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With the caveat in the section above–that we’re often doing a little of both–and some informal polling of many esteemed marketers I know, here is where I’ve landed on social marketing vs. content marketing. Social marketing is a channel where we find potential customers by listening to earned conversations and analyzing our owned accounts. We then interact with those people to move them through the customer journey. You can use various tactics to make that movement happen. Content marketing is a tactic. It’s a method of marketing that allows companies to add value for potential customers by creating and distributing (sometimes through social) collateral like blog posts, videos, and web pages. These pieces of collateral entertain and educate your target audience about topics related to your product. They’re intended to generate interest in your offering by reinforcing relevant problems, challenges, misconceptions, and, finally, solutions....
Now that we're well into 2017, are you checking items off your marketing to-do list? Or, like many of us procrastinators, do you have a to-do list that consists of just one item: "Make 2017 marketing to-do list"? If the latter is the case, IBM has you covered. The software company has put together an infographic guide to help marketers prioritize their efforts this year, and it also explains the benefits that each idea can have on your program. For example, stories are up to 22 times more memorable than facts or figures alone, the infographic claims, and it gives tips on how to captivate your audience with better stories this year....
Perhaps most reflective of this has been the award-winning juggernaut of REI's #OptOutside campaign, which won the Titanium Grand Prix on Saturday. If for some reason you weren't one of its 6.7 billion media impressions, essentially the company closed its doors on Black Friday, encouraging its employees and everyone else to get out into the outdoors. Beyond the ad, starring REI chief exec Jerry Stritzke introducing the idea from a wide-open office, the brand also created a helpful online guide to hiking trails and other outdoor activities around the U.S.
By encouraging us to drop out of the annual shopping day, the outdoor retailer aims for more sales and brand loyalty. The company said the brand's social media impressions went up 7,000%, with 2.7 billion media impressions in 24 hours, while overall the campaign attracted 6.7 billion media impressions, 1.2 billion social impressions, and got more than 1.4 million people to spend the day outdoors. Meanwhile, more than 150 other companies joined REI to close their doors on Black Friday, and hundreds of state parks opened up for free.
If Cannes is the ad and marketing industry's Oscars, than this is arguably Best Picture. The Titanium category is meant to honor work that breaks new ground, crosses boundaries, and pushes the industry forward. The win adds to the campaign's Media and Promotions Grand Prix, picked up earlier in the week, and its run of wins at other industry awards like the D&ADs, and Best of Show at the One Show awards in May....
“How can we get more visitors to our website?”… You’re certainly not alone, as increasing traffic is often the number one problem faced by marketers today. The bad news? Saying “get more traffic” is easier said than done. You could write guest posts (Leo wrote 150 articles in 9 months when Buffer first launched), optimize for SEO traffic, or drive visitors through social media. The options are endless. This article focuses on the latter, though. In this post, I’ll share the seven most powerful lessons we learned at Hubspot from running social media experiments to increase our social media referral traffic by 241%....
Campaign Monitor, a simple email marketing solution for businesses and professionals, has taken this bottom-up approach to building a social strategy. And we’re honored to share how they’ve done it.
Campaign Monitor is a fast-growing, industry-leading company with some really incredible ideas on growth and strategy. Their marketing team, which has grown to five times the size in just over eight months, has the awesome privilege of sharing the email marketing message with others via a big number of different channels, social media included, and has just undergone this very exercise of hitting the drawing board and coming up with a rockin’ new plan.
Here’s a bit more about how Campaign Monitor redefining their social media strategy in light of their new ambitions, and how social management tools like Buffer fit into their daily workflow....
This round-up of pro social media hacks comes from fourteen hard-hitting social media pros.
Use these 15 helpful and actionable social optimization tricks to boost your engagement, productivity, revenue, and following....
Nine months ago, I analyzed a report that would transform not only my role on the HubSpot blogging team, but also the whole blog's editorial strategy. The results have been nothing short of eye-opening. And I'm not just talking about the findings from the report -- I'm also talking about the business results we've generated from the shift we made in our blogging strategy because of those findings.
That shift is an ongoing internal project we call "historical optimization." The goal? Update old blog content and generate more traffic and leads from it in the process.
Great for us, right? Hang on -- it's great for you, too. I'm writing about all this because any experienced blogger who's tasked with growing and scaling the results they generate from their blog needs to know about it. The thing is, no one is really talking about it ... yet....
Q: Can social networks really drive ecommerce and retail sales? How has ADT used social networks to drive sales? What has worked and what hasn’t worked?
