Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
The first step to getting a leg up on the competition is to have a solid, smart content marketing plan in place. If you're having trouble planning for the upcoming year or need some fresh ideas to include in your plan, read on. In this post, we'll dive into why your business needs a content marketing plan and the exact steps you will need to take to create one....
All over the world, brands are united by the same goal: to generate unique content that their customers can relate to, and thus, help them earn better business outcomes. They spend infinite time, money and resources on this objective, and develop complex buyer personas to help them achieve optimal results.
However, intangible questions remain, including what are the basic pillars of content marketing? How do brands create compelling content that can be used to attract customers and ultimately boost sales? What is the secret to a truly successful content marketing strategy?
These questions may be intangible but they are still ones that every content marketer today should ask and strive to find answers to.
Strap yourself in to learn my 12 simple rules for successful content marketing.
The world of visual content can be tough to navigate, with some content cleverly disguised as entertainment. If you’re just getting started with visual content, or looking to optimize your visual content we’ve broken it down into three key categories:
Static: Static content represents stationary images that don’t change based on the reader’s actions. This includes images, infographics, and slideshows.
Interactive: Interactive content, like apps, assessments, calculators, and quizzes, requires your audience’s active engagement and displays content that responds to their actions.
Live Motion: Video content, which includes (as the name implies) videos and webinars, is broadcasted through live video or recorded and then distributed on-demand.
Ready to take a journey through the delectable world of content visualization? Check out our infographic, Content Land: Find the Best Type of Visual for Your Objectives and Content, and find out which method may work best to captivate your audience.
You already know that having and documenting your strategy is important because you’ve probably read the same reports and case studies that my team and I have read. But there’s a pretty big difference between knowing you should do something and knowing how to do it -- which might explain why 89 percent of B2B marketers use content, yet only 37 percent have documented strategies. The marketing team at Influence & Co. spent the last couple months of 2016 carefully researching, planning, and creating a content marketing strategy for this year. What follows is an exploration of exactly which elements our team determined a successful plan must include to drive results, empowering you to create your own documented content strategy....
Let’s further evolve your view of social media as follows: When you view social media as another channel to help you achieve the same business objectives you have for your content marketing, you begin to discover the massive potential it has for your business. On the other hand, because social media represents the convergence of information and communication, businesses need content in order to engage in social media. In other words, as I am fond of saying, “Content is the currency of social media,” but knowing on what social networks you will publish which content for whom is sometimes an afterthought for content marketers. With this in mind, every content marketer needs to create a unique content marketing strategy for social media. Here’s how. Note: There are a handful of other very important steps that should also be included in your content marketing strategy. Those listed below are those that are specifically related to the “social” aspect of the strategy. For a broader list, please see my post on content marketing strategy best practices. The key steps your content marketing strategy for social media should include...
Being in charge of content marketing can feel like you’re trying to simultaneously conduct an orchestra, host a wedding and put on a broadway show. A documented content strategy is vital to keeping it all together according to the 2015 CMI/MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Benchmark report, which shows marketers with a documented strategy are much more effective than those who do not document their strategy. Enter Curata’s Content Marketing Pyramid™, a strategic framework that enables the execution of a content campaign, assuring optimal content consumption, reuse and reach. This hands-on guide teaches you what the Content Marketing Pyramid is, why it works, and how you can implement it within your organization....
Two years ago, well-known blogger Mark Schaefer coined the term “content shock” to describe an inevitable reality in the digital marketing world: too much content and not enough time to consume all of it.
Using simple economic terms, he argued that the “supply” of web content is doubling every nine to 24 months, while “demand”—which is Internet users’ ability to consume content—is finite. Even if mobile devices have allowed us to increase media usage to 12 hours and nine minutes per day, there’s only so much texting and tweeting we can do during the wee hours of the night. Content creators have known for a while now that a big problem has been looming on the horizon. But much like climate change deniers, some were hoping the uncomfortable truth would go away and that, somehow, the possibilities of content creation would be limitless.
They were wrong....
THINK Marketing can be likened to The Huffington Post meets Amazon – or the brand newsroom meets Watson-powered customized content, according to Lord. (He was formerly president of AOL, which owns the HuffPo.) On the newsroom side, THINK Marketing publishes a high volume of industry-leading content on a daily basis. Though IBM isn’t necessarily known for brand publishing – or being a marketing thought leader, for that matter – the company was actually spending a lot of money developing content before THINK Marketing was conceived. “What THINK Marketing has done is focus everyone’s energy to get the content into one repository,” says Lord. “It’s a repurposing of all the publishing we’ve been doing, to-date.”...
