 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) get almost 24 calls a month from marketing providers looking to sell them advertising or marketing products and services. Competition is fierce, and SMBs often have a difficult time choosing a provider.
Last month, I covered how the trend of fake online content leads to a general distrust of digital and online media. But the local digital marketing industry, especially in the area of SEO, suffers from its own share of issues that lead to a lack of trust by SMBs.
LSA (Local Search Association) conducted a survey to examine what challenges SMBs face when shopping for a digital marketing provider and what areas they feel are most important for marketers to address when trying to gain their business.
Below I discuss the results of the survey, data regarding client churn in the industry and ways in which marketers need to respond....
Are you ready to give content marketing the time, money and resources it deserves?
While your answer may be yes, it’s never easy to get up and running with a new marketing strategy. There are questions to answer, challenges to overcome and various tasks that need addressed.
With 88% of B2B marketers currently using content marketing as part of their overall strategy, neglecting to do so will put you in the minority.
As you get started, you’ll soon find a variety of ways to better research, plan, create and distribute content.
What I’ve created here is a list of content marketing tools that you’ll want by your side as you roll out your first campaign.
These tools cover the most important details you’ll need to address before you get started, as well as in the early days (and weeks) of running your campaign....
Consumers’ top purchase influencers are also their top sources of new product awareness, according to results from a recent Nielsen report [download page].
The study, based on a survey of 30,000 consumers across 60 countries, found that friends and family (56%) and TV ads (52%) are the leading sources of information about new products for consumers. These are also consumers’ top purchase influencers, according to studies by MarketingCharts and by Deloitte....
Maintaining a steady stream of content that's unique and interesting to your target audience is a challenge. But with a big dose of creativity (and a little help from content idea generators), you can create content that's not only valuable to your market, but also stands out from the sea of information.
44 Fantastic Types of Content
There are tons of options out there for content you can create. Forty four content types are outlined below, so look through the list and see which ones would make a perfect fit in your marketing plan....
When digital marketers roll up their sleeves and generate leads, many have found that white papers provide a utility for which potential customers are willing to give up a name and email address. White papers are more substantial pieces of content that allow customers to solve an information problem that represents the solutions your company can offer.
Do marketers still use white papers?
A 2014 study conducted by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs showed that 64% of marketers use white papers. Among those are marketers tasked with conveying more in-depth, complicated information to potential buyers. Those marketers recognize the impact that white papers can have on a consumer’s buying decision. When used effectively, white papers can serve as and anchor to a longer content marketing campaign. Here’s how...
Someone once said, “The best advice is this: Don’t take advice and don’t give advice.”
While that statement isn’t true for the most part, there are a few times in a marketer’s career in which it might be best to just ignore the advice.
As all of the 2015 predictions and advice blog posts came rolling in, we thought it would be fun to ask just the opposite. So we reached out to some marketers and asked, “what is the worst marketing advice you have received or witnessed?”
We think you’ll find a whole lot of “what not to do” in what follows....
For the past year, American Express has experimented with turning over its social accounts to influencers for short bursts of time to pick up followers and buzz. And it appears to be working—at least based on some results from a recent two-week Instagram campaign.
On Nov. 9, AmEx gave six Instagrammers the keys to its account as part of the #MyAmex campaign. The posts were created by graphic designer Ann Kim, chef Christina Tosi, Patrick Janelle (who won the CFDA's first-ever Fashion Instagrammer of the Year award this year), fashion designers Oleema and Kalani Miller, Team Epiphany managing partner Coltrane Curtis and designer Timo Weiland.
The group posted a series of pictures (see examples) depicting how AmEx impacts their businesses.According to AmEx, the #MyAmex posts generated 23 percent more engagement than the brand's other Instagram pictures. AmEx also doubled its average number of daily Instagram followers for two weeks. In total, the campaign generated more than 10 million impressions and 40,000 engagements....
Social media is still a young platform when it comes to customer service. Both customers and companies are in the “figuring out” stage, where both parties are trying to understand how best to communicate with each other.
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that social media platforms have their own “rules of conduct” and “language”. Learning social media etiquette is an extremely important aspect of customer service on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Equally as important is learning how to best manage your communications over various social media platforms.
With the right mixture of tools and a willingness to keep a tab on all conversations with customers, you can ensure that maneuvering your way around various social media channels and communicating with customers is as effective and efficient as possible.
So how do you create a good content marketing strategy? Today we are going to go through and show you how we create a good content marketing strategy that will be the basis of a long lasting website. We will not go into any gray hat or black hat techniques since I personally believe most of those don’t work with content marketing, and are a waste of time to try.