A: We leverage a presence on social networks in a few different ways. First are our active profiles on Facebook and Twitter, which are positioned as communication and retention channels. Second is an ongoing campaign where we invest in ads on Facebook's displaying against target profiles such as home and business owners. The third is leveraging social networks as a retargeting platform to reengage users we’ve touched across the buying journey. This has been the most effective method for acquisition, due to the relevancy of the in-market audience’s interaction with other media touchpoints....
If you don’t use content marketing, there is a big chance your brand gets left behind, and it’s your competitors (who’re using content marketing) that run away with your customers.
You can’t afford to let that happen.
You must learn to not just survive but thrive in a landscape that is constantly changing. While there is no easy way of doing this and it is imperative you do the hard yards, there are a few not-so-clandestine secrets that can make your job a little easier.
Let’s unravel them....
According to the “Customer Experience Optimization Report” by Econsultancy and Ensighten, 96% of company marketers and agency respondents (including vendors and consultancies) consider customer experience optimization somewhat important or critical.
Marketers who take pride in their customers' experiences can leave a major (paw) print on their organizations. In fact, 94% of marketers and 79% of agency respondents say that higher engagement and conversion rates are among the many benefits of customer experience optimization. Better brand perception and loyalty (66%, 47%); renewal, cross-sell, and upsell (50%, 41%), and increased average order value (22%, 29%) are also benefits for marketers and agency professionals, respectively....
I will get straight to the point since I have so much to share.Long story short:Some weird things have happened since the morning of September 12, 2014, the day 1,009,964 people viewed the story of my life.
It was my second article to get big traffic, and since then my life has become a bit intense at the crossroads of freelancing, startup-ing, and blogging.
Here is the thing I want to share with everyone in this post:I am starting to come up with a set of tactics that have been working repeatedly for getting huge traffic and visitors, and turning them into subscribers or followers across all networks.
My findings come from online marketing, managing social media and growth for the businesses of friends and clients, and my own work....
How often should you post to your social media accounts?
For many marketers, this question is tough. Here’s why: Social media is a very flexible and fluid part of your marketing strategy. It’s not easy to draw the line between how much you could be posting and how much you should be posting.
That’s why we created the 2015 Social Media Benchmarks Report. Marketers need actionable, tailored insight to improve their social strategy, and that’s not easy to come by. There’s millions of helpful social media statistics out there, but the most helpful ones are industry-specific.
So if you want to see how your social media strategy stacks up against other companies in your space, check out our industry-specific social media analysis below. You can also click the links below to jump to individual verticals...
Believe it or not, startup marketing isn’t always about quantitative metrics and growth hacking. It’s about making a connection with your customer and driving their actions through emotion.
Psychologists say there are at least eight basic emotions that guide behavior. They include everything from joy, trust, fear and surprise to sadness, anger, anticipation and trust. These emotions can over time help establish a connection to a brand that goes beyond normal engagement.
The key is determining what emotions to target and how best to get them that will yield the best results. Research suggests that intrigue and mystery can lead to curiosity and perhaps better click-through rates in emails. Desire can help with imagery on websites and urgency or fear can evoke feelings of missing out and perhaps trigger a purchase....
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If there is one entrepreneur who knows the real value of building social relationships, and how they can extend into the world of social media, it’s health and fitness mogul Andy Frisella: founder of Supplement Superstores, Paradise Distribution, and the renowned fitness brand 1st Phorm International. These brands, among others, bring in more than $100 million a year.
How?
He has built a true community....
In a platform world, publishers face tough decisions on where to place their resources. In August, The Economist faced this head on and axed its ailing Pinterest and Tumblr accounts while ramping up its commitment to LinkedIn.
The publisher had been experimenting on Pinterest for the past six months. But even with a social media team that had grown from two to 10 people, The Economist couldn’t make it click. “From day one, it was a struggle,” said Denise Law, community editor at The Economist. “We found it difficult to articulate what our raison d’être for Pinterest was. It’s not the place to share serious content; it’s more where people go to share ideas.”
For Pinterest, The Economist was posting pieces from 1843, its culture and lifestyle magazine, then called Intelligent Life. Articles from travel blog Gulliver’s Travels were also going there, as well as pieces from its archives and links to items from The Economist Store. But it was gaining no traction. When it cut the account, it had 5,000 followers. “Not enough to move the needle,” said Law, adding that its Tumblr account shared the same fate. Earlier this year, The Economist also culled a number of its Twitter accounts.here's
The Economist’s approach to social media is, according to the publisher, to promote quality over quantity. It’s taken that mission to LinkedIn, which it uses for brand awareness rather than to drive traffic. By tweaking its approach to publish a broader spectrum of content, The Economist saw its LinkedIn follower count grow from half a million last year to 2.4 million, and it continues to grow at a rate of 25,000 followers a week, according to Law....
Not planning for your social media campaign can be a disaster for your business.
