Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

How do you create strong, meaningful, powerful content that sells, converts and engages your customers? The secret lies in creating a fool-proof content strategy that works for each and every website right from a small business to a large corporate site. In creating a content strategy for your website, essential tasks such as keyword research, content gap analysis, site maps and content audits take a back-seat to the creation of a content map, a simple diagram that places key pieces of info at your finger tips.

A content map is an invaluable tool that assists content strategists and it’s elements are the building blocks for your entire website right from content to design to development and marketing. I like to use the content map that Joe Pulizzi and Christina Halverson used on slide 42 of their slideshare presentation – Web Content Strategy – How to Plan for, Create and Publish Online Content for Maximum ROI....

Ikea USA serves as a blueprint for social media content creation. There are some great ideas to steal from Ikea USA’s editorial calendar.

If I were to reveal a hidden talent of mine, I’d say I’m good at assembling Ikea furniture. As most Swedes, I’ve grown up with flat packages and family quarrels around mounting manuals. I’m practically born with a hexagon key in my hand. Therefore, as a devoted brand advocate, I wanted to check out Ikea’s social media strategy; curious to know if it is as innovative as their products. Ikea Sweden is not on Twitter while Ikea USA tweets according to a clear content strategy....

With social selling, you’re no longer simply pushing information about products and services out to your audience. Instead, you’re discovering what they’re passionate about, which can lead naturally—organically—into a discussion of how you can solve a problem or improve their lives, and why your company is the right choice to help them,” Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara said recently, as I was researching technologies that enable this kind of social approach.

Building a socialized selling strategy involves completing the following three basic stages: Research: This stage is all about identifying your ideal customer – also called your Buyer Persona – then finding out what their fears are when buying your product: Content: This stage is all about creating content that speaks to the buyer persona you identified in the first step. Distribution: This stage is about getting the word out about your content, then using the results to refine future content.