed in content marketing – and both search listening and social listening help with all of this.

Related: 21 Analytics Tools for Digital Marketing

Building Your Content

It’s better to create content for the right people instead of creating content for the largest group of people. Content marketers often want to cover as much as possible, with the broad approach. There’s nothing wrong with writing to a larger audience, but there are also more targeted questions specific to certain people and things – so you need to create plenty of options to help them answer questions.

Even if you address only a small subset of your audience with a piece of content, you can replicate it with other segments as you go through creating more content. To be successful, you have to be able to meet your audience at the point where they are at the time. Keeping your content evergreen – so it can stand on its own for a long time is key.

As you plan your content, it’s crucial to build pieces of content for each stage of your customer journey – from awareness through post-purchase. What information are people looking for regarding your brand, product, service, etc.?

Tools to Help You Get the Information You Need

AnswerThePublic – a tool I’ve talked about before, is a great tool to find out what people are asking about any particular keyword. It can be targeted by country.

For example, if you’re a sports equipment vendor, you could search for “soccer equipment.” You’d see questions like:

  • How much does soccer equipment cost?
  • Where do donate used soccer equipment?
  • What soccer equipment do you need?

While most people think of something like this for B2C, it also works for B2B.

Take a look at “search engine optimization” there. You’ll find questions like:

  • What does search engine optimization do?
  • How does search engine optimization work?
  • Is search engine optimization important for business?

Quora and Reddit are question and answer platforms where you can find a ton of information about what people are talking about or wanting more from.

Facebook Pages are a good place to look at your competition. Look closely at the type of content they’re posting on their pages – the types of content, when they go live, and so on, to learn more about how their audience is responding.

Google Analytics provides some audience insights – to show user behavior on your site. You can also use Google keyword tools to learn more about keyword volumes, etc.

YouTube – look at search activity and your competitor’s content. The search activity can help you find questions to answer and new content ideas, and the competitor activity can let you see how people are responding – so you can adjust your strategy accordingly.

Of course, these are not the only platforms you can use for your audience. If there is a place where you know your audience is, you should be there to see what’s going on.

Ultimately, using the information you find, you can find patterns that help you develop the content your audience needs and wants. It’s important to serve your audience first, in everything you do in your online marketing.

Categories
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.

 

Categories
Digital Marketing

How COVID-19 Has Changed Marketing

COVID-19 has changed marketing in a big way, shifting focus towards digital channels as consumer behaviors and preferences evolved. Brands have adapted by increasing online presence, leveraging social media, and creating more empathetic and contextually relevant content. The pandemic emphasized the importance of agility, digital engagement, and personalized marketing strategies, leading to innovative approaches in reaching and communicating with consumers in a rapidly changing environment.

We’re now three months into the Coronavirus pandemic, and while many states are re-opening and trying to bring things to a semblance of normalcy, analyses indicate that ad spending has hit bottom. Though this puts the industry in a great position to rebound in Q3, it’s worth taking a look at how the virus has changed the face of marketing – forever.

As people go back to shopping, we won’t see consumerism the way we saw it before. Consumer priorities have shifted, and to keep up with the change, marketing strategies have to reflect that, too. Out-of-touch marketing campaigns will alienate audiences, and quickly at that.

Take a look at this Coppertone sunscreen commercial. Their “summer is still on” ad seems to speak to the current situation, yet misses the mark. Specifically calling out things like road trips and concerts, saying that they are still on, negates reality for many people.

While some may still elect to take short road trips to destinations close to home, cases of the virus are still climbing, and many are choosing staycations in an effort to avoid getting sick or spreading the virus. And many concerts and music festivals have either canceled their events completely or rescheduled tours for 2021. Several artists have postponed shows, but have yet to work out new dates. Those who don’t wish to attend the rescheduled events have the option to request refunds for the shows, so overall attendance may be down – but we’ll have to wait to see how that pans out.

The “new normal” means that people will focus more effort on saving money, rather than spending it. Research from McKinsey & Company shows Americans will remain financially conservative, reducing discretionary spending for the foreseeable future. Only 36% of those surveyed expect the economy to rebound this summer.

