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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....
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....
So what are the digital marketing trends that could destroy your business if you don’t start now? You can be sure that your savvy competitors will be getting in on the digital action! So it’s time to beat them to the punch.
And you can’t ignore the looming reality that the new start-ups will also disrupt....
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....
Everyone makes it sound so easy. Post a few times on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and the traffic will pour in.
In reality, it’s not easy. And like with anything else, you need to spend some time learning how to do it properly.
I assure you it’s possible. My nutrition blog case study received over 9,000 visits from Facebook alone last month, despite being a new blog.
But as I noted in that second-month update, it could be doing even better. My friend Mike, who is running the site, is a really smart guy, but it’s still taking him some time to really understand how to use social media to its fullest potential.
You should care about social media traffic because it is one of the biggest referrers of traffic at your disposal. In early 2015, social media traffic made up 31% of overall traffic.
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....
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....
According to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 80 percent of responders said they research a product online before buying. Today, it’s not enough for businesses to have a voice in traditional channels. In addition, brands must be active online in order to influence purchase consideration – with emphasis on the word “active.”...
As a result, we at Vertical Measures have created the following eight-step approach that businesses can adopt to begin the quest of creating content their audience will find and love, and see success through content marketing. (In fact, I just published a book that covers these eight steps in detail.)...
Across the six-month period of this analysis, we found that some post types did perform better than others. - Lists and why-posts proved to have the most reliable social traction, averaging around 21,000 shares per month with a variance of less than 2.5%. - What-posts were the riskiest format, showing a high variance of 13.45% - Further analysis of the six-month period revealed:Lists narrowly claimed the most social traction at 22.45% - Why-posts earned 22.32% of social traction. - Videos drew 18.94% of total shares and performed well in Q4. - How-to articles earned 18.42% of shares. - What-posts had the lowest social traction, earning 17.88% of total shares....
Content marketing was voted the top marketing activity to drive commercial results in 2015, according to Smart Insights, so competition will be tough and the need to create a focused plan is paramount.
Even though content looks set to take over the digital marketing landscape in 2015, brands still need to get the fundamentals right. This means coming up with a clear strategy, researching consumer data, distributing content in the right places and measuring campaign effectiveness.
By doing so, B2C companies can overcome challenges such as creating engaging content that resonates and appeals to customers, on a regular and consistent basis.
Take a look at the infographic below for an overview of, the most commercially important digital marketing trends for 2015, marketers' top goals for 2015, most popular B2C content marketing tactics, 7 content marketing planning techniques, and more.
Simplistically, consumers consume content that resonates with them. Mostly, this happens on a subconscious level, and something as basic as the colour of the dress being worn by the model can dramatically sway a campaign.
Simplicity, however, is not something commonly associated with subconscious processing, which is where technology finds its place. Results from A/B testing, when fed into algorithms, determine not only which dress, for example, will present the best returns, it goes much deeper: information such as a black dress will work on a female audience aged between 25 and 28 years, using Android mobile devices.
Naturally, the queries all stem from creative output – this is always the starting point. Additionally, certain aspects of the campaign, for example, the target audience, need to be defined. Once the basic parameters have been defined, scientific metrics should be overlaid. By using algorithms, hundreds of permutations can be created, and the most effective easily determined....
Rather than listing more examples, with this post, we want to offer you a methodology to ensure that your brand doesn’t make an appearance in “Part 3.” To catch potential mistakes before they make it to your social media messaging queue, it’s helpful to set up an editorial process for your posts. You probably have one in place already for your content marketing platform, and those translate easily into social media messaging, and won’t take up too much of your time and effort. But if you’re unfamiliar with the idea and the process seems intimidating, we have prepared this handy flowchart, along with a list of questions to aid you with the vetting of your social media posts.
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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....
“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%....
But here’s what you need to do to plan your campaign: - Pre-campaign planning
- Define your campaign goals and metrics
- Targeting – who you are going to target and how
- Map out your funnels
- Create your content and build your editorial calendar
- Get all your tracking in place – goals, URL builder, etc.
- Campaign Launch
- Optimization – assess and adjust
- Evaluate at the end of project.
We call this the rocket formula, so of course we have an image of a rocket!...
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.
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....
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...
Do you want to improve your social media marketing? Are you curious about what works for large companies? The best way to add techniques to your repertoire is to look at what brands with high levels of engagement are doing.
In this article I’ll share 26 tips, an A-Z guide, from brands doing an excellent job of social media marketing and getting results to match.
Content marketing is more important to B2B businesses. Who is succeeding and why? Below is a infographic that details B2B Content Marketing Trends for 2015.
Here are 15 B2B case studies. They show how content marketing drives ROI with B2B businesses who: - Know their audience
- Don’t create content for the sake of creating content
- Use specific content solutions to impact different stages of the buying cycle
- Integrate internally with their teams...
As a small business owner, the concept of content marketing makes you raise an eyebrow and ask yourself lots of questions that might include:
Do I really need a content strategy to speak my mind and bond with my clients? Couldn’t I just let the words flow freely?
Don’t let your upcoming experiences provide the answers to these questions.
Trying to convey your messages without a well-researched, documented content marketing strategy would be like trying to steer a ship without a helm. In this case you would probably drown in a sea of disparate content pieces that do not actually add value to your audience and don’t do a great job at representing your business....
Content marketing was big in 2014. Last year, more businesses began regularly investing time and money into content marketing than ever before. That’s not much of a surprise when you consider the following facts found in a recent writtent.com blog post:
Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about three times as many leads. (Source)
78% of CMOs believe custom content is the future of marketing. (Source)
Website conversion rate is nearly 6 times higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters (2.9% vs 0.5%). (Source)
If you haven’t yet taken the time to invest in developing and implementing content marketing strategies for your business, now is the time....
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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!