A social media campaign can deliver great results. It can also deliver really poor results and waste your money. What causes them to fail?
Not using cat videos… ha ha…
Ignoring cat videos, what really causes them to fail?
Planning....
As social media becomes less shiny, many of our clients are realizing that social media success relies on having a content marketing plan.
While we’ve been hired to come in and “do” social media, our constant gentle push about sharing stories through original content (read: the RIGHT content for our customers) is finally being felt.
Our biggest client came to us this month ready to tackle the reason social media exists in the first place: storytelling. More specifically, telling their story in such a way that the consumer aligns with, trusts, and recognizes the brand.
While putting together their agenda, I thought it may be helpful to share so everyone can get clear on their content marketing plan or agenda for 2016....
Brand messages are validated with each and every person who reads or interacts with them.
A PR professional must not only create successful content and campaigns for clients but also expand his or her personal brand through building influence among fans, followers, clients and other PR professionals.
Doing so requires just as much effort as securing your client’s news in print. Several tools and resources can make it easier to show off your communications expertise.
Here are five ways you can show off—and build—your influence online:...
It’s fantastic that interest in social media is so high, but I’m alarmed at the number of brands and agencies that are ready to jump into social media to take “advantage” of audience concentration in Facebook, Twitter, and other fast-growth outposts. What’s lacking in most social media programs is an actual strategy.1 If you don’t know precisely why you’re in social media, with whom you want to engage, and how you’re going to measure success, you’re not ready to start.
I use a 7-step Social Media Strategy Worksheet to create a framework that governs what the initiative aims to accomplish.
There’s an assumption that traffic will just naturally convert to leads, but that isn’t always the case.
And what if you don’t have traffic, but want to generate leads for your business today?
In that case, you have to pursue other avenues.
I’m going to be covering 13 different ways to generate leads for your business, many of which are free, simple, and can be started now....
Brief-writing is the unsung art of content marketing. Get it right and you dramatically increase your chances of hitting a home run. Get it wrong and you’re more likely to win the lottery (it’s possible but don’t hold your breath).
And since most marketers aren’t the ones actually writing or designing or producing the content in their editorial calendars, the brief is the most important place to exert leverage and make an impact on the final product. It all starts here.
So what goes into a great content brief? The usual stuff plus six critical extras you don’t see in many briefs....
Ten years ago, AdAge published a survey of young adults which asked them what sources of information they trusted most to inform a purchase decision: nearly seven of ten identified word-of-mouth as the most influential tactic to them. This is when 2 percent of all adults used social media on any given day.
In 2015, social networks have demonstrably changed the word-of-mouth distribution model. Forty-seven percent of all U.S. adults use Facebook daily, 25 times the number of total daily social media users a decade earlier. While Jonah Berger’s research in Contagious: Why Things Catch On indicates that face-to-face word-of-mouth is more effective than social media word-of-mouth, social media is not an insignificant contributor to word-of-mouth “buzz.”
What I want to do in this piece is highlight nine diverse word-of-mouth campaigns....
Consider this: Each month, U.S. consumers are engaging with media across a spectrum of devices. In Q4 2014, traditional TV reached an average of 285 million viewers each month with more than 181 million of these consumers watching time-shifted TV. In terms of mobile and computer users, 122 million viewers watched video on a smartphone, 146 million watched video on the Internet and 164 million people used an app/web on a smartphone. Radio is also a vibrant means of engaging with content, reaching 258 million listeners per month.
While the average American adult spent nearly a week (149 hours 14 minutes) on average watching traditional television each month in fourth-quarter 2014, other ways to connect with content were desirable as well. In that same quarter, U.S. adults spent well over 15 hours each month watching time-shifted content, close to 30 hours using the Internet on a computer, and over 43 hours using any app/web on a smartphone!
In addition, consumer’s monthly time spent listening to radio was also a resounding 58 hours and 36 minutes.Consumers are also spending a lot of time on social media: 133 million are connecting via computer, 142 million are using social media on an app or smartphone, and 124 million are using social media on the web on a smartphone....
In summary, the article argues that social media does not contribute to sales in a measurable way and, therefore, is a hype-ridden waste of time.
Unfortunately, by defining the value of social media purely in terms of sales, the author ignores the value of social media in building relationships with customers, offering responsive technical support, and engaging efforts to establish a sustainable base of consumer advocates.
As an academic, the author has impeccable and impressive credentials. However, this is one of those times we must ask people working in the field for their comment. Therefore, I invited top several marketing and analyst practitioners to share their thoughts...
B2B marketers also need an artistic side to go with their scientific roles in attracting potential buyers.
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What's the difference between content marketing and social marketing? Is it that content marketing focuses on content production and creative thought, while social media marketing handles distribution? Depends!