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Our content marketing infographic series covers three challenges that most marketers face today: scaling content production, creating a distribution strategy, and earning your audience.
This infographic, “Earn Your Audience,” details how to reach your target audience through engaging content. Marketers understand that they need to provide tangible value in their customers’ lives, and content is one of the last mediums left to effectively do this. Instead of allocating a large portion of marketing budget to traditional advertising, successful marketers are opting to think like consumers and deliver engaging content that creates a two-way conversation with their audiences.
Take a look at the infographic below for more on how to build and retain meaningful relationships with your audience
Howdy all and welcome to a special edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Rand Fishkin. I'm the founder of Moz, and today I want to talk with you about how to craft the best damn ecommerce page on the web. I'm actually going to be using the example of one of my very favorite ecommerce pages. That is the Bellroy Slim Wallet page. Now, Bellroy, actually, all of their pages, Bellroy makes wallets and they market them online primarily. They make some fantastic products. I've been an owner of one for a long time, and it was this very page that convinced me to buy it. So what better example to use?
So what I want to do today is walk us through the elements of a fantastic ecommerce page, talk about some things where I think perhaps even Bellroy could improve, and then walk through, at the very end, the process for improving your own ecommerce page....
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....
This past year, we've seen the importance of visual content emphasized by the changes that occurred across almost every major social network, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. At the same time, both video and infographics have become powerful tools for brands looking to communicate more easily with their readers.
To help you keep pace with these trends, let's take a look at some statistics that demonstrate the impact visual content has on reach, engagement, and sales....
Wish you didn’t have to keep creating new content?
Do you need a better return on the content you create?
Having a plan in place for posting, and repurposing your best content will give your content a longer life and make the most of the time you spend creating it.
In this article you’ll discover how to get more value out of your social media content....
Nine out of 10 of the 2,008 consumers surveyed said they multiscreen. 40% reported feeling distracted while using multiple screens, as do 47% of millennials. This content overload has led to increased selectiveness from consumers, and the content market gets more competitive as a result.
73% of consumers said that content “must display well on the device” and there are several common traits that turn users away including...
One of the takeaways from Advertising Week in New York last week is the rise of “branded content”. Brands are embracing the potential of branded content to blur the lines between advertising and entertainment. It seems like every week, I hear the expression, “Content is King”.
It’s true that content marketing holds great promise, as marketers start to create communication that is genuinely worth sharing. Yet, in creating content, we should remember that consumers don’t necessarily want “content”. They want stories. “Branded content” and “content marketing” is insider terminology used by marketers. It’s up to marketers to make the content into something more meaningful.
In the branded content bandwagon, there is too often an emphasis on quantity over quality. Content is treated like a commodity. Consumers can see many forms of “branded content” a mile a way, and it’s only a matter of time before they learn to tune it out as readily as other forms of advertising.
That is, unless we create content that is truly meaningful to the audiences we are trying to reach....
According to a recent survey sourced in Ad Age, 75 percent of marketers said that content should frequently mention products and services, yet 60 percent of their audience turns down salesy content.
This is the true rubber-meets-road moment in marketing, IMHO. Here’s my general take:Marketing needs to evolve as a source of product. We need to stop worshipping at “The Temple Of Big Numbers”
My two cents, just from places I’ve worked: a lot of times at jobs, people get promoted because of their ability to make money. This is only logical: if you’re considering a job for someone that might pay them $120K, it’s hard to justify giving that job to that person if they only generate $80K (that’s essentially a $200K loss every five years for the company). Because of this promotion model, you don’t always see “tried-and-true marketers” get promoted up to SVP/CMO jobs; for better or worse, the ROI of standard marketing is still hard to prove....
