Tag: content strategy

Categories
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.

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

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
Social Media

Creating Personalized Content for Social Media Marketing

Advertising to the prospect or consumer on social media is a growing craft—and an increasing area of competition. Consumers prefer content tailored to them, making them 40% more likely to make a positive buying decision after seeing that content. With so much riding on catching the audience’s attention on social media, creating personalized content for social media marketing has become a major area of focus for many marketers, particularly in the ecommerce sphere.

What is Personalized Content for Social Media Marketing?

Personalized content is a means for building interest, engagement, and trust in a brand via personalization on social media channels. That is, to the prospect or customer, personalized content is not only targeted, but feels bespoke and valuable. It creates familiarity, reflects the desires of the viewer, doesn’t at all annoy the consumer, and establishes a personalized ad delivery experience.

Above all, personalized marketing is centered around real, relevant data collected via survey, buyer persona creation, or real-time analysis.

Why Invest in Personalized Content?

The statistics have it: customers want brands who know them by name and deliver specific recommendations based on past purchases and cart items. A majority (63%) of customers don’t like generic ad content. To get the consumer’s attention, providing personalized experiences, particularly in a way relevant or not disruptive to their social media experience, has become key to sales conversion.

They’ll Trust the Brand—Even if They Don’t Trust the Platform

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other revelations about who controls, posts, and sways public opinion using persuasive content and data on platforms like Facebook, a post-2016 election American audience remains dubious and skeptical about content posted to their social media platforms. It’s understandable that they wouldn’t trust the platform—which means your brand trust needs to supersede their trust of social media platforms.

After all, they won’t trust the platform, but they still understand that it’s a primary advertising space for brands like yours.

Organic Search is in Decline

Organic traffic—that is, the search results-oriented website hits that come directly from Google and other search engines—is the holy grail of content marketing, proving content to be worth the investment for many brands. However, your organic searches may decline due to multiple factors, including minor adjustments in Google’s algorithm.

Your organic search strategy may be top notch, but inbound traffic should never be about organic search alone. Investing in personalized social engagement is like a back up plan for your business. Think of it as operating with insurance for your content and product pages.

User Control and Agency

In a world where many internet users feel a lack of control or certainty over their lives, they want agency over their experiences. From “dark mode” to social media polling and selection choices, every opportunity for the audience to personalize their experience on social media is potentially a win for your brand.

Using social media, how can you provide users with a sense of control over their experience?

Examples of Personalized Content

Some of the internet’s most popular services rely heavily on serving personalized content. They include:

  • Netflix: This streaming service serves up recommendations for you based on what you like. They hope you’ll retain your subscription and continue to use the service as a result.
  • Etsy: This boutique forum for independent craftspeople, artisans, and antique dealers does a fine job of suggesting further items for purchase or perusal based on what you’ve viewed. Considering the unique nature of each item, their categorization and word-matching process is top notch.
  • Amazon: The internet’s retail giant got that way for a number of reasons, including personalized content recommendations. Add plugins like Honey or Wikibuy to ensure you get the best bet, and the price-matching is basically built in.
  • Spotify: Like music and want to discover more? Spotify offers a gentle push in the direction of music discovery with their platform. You can listen to an artist radio, for example, “The Beatles Radio,” which will play the artist in addition to similar sounding music.

What makes all of this social, though, are the websites’ abilities to share. With a click of the button, browsers can share to friends, family, and followers via email or social media.

This can result in further ad retargeting—that is, when someone shares a piece of content without buying it, they’re later served an ad for the same product (or similar ones) from the retailer and competitors. That’s pretty powerful advertising—not to mention extremely personalized.

How to Create Personalized Content for Social Media Marketing

Creating personalized content for social media marketing should involve as much data as you have about your existing consumer. If you’re not sure where to begin, try this short exercise to personalize a social media message for your audience:

  • Gather your data: Gather all the available data on your consumers. This includes anything from real-time data to existing information about your customers. Examine how you can leverage this data to personalize content.
  • Define your buyer persona: Who is your average customer? Create and consider your buyer persona when creating personalized content for social media marketing.
  • Choose the ideal platforms: Personalizing the experience is all about making sure you’re finding your customers where they live—that is, on their preferred social media platforms. Before you can target ads, you need to find out where they go. Aside from analyzing existing data, you can use buyer persona and demographics information to determine where your ideal customer spends their time.
  • Determine audience segments: Further segment your targeted audience with ads and organic social media content based on recent searches and interests. This is especially important for ecommerce marketers.
  • Move the user to email marketing: A sale isn’t the only conversion that matters: think about that email marketing list. You can create an extremely customized experience when you make a user feel like they have one on social. Asking for their name and preferences at email list sign up allows you to personalize and distribute extremely relevant messages to the consumer on an ongoing basis—an experience that can loop back to social media content, engagement, and ads.
  • Use Facebook and Instagram Stories: Forget text-heavy advertising. Users gravitate towards ephemeral content, like that which appears on Facebook and Instagram stories. The platforms also seem to be pushing “stories” content, meaning your personalized efforts are more likely to become part of the user’s daily experience on these platforms, even if the individual messages themselves are rather fleeting. Effective stories tend to be low in text, and high in graphic and video-rich content.

Get Personal with Messaging Apps

Chatbots and messaging apps have also increased in popularity due to their level of personalization, engagement, and conversion. Automated messaging apps, or even regular Facebook page messages set to answer with a pleasant greeting, allow your brand to answer your customer 24/7, even if it’s just acting like a modern day answering machine service.

Messaging apps can set personalized expectations by addressing customer concerns and providing a time frame for response.

Since 79% of companies surpassing their revenue goals had personalized content plans in play, if you’re not already personalizing your social media content, it’s time to consider it. Ultimately, you may not need a bunch of fancy tools and metrics to begin personalizing a social media experience today—a solid, personalized reply can make all the difference to a concerned or grateful users on social media. If you’re not sure where to start, begin with that kind of engagement and grow.

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

7 Emergency Measures to Resuscitate a Dead Content Strategy

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

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

Why Your Content Strategy is Failing

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

So why might your strategy be failing?

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

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

Repairing Your Content Strategy

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

Ready to get started? Let’s jump in.

Reassess Your Audience

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

Find Your Audience

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

When Do They Consume Content?

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

Readdress Your Keyword Research

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

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

Develop a Strong, Consistent Workflow

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

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

Map Out Your Content Strategy

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

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

Explore Content Types

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

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

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

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

Step Up Your Frequency

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

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

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

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

Categories
Content Marketing

What is an On-Demand Content Strategy?

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

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

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

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

Why is On-Demand Content So Important?

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

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

How to Create a Compelling On-Demand Experience

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

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

Developing Your On-Demand Promotional Strategy

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

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

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

Running Successful Webinars

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Exit mobile version
Skip to content