So, what can marketers do to navigate the post-pandemic world?

Focus on Connection

In a world where everyone was always busy and on-the-go, halting everything to stay inside our homes with family for weeks on end has reminded us that we really are all connected. Brands who highlight ways to stay connected but still get things done are ahead of the curve.

When gyms closed, Planet Fitness jumped on Facebook and YouTube to start doing a series of home “work-ins” to encourage people to keep up with their health and fitness routines. People can hop on live and work out with trainers or watch the videos later on their own schedule.

Nike is asking everyone to “play inside, play for the world” to encourage people to stay home, but like Planet Fitness, keep up with healthy activity habits. To support that message, they’ve waived fees on their premium content within the Nike Training Club app.

Shift Marketing Budgets to Test New Strategies

In times of financial crisis, marketing teams are among the first to go, but that’s not the case in this situation. Because people are home now more than before, internet usage has been up. Even though customers may not be buying, it’s still a great time to engage with them.

Direct sales companies like Tupperware and Colorstreet are seeing record high sales because the in-home party has been replaced with social media and video conferencing. People are cooking more meals at home, and using nail polish strips as a way to make up for the fact that they can’t go to the nail salon like they used to. Both companies have had to make adjustments to their website hosting structure to accommodate for the increased virtual sales volume.

Star Director, Michelle Barrett of Heart’s Desire Tupperware notes that her sales team has reached record-breaking sales levels compared to the same time period in 2019.

Colorstreet Stylist Angela Kunschmann joined at the beginning of the pandemic. Colorstreet turns 3 years old this month, and sales are higher than ever before. Since COVID from April – June, companywide sales have exploded and have been growing at 200% in sales and 207% in sponsoring, on top of regular growth.

Companies that can offer virtual replacements for the same things once offered face-to-face will still be able to operate. Restaurants have shifted to providing curbside delivery, while services like GrubHub and Instacart offer no-contact delivery options.

Worry Less About Your Company and More About Your Customers

Yes, your company’s revenue matters. If you can’t stay open, it affects all of your employees. That said, by focusing on your customers – providing help and resources selflessly, you can do a great deal to protect your company and keep it above water.

Your customers may be having financial issues, especially if they’re waiting on unemployment benefits and aren’t considered an essential employee. Offering payment options and flexibility with financing options like Affirm or Klarna makes it easier for customers to pay.

Where you can, offer educational training to help others, as many are seeking new ways to earn money. Create as much content as you can that speaks to your audience’s biggest pain points, worries, and concerns.

As the number of cases continues to grow, we can only expect things to get worse before they get better. Personally, all you can do is practice social distancing and limit trips outside the home to only what is necessary. But, in terms of your business and marketing, it’s possible to make adjustments so that you can keep things running as smoothly as possible until the pandemic runs its course.

Categories
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.

Categories
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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Digital Marketing

7 Marketing Ideas to Grow Your Business in 2020

Effective marketing ideas to grow your business include leveraging social media for brand awareness and customer engagement. Creating valuable, SEO-optimized content establishes your expertise and improves online visibility. Email marketing, with personalized messages, nurtures leads. Collaborations with influencers can expand your reach. Offering promotions and loyalty programs encourages repeat business. Utilizing customer feedback for improvement and referral programs can also drive growth and enhance reputation.

Business owners need to know how to promote their businesses in the right way. You may know promoting your business online is necessary in today’s world, but you don’t necessarily understand all of the ways you can do it or the ways that will give you the best results.

No matter which of the methods you choose, the key is putting your customers first in everything you do. Speak to entertain them, inform them, and teach them.

In this article, we share 7 marketing ideas to grow your business.

Revamp Your Website

When it comes to promoting your business online, everything needs to lead back to your website because it is the one piece of the internet you completely control. While social media can help you grow your business, you’ll never have complete control of those spaces and you must have a plan should Facebook decide to put you in Facebook jail or delete your Instagram account.