Have other quotes you love? We’d love to hear from you! Tweet us @NewsCred with the hashtag #ThinkContent. - "Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left." - Seth Godin
- "We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in." - Craig Davis, former Chief Creative Officer at J. Walter Thompson
- "Behind every tweet, share and purchase, there is a person. Care more about the person and less about the share." - Shafqat Islam, CEO and Co-Founder at NewsCred
- "If great content is the hero, then banners are the villain." - Michael Brenner, Head of Strategy at NewsCred
"- Banners have 99 problem and a click ain’t one." - Scott Sorokin, Chief Strategy Officer at Razorfish
- "Marketing used to be about making a myth and telling it. Now it’s about telling a truth and sharing it." - Marc Mathieu, Global SVP of Marketing at Unilever...
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....
Do you need some help to get started with your social media marketing plan? If you want to attract and engage social-media fans and followers — and convert them into paying customers — you need to map out a clear, goal-oriented social media plan.
If you don’t, it will be obvious to your fans and target market that you are disorganized. In addition to damaging your brand, you’ll risk losing sales by sending your audience to your competitors.
If you’re starting from scratch, it can feel overwhelming.
You know that others have been successful at social media marketing, but there are so many moving parts that creating a plan of your own can be daunting. If you are brand new to social media and looking for a straightforward way to start, follow the advice below....
The number of shares an article receives has become ubiquitous in online content; widgets that show shares, tweets, pins, and +1s appear front and center on nearly every post you read (or, in this case, just to the left of this paragraph).
Just how many times does content get shared? Where do people prefer to share it? And are some publishers more effective than others at generating highly shared content? These questions are crucial to content marketers looking to understand the key components of a viral marketing success, and our recent research collaboration with BuzzSumo is here to give you some answers....
...So even if you don’t “do” Pinterest or Instagram, your content needs to have some kind of visual element if it’s going to rack up likes and shares. This is, of course, great news if you’re naturally creative with visuals…
But if you’re like me, it means you’re likely to be stuck with stock photography. As Seinfeld would say, “not that there’s anything wrong with that,” but when you pull up “happy-woman-at-computer.jpg” for the umpteetnth time, you start looking around for something with a little more pizazz.
Enter the meme. If you’ve never heard of memes (pronounced meemz), I guarantee you’ve seen at least one. They’re those funny images you see all over Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere on the inter-tubes with different messaging embedded. One of my favorites is the Boromir ”One Does Not Simply …” image from Lord of the Rings that I’ve included above. Look familiar?
The good news is that you don’t need Photoshop to create and share your very own memes—just an Internet connection. There are several (free) meme creation websites out there; I’m partial to memegenerator.net, which is super-easy to use...
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Hey, remember the good old days before smartphones? That golden age where you actually had to use a landline to contact friends, use paper maps and log on to a whirring desktop computer to access the Internet? Well, guess what, many of today’s young influencers and consumers of the future don’t.
In fact, even if your earliest memories of a mobile phone are a chunky Motorola, you could probably take a tip or two from the younger generation to inform your content marketing efforts. Why? Because they are the connected generation, brought up on social media and smartphone use. They will see your snake game and raise you a Pokemon or three and this is all from the age of 11.
Of course, your target audience might not fall into the teenage or early twenty-something bracket. But in a world where Eric Lassard, a boy of 12, has (amongst other ventures) launched an app, social platform and is publishing his second book, ‘From Dublin to Silicon Valley’, perhaps your business might pick up a tip or two straight out of the mouths of babes. For connecting with millennials and those that come after is the future of your business…
In a study published by the Content Marketing Institute last month, 70% of B2B marketers stated they will produce more original content in 2017 than they did in 2016, and 39% plan to increase their content marketing spending over the next year.
Meanwhile, user-generated content is also expected to explode. The global Internet population grew 62%, from 2.1 billion to 3.4 billion, in just the last four years.
All this means that the amount of content online, including visual content, will only increase exponentially with time–not decrease.
So, with so much noise out there, how can can you still create unique visual content that stands out?....
In this post, we’re going to review 15 marketing guides that can speed up your success.
We’ll look at the finer details of each guide, ensuring that you have a clear understanding as to how you can use each one to your advantage.