When it comes to writing for social media, the toughest part is creating content that’s engaging enough to make people want to click, read and share. All of the components have got to be there – a great headline, quality content and valuable information that readers will want to pass along to others. Give your blog a boost with the help of some of these essential tools. They’ll increase the effectiveness of your content, making it more engaging for readers....
Companies that use marketing automation have 53% higher conversion rates than companies that do not, according to the Aberdeen Group. Though some marketers insist content marketing automation takes away the relationship between the brand and customer, automation can actually enhance that relationship. Content marketing automation can be as simple as scheduled social media posts and as complicated as list segmentation and lead scoring. Depending on a brand's marketing and sales strategy, content marketing automation can dramatically improve conversion rates. However, marketers really need to take automation seriously if they want to prove the success of a campaign....
Companies are scrambling to publish more content than ever before. They’re dedicating new content teams to keep up with the consumption demands of prospects and customers. Before you blindly assume that more is better, take a step back and make sure your publishing schedule sits on top of a solid content marketing strategy that is rooted in business goals and customer research. This article will review key components to consider when planning and executing on your strategy. But first, it is important to agree on a definition of content marketing...
Joe Pulizzi, Founder of the Content Marketing Institute, put it in CMW’s opening keynote: “Mediocre content will hurt your brand more than doing nothing at all.”
Currently, only 20% of content marketers said they were committed to a full content marketing approach: Hitting a defined audience with one message, finding compelling angles from which to tell your story, staying consistent over time, and building value outside of the products and services you offer, according to Pulizzi.
The other 80%? They’re creating a lot of content, but not building a loyal audience or telling a new story.
Here’s what some of our favorite speakers had to say about how their companies are creating great content and staying ahead of the pack in the content marketing space....
I joined LinkedIn in the very early days, but then went years without getting a single piece of business from the social network. Fortunately, this changed when I started publishing articles, and now I have written over 500 posts. Almost overnight, LinkedIn became an important source of new clients. Selling morphed from an annoying necessity to an easy and enjoyable process: I just answer my email. Using social media to attract new clients can be a highly efficient and effective strategy, but only if your mindset is to help people first, and to sell a distant second. This notion – win customers by selling less – is counter-intuitive. Let me explain….
|
The British Library's content marketing strategy is built upon four pillars that enable them to rank highly in SEO, then convert users to make a purchase. If judged in words and sentences, paragraphs and articles, the British Library might well be the biggest content marketing organisation in the world. With well over 150 million items within its collection, brought to life by a small, 30-strong marketing team, it has one of the biggest impacts, both for the million people who come to the library each the year, and the many more who engage with its sizable online presence. So how does such a content-rich organisation marshal its resources to deliver on its core missions of getting its assets utilised, not left un-accessed and unloved in a warehouse somewhere? Graham MacFadyen, former Head of Digital and Marketing Operations at The British Library, explains how its content marketing program operates, sharing everything from objectives to search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy....
“Content needs to be highly entertaining or informative to break through the clutter in today’s media environment,” says Stacy Taffet, Senior Brand Director at PepsiCo. That’s why the old View-Master toy now has 360-degree imagery and virtual reality capabilities. Automaker Lincoln put itself back on the map with stylish ads featuring an alluring new identity with Matthew McConaughey. And they’re not the only ones. The following old-school brands have recently made comebacks through clever, creative, and strategic content marketing....
Content marketing sounds very simple on its surface but I can tell you from lots of experience that it can be tough to do it right. Even if you have innate writing ability, this may not translate well into results-producing writing if you don’t do your homework and understand what you are selling and who you are selling it to. Plus, prospects are inundated with content from your competitors, many of whom take the creation of content very seriously. Like Dana Brookes, author of Content Marketing Revolution: Seize Control of Your Market in Five Key Steps, who stated,“Think of every contact a customer has with your brand as the most important encounter of your life.” Businesses that need to increase their brand awareness, credibility, and preference with their target audiences are turning to content marketing in greater numbers as a proven, pull-marketing strategy that aligns with business metrics. Whether your goals are to increase market awareness, drive website traffic, build lead generation or improve sales funnel conversion, understanding how to create copy that delivers results is fundamental to achieving success. From strategy to execution, you need content that is consistent and on-target. To leverage your brand’s core promise, quality content turns differentiators into a narrative that systematically engages your critical audiences. Tailored content for every stage of the process compels prospects to take action. In a Lead-2-Revenue Machine, we are not creating content for content’s sake, but rather to drive specific business objectives....
Q: What kind of content should a local business develop? A: The kind that converts! Okay, you could have hit on that answer yourself, but as this post aims to demonstrate: There are almost as many user paths to conversion as there are customers in your city, and Your long-term goal is to become the authority in your industry and geography that consumers and search engines turn to. Google’s widely publicized concept of micro-moments has been questioned by some local SEOs for its possible oversimplification of consumer behavior. Nevertheless, I think it serves as a good, basic model for understanding how a variety of human needs (I want to do, know, buy something, or go somewhere) leads people onto the web....