Sometimes it’s easier to just follow the dotted line as you’re looking to ensure your digital marketing is balanced and complete. This infographic compliments of Two Legit aims to do just that, walking you through your web presence, mobile, ecommerce, outbound, inbound, content and social media marketing initiatives.+ One element lost in this infographic is the ability for all of the strategies to work with one another. For instance, utilizing your content marketing to power newsletters that are optimized for mobile devices. That’s not defined in this infographic but it’s an absolute necessity if you’d like to fully leverage email and ensure your emails are read properly. I’ve written before that the modern digital media consultant is more of a conductor, balancing the volumes of each strategy to make some sweet, sweet music!+ More often than not, we find that the key to marketing well isn’t doing everything… it’s balancing a combination of strategies, amplifying the impact by having them work together, and understanding how much of each strategy to initiate in order to maximize results. That said – this is still a great checklist to go down and ensure you’re not missing anything! This infographic also provides some statistics behind the digital marketing trends.
Social media is not delivering the desired result for the majority of enterprises worldwide, according to a global trend report published by Tata Consultancy Services. Very few (10 percent) enterprises have actually benefited from investments in social media.
Consumers do use social media to interact with companies but findings of the report indicate that only 27 percent of research and development/product development and 37 percent of product management departments read social media comments from consumers on a regular basis. Eighty-one percent of those who are benefiting from social media go beyond just having company pages on social networks and have corporate blogs....
An interactive media feature showing Hewlett-Packard's new shipping corridor along the route of the ancient Silk Road.
Via Marie-Sophie
While a wide variety of professionals will define content marketing in different ways, no one who actually gets it would deny the central idea is to provide valuable insights and answers.
While a wide variety of professionals will define content marketing in different ways, no one who actually gets it would deny the central idea is to provide valuable insights and answers. Therefore when the conversation becomes about finding powerful content ideas and the drill-down process begins, more often than not, you’ll hear: • Identify your customers’ pain pointsand/or… • Answer the questions potential customers have.
You’ll get no argument from me. This is indeed the formula for success. How do you discover what questions to answer?...
|
According to AmeriCommerce, Facebook accounts for 60% of all social traffic driven to retail sites; however people don't really log on to Facebook to make purchases. People go on Facebook to connect with others, so the real trick is figuring out how to connect those people with your content, and consequently your products.
Did you know that you can sell your e-commerce products directly on Facebook? The world's largest social media network offers a simple and effective platform for online sales. And with its massive user base of 1.7 billion monthly users, it's incredibly effective.
To get started, you'll first need to create your Facebook Page. Unlike personal profiles, Pages are intended specifically for commercial purposes, with the ability for users to “like” them. To create a Facebook Page, simply visit https://www.facebook.com/pages/create/ and follow the on-screen instructions.
After setting up your Facebook Page, you can sell your e-commerce products by using a compatible app. There are more than a dozen different e-commerce store apps for Facebook that are designed for this purpose. Once installed, they'll automatically pull product listings from your e-commerce site, posting them directly on your Facebook Page. This means you'll only need to update your website anytime a product is added, removed or otherwise changed, as the app automatically mirrors what happens on your site....
In this volume of our biannual trend publication, we explore the theme of Evolution. Agencies, consultancies, brands and other industry thought leaders largely agree that 2016 is shaping up to be an evolve- or-die year. Or, to put a positive spin on it, we might say it’s a year to thrive through intelligent adaptation. While some agencies are going the way of the dinosaur, a forward-thinking cross-section of shops are reporting increased revenues and profits by partnering with clients in new and innovative ways, by bringing their own IP to market and more. Other industry players need to evolve as major shifts in the way consumers use technology, consume media and engage with the world around them are forcing massive changes. Throughout the 2016 editions of The SoDA Report, we’ll explore top trends and behaviors that leading practitioners in our industry won’t be able to ignore as the year unfolds, and we’ll cast a spotlight on brands, agencies and individuals who are flourishing in this environment. Within Modern Marketer, Industry Insider and via our Digital Outlook Study (conducted in partnership with Forrester Research for the first time), we’ll also explore how the landscape of creativity and the modus operandi for agency-client relationships are shifting in radical ways. Spurred by rapidly changing consumer expectations and behaviors, agency-client partnerships are expanding in incredibly exciting ways beyond the marketing realm to include business strategy, R&D, product development and customer service. We are so proud of the growth and development of The SoDA Report over the past year.
Short consumer attention spans.
For modern digital marketers, it’s one of the biggest struggles to optimizing consumer engagement despite having more channels than ever before. In fact, the average consumer attention span has decreased over the last decade to just 8 seconds (!), but I’m sure we all know people will shorter attention spans too!...