Investing in your website helps you build long-term equity in your brand. You’ll develop an asset that never stops working for you, and gives your customers a home base.

The key to a successful website is one that is not only aesthetically appealing but is easy for your customers to use and contains content that they find useful. Your website should be treated as a living and breathing organism that must be kept up-to-date and continues to grow.

Invest More in Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of attempting to drive traffic to your website organically through search engines. As Google continues to exert more influence on its own results, SEO is becoming more difficult, but it doesn’t mean you should completely abandon it.

A properly executed organic SEO campaign builds equity in your site which keeps it working for you over the long-term. Organic SEO is better than pay per click ads in many cases. However, because SEO can take months to see results from, it needs to be only a portion of your overall marketing strategy.

Create or Advertise on Podcasts

2019 research indicates that nearly ⅓ of Americans over age 12 listen to a podcast monthly. 41% of Americans say they are listening to podcasts now more than they did last year. And, Americans average 7 podcasts per week during the period of the study.

This tells us that there is a high demand for podcast content which is becoming the new radio. It’s cheaper, easier, and has a much greater reach. If your company has the resources, our regular podcast can be the center of your content marketing strategy. You can build an audience and establish your brand’s authority.

It’s okay if you don’t have the resources to do a good podcast on a regular basis because few do. If you don’t want to start your own podcast, you can find podcasters whose audiences match your target audience. This allows you to leverage the podcast audience and use advertising on those podcasts to promote your business.

You may also consider finding podcasts to be interviewed on, so you can spread the word about your business this way. It may take a bit longer with this approach because you need to build relationships, but guest starring on podcasts is a wonderful way to grow your reach.

Focus on Your Email List

If you don’t already have one, you might not think about emails when you consider promoting your business. When you invest in building your email list you are creating and long-lasting asset for your business.

A HubSpot survey showed that more than half of respondents check their personal email account more than 10 times a day. It is by far their preferred way to receive updates from brands. 59% of those surveyed indicate that marketing emails influence their purchase decisions and more than 59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of return on investment.

If you can get them to trust and value your brand, people will be more than willing to share their email address. Make sure you use smart marketing with compelling and useful content. you need to demonstrate to your audience that you’re worth listening to. Don’t just blast them with annoying emails every day.

Build Your Review Profile

We’ve known for a while now that Google and other search engines use online reviews from customers as a ranking signal. You should be looking for reviews on these platforms for your customers. Reviews serve as a basic kind of social proof to demonstrate quality.

Make sure you’re actively seeking feedback from your customers and using it to improve the products and services you offer. Ask your customers for reviews after your service has been performed or your product has been delivered. Follow up with your customers regularly, if you have long-term customers. and aim to have the best possible customer service at all times.

Why are reviews so important? A 2018 survey revealed 91% of consumers between the ages of 18 and 34 trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. 40% of customers only take into account reviews written within the past two weeks. and 89% of consumers read business’ responses to reviews so it’s crucial that whenever someone leaves the review for you that you respond to it.

Start with making sure you claim your Google My Business profile, as this gives you some control over how your information may display in the search results.

Start a Customer Loyalty Program

A customer loyalty program can be as simple or as complex as you want to make it – but it needs to be easy for people to sign up for, participate in, and redeem rewards for. Whether you use a card that’s scanned every time a purchase is made or another approach, you’ll get data to help you make decisions about your company.

You can use it to see who your most loyal customers are, and send them exclusive deals not available to the rest of your customer base. You can use it to convert more customers into repeat buyers. Your loyalty program can also help you see your most popular products and find other trends you can use to create promotions and other specials to keep your business growing.

Join Professional Associations

Chances are no matter your industry or niche, there is a professional organization available to you. You can use your local Chamber of Commerce or other B2B organization to not only market your business but to build relationships and camaraderie with other members. Membership in professional organizations helps increase your business visibility within your community and provides you with opportunities to network with other businesses in your area.

If you’re ready to kick your marketing up a notch in 2020, let’s talk!

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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

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!

 

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