By the end of this post, you’ll have a better idea of how each guide can push you down the path to reaching all of your content marketing related goals....
The research findings would appear to suggest that viewing branded content on a mobile device can have a big impact on consumer purchase intent. This isn’t too surprising, given the fact that mobile devices are with us all the time and deliver personalized content on-demand. A lot of this content is branded and served up in native formats.
Impulse purchases, it would seem, are going to become fairly de rigueur -- that is, if the mobile checkout and payment process becomes easier and more seamless.
Well-produced branded content, at least in this survey, looks like it can deliver the goods, so to speak.....
In this article, we’re going to take a look at the different kinds of content marketing you can do, if you’re not into writing blog posts.
By the end of this article, you should have a good sense of how you can implement each method, so that you can use it to generate leads for your business.
But before we take a look at how you can implement these tactics, there’s something I want to discuss....
Consumers will only pay attention to you when they’re motivated to do so. Interaction and education along the buyer’s journey is the best way to gain their attention and keep it. Obviously, you need to understand your target consumers before you can offer something valuable or helpful to them, but, once you’ve gained their permission to market to them, you can be strategic about guiding them along the buyer’s journey and positioning offers at just the right moment.
What is the Buyer’s Journey?
The buyer’s journey includes the steps that consumers take in the buying process. After buyers become aware of their needs and begin researching solutions, they generally proceed to three additional stages: Consideration, Recommendation and Purchase. These buyer journey stages map closely to the Lifecycle Marketing stages within the Sell phase: Educate, Offer and Close....
Marketers are trained to put their best foot forward and ignore the downsides of their products. This is about doing the exact opposite: finding your weakest points and showcasing them for all to see.
The victims of the echo-chamber are many. The costs of listening to it are vast. The fact is time is a finite resource and how we choose to spend that time developing our own marketing skills is critical to our professional success and the success of the brands we represent.
Not only could marketers be missing out on other, more important, topics for self-improvement, but they could be implementing and executing bad advice.
In an attempt to protect the many, below is a list of four group-think echo-chamber topics that deserve to be called out for what they are – not true, just a distraction or plain old bull sh%#. Don’t let yourself be caught up in these topics – just move on because your time is too valuable to be listing to it....
A much-ballyhooed Gallup study uncovered some ugly “truths” about social media, including a reputed inability to influence purchasing decisions. According to the study, 62 percent of Americans say Facebook, Twitter and their ilk have no influence on whether they purchase a product.
Although asking consumers to accurately recount the advertising methods that ultimately drove them to purchase is likely a fool’s errand, many marketers who have attempted to correlate standard social metrics to sales and other conversions have struggled to make a connection.
As a result, in many marketing shops the number of likes, shares and retweets a brand receives daily is lessening in importance. But that doesn’t mean social media offers nothing of value — advanced marketers are leveraging social data for reasons beyond direct marketing tactics....
I decided to share the 15 questions we find are critical for any organization going into any content marketing campaign. And if your company is in the process of embracing content marketing, and you haven’t yet answered each of these questions, I’d strongly urge you to answer them before moving forward. Here goes,...
Ninety-three percent - that’s how many organizations said they rely on content marketing for brand building and demand generation this year according to the Content Marketing Institute. With 87% of buyers stating that digital content has a large impact on their purchasing decisions this year, it’s clear that content marketing is on the ups.
So who’s doing it really well? Which brands have rocked the boat and set the example? We scoured our archives and asked content marketers to weigh in, and here’s our list of the 25 Top Content Marketers of 2014....
Blogging is increasingly becoming a non-negotiable for brands. If you want leads, you want website traffic; if you want website traffic, you need good content. And if you want to show up in Google searches, you need good content. What is considered “good content”? That’s a huge question. But there’s one thing that I’m a stickler about: good blog content does not have sales pitches....
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B2B buyers research thoroughly before buying and they do pay attention to reviews.