...more often than not, we don’t write content with the reader in mind. For the professional writer you hire, it could just be a means to an end, i.e., a paycheck. When that’s the case, the core content marketing mantras, things like “this piece of content should address a problem or help the reader out,” seem to fly out the proverbial window.
Articles are mostly used as filler and that’s the reason the ROI of content marketing is often much less than expected.
Want a solid ROI for your content marketing efforts and ultimately be able to use your content to improve your conversion rates?
In this article, I will be talking about what needs to change for that to happen and how to effect those changes....
As CMI research shows, marketers with a documented content marketing strategy are more effective than those who don’t have a written strategy. Yet, only 27% of B2C and 48% of B2B marketers have developed a plan.
If you lack a written strategy, a one-page plan is a great place to begin. If you have a detailed strategy but struggle to gain traction, boiling it down to one page will make it easier. A one-page strategy can help you:
- Crystalize your content marketing strategy
- Gain stronger buy-in more quickly from executives or clients
- Keep content producers strategically aligned...
If you're a sales or marketing leader, you've probably already wrapped up strategy planning for 2015. (Or you might still be in the thick of it if time hasn't been on your side. No judgment -- I've been there.) But a new infographic from Implisit which reveals the most and least effective channels for customer conversion might prompt you to crack the newly approved plans open once more and make a few revisions.
For instance, if you intend on finding customers through events and purchased lead lists in the new year, you might want to think again, as these channels had the lowest lead to conversion rate of 14 options. On the opposite end of the spectrum were Facebook and Twitter, company website, and referrals, the last of which blew all other channels out of the water with 3.63% of leads converting to customers. These same avenues were also far more likely to result in closed-won vs. closed-lost deals....
How close is Instagram to Facebook when it comes to brand activity? Probably closer than you think.
Social media shop Shareablee pulled the following numbers, which illustrate that marketers—while most of them cannot run ads yet on Instagram—are highly active on the social-mobile phone app.
The intriguing stats below are for United States brand pages during the second quarter. Keep in mind that Facebook went live in 2004, and Instagram hasn't been around for four years yet.
Facebook garnered 2.5 million brand posts, a year-over-growth of 22 percent.
- Instagram had 493,000 of such posts, a 49 percent year-over-year jump.
- Facebook accrued 6 billion actions (likes, comments or shares).
- Instagram totaled 3.4 billion actions (likes, comments).
- Facebook had 2,396 actions per post.
- Instagram racked up 6,932 actions per post....
According to a study by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs only 38% of B2B companies think their content marketing is effective. The same study also states that only 35% of the companies have a documented content marketing strategy.
My guess is that some of these companies do not even know whether they are effective or not. They cannot say what “effective” really is in regard to content marketing without goals, metrics etc. It would certainly help with effectiveness of content marketing to have a strategy at hand.
Here are 9 essential elements any content marketing strategy should include....
I predict that many CMOs will diminish their support for social media, content and earned media marketing in the next year or two, and when they do, careers will be adversely impacted. If your career relies on Marketing Department support for content or social media marketing, now is the time to take stock of the trends and consider some actions to protect your career.
It is possible that you work for the right sort of company for which social media is well aligned for Marketing Department expectations---that's the "Unless" part of the title--but, as you will see, I believe this is the exception and not the rule....
Technology has changed business, but few have leveraged this opportunity. Mitch Joel explains marketing tech trends and shows how to leverage them.
You know technology has changed business, but has your company actually adapted to the opportunities?Mitch Joel, author of “CTRL ALT Delete,” recently showed us how to leverage tech to be better marketers, in his Vocus webinar.
Mitch Joel - Marketing Tech TrendsMissed Mitch’s presentation? Register for the on-demand version here!
Here are our three key takeaways, and some brands already doing them...
Digital marketing offers greater opportunities for businesses over the next year than more traditional channels, according to a new report.
When asked to identify which three marketing channels offer the greatest opportunities, half of brands (50%) mentioned social media followed by email (43%) and websites (35%).In fact the top 10 most cited channels are all online, with the most popular offline channel being direct mail at 8%....
When Google announced it was making its popular Google Reader service redundant this summer, it left millions in need of a new way to read and subscribe to their favourite web content. Step forward Flipboard, a digital social magazine that has quickly become an App Store favourite. Now in its second iteration, Flipboard has been boosted by a new personalised magazine creation tool that enables users to create their own custom magazine based on whatever they fancy.
Since its launch, the second version of Flipboard has amassed a further three million users to the service, and has already seen over 500,000 personalised magazines published....
|
![New Data Exposes the Best and Worst Customer Conversion Channels [Infographic] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/y0ctjvxSaoq001P926bM5Tl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
SearchEngineLand shares tips on how to break through with your marketing to reach small to midsized businesses.