The biggest pain point of all to come out of the State of Content Marketing survey? "Producing engaging content, consistently." I had been reading all the results with mild interest until those words stopped me dead in my tracks. You may think the source of that concern stemmed from the fact that such a thing should be easy to manage, but it goes deeper than that. Success with content is predicated entirely on your ability to consistently produce content that engages, resonates and adds value to your audience’s lives. And if producing that is the single biggest barrier then we have a problem! You see, investment in content is a waste of money if you don’t have a well-designed plan to deliver constant content....
Content marketing is now part of the very fabric of Virgin Media’s marketing operations on a day-to-day basis. “We now have a pot of budget that is solely allocated to content marketing, as well as having a content line in every piece of marketing activity we do,” says Worby. But how did Virgin Media get there? And what challenges did they face? At NewsCred’s #ThinkContent Summit in London, Worby shared Virgin Media’s story and the process they used to achieve executive buy-in for content marketing. In addition, she offered tips, based on her learnings, for other marketers who are looking to do the same....
After evaluating hundreds of B2B brands, we narrowed it down to the best of the best. The 2016 Kapost 50 are top-notch marketing teams, learning to integrate strategies, create full-funnel content, and value quality over quantity—all to thrive in the digital age. Dive in to read their stories of world-class marketing.
People love to use the adage “work smarter, not harder” these days. It implies that the quality of one’s work has outmaneuvered the hours normally spent on it, sparing unnecessary time and energy. Indeed, it’s one goal of the modern workforce. Try applying this to marketing, however, and the phrase comes up short. For example, quality has always been a must in content marketing. But any marketer knows that quantity is tantamount to awareness, as study after study shows that a customer almost always intercepts a message multiple times before making a purchase. So the question becomes: How do we take high-quality content and make it multiply? Suzanne Copeland, CMO of Sterling National Bank, explains the math that expanded her own department’s content marketing efforts....
Content marketing has become one of the most crucial strategy to increase consumer engagement and also to attract the right audience for a business. A lot of companies spending great amount of money on it and it’s getting pretty hard to create competitive advantage in the red ocean of blogs, infographics, videos, and more. Let’s take a look at the benefits content marketing has to offer
Our content marketing infographic series covers three challenges that most marketers face today: scaling content production, creating a distribution strategy, and earning your audience. Today, we’re releasing our second infographic in the series, “Meet Your Audience Where They Are,” which dives into the tactics needed to build a solid distribution strategy. Analyzing data from our own marketing efforts, we found that employing a multi-touch strategy of public relations, social media, and email marketing almost always wins. By distributing your content across different channels, you meet your target audience where they are and extend your reach far beyond simply publishing a piece of content to your owned blog. Take a look at the infographic below for our findings about the most successful distribution tactics: ...
Done the right way, written content can turn a company from one of many competitors into an industry thought leader and help businesses flourish.
Why any company should strive to become a thought leader
Thought leadership is more than simply a marketing buzzword. If a company establishes itself as a thought leader in their respective field, it turns from a business into an experienced and competent expert and a trustworthy source of information and guidance. This doesn’t only increase a brand’s visibility and traffic – it also increases the likelihood that customers will feel like they can rely on the company when it comes to making a purchasing decision. But to become thought leaders, brands have to do more than simply produce regular content that shows their interest in their specific field. Rather, they have to provide the audience with a compelling, informed, and original point of view. Any potential customer will have plenty of questions on their mind. A good thought leader anticipates those questions and answers them expertly, even before they are raised.
Thought leadership can never be a marketing strategy in itself, but is merely the intended outcome of any resourceful and creative content strategy....
You’ve all seen the data and it’s not pretty — the amount of information on the web is certainly overwhelming. Content budgets are soaring, content output is exploding. There are more than 1,000 blog posts and 400 hours of YouTube video uploaded every minute in a never-ending war for attention. If you’re the first one to dominate a niche with your content, you’re one of the lucky ones. You’re probably keeping a stranglehold on your leading position by publishing relevant, helpful, and interesting content on a consistent basis. In essence, you are creating Content Shock for your competitors — dominating a content niche so that Google juice flows in your direction. But what if you’re on the losing end of the stick? What if you’re in a situation where your competitors have already loaded the web with content that dominates the search results? Personally, I am facing this problem all the time now when I consult with companies. If they’re late to the content marketing game, they may feel paralyzed because the competition has such as head start. So I need to find new ways for them to compete. I’ve thought this through, and I’ve come up with eight strategies to stand out for an organization that is late to the content game....
|
Couldn't agree more