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Maintaining a steady stream of content that's unique and interesting to your target audience is a challenge. But with a big dose of creativity (and a little help from content idea generators), you can create content that's not only valuable to your market, but also stands out from the sea of information.
44 Fantastic Types of Content
There are tons of options out there for content you can create. Forty four content types are outlined below, so look through the list and see which ones would make a perfect fit in your marketing plan....
For the seventh consecutive year, I’m proud to announce our annual eBook of content marketing predictions (you can also view our forecasts for 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014).
Special thanks to our friends at Marketo for making this year’s eBook possible.
My favorite part about these predictions is that I’m usually wrong (as you know). Despite this, I don’t mind going out on a limb again this year.
For the record, here are my (soon-to-be-failed) predictions for 2015....
Shoppers have always had different personalities. They are motivated to buy for all kinds of reasons, and their shopping strategies can be radically different.
In order to stay competitive in an increasingly challenging online ecosystem, marketers need to understand exactly what drives the behavior of the shoppers who frequent their online stores. Here are eight types of shoppers based on personality types and how marketers can provide the best online experiences to reach them...
ShareThis's consumer sharing behavior report, which analyzed data collated from 52 million unique users registering more than 1.9 social signals, found that each travel share generates 18 click-backs - 40% more than other types of shares.
Furthermore, 10% of social media users share travel-related content and 19% of those who are in the process of planning travel share travel-related content.
While most travel-related social sharing takes place on Facebook and Twitter, the study reveals that users are most engaged with travel content on Pinterest, Blogger and email when in the throes of travel planning. Users still prefer to use a desktop computer for travel research, while smartphones are the preferred device for sharing....
Twenty years ago last month, a team of well-meaning designers, coders and magazine publishers inadvertently unleashed on an unsuspecting world one of the most misguided and destructive technologies of the Internet age: the web banner ad.If that is an exaggeration, it is only a slight one.
FThe first banner ads — those long rectangular ads at the top of a web page — looked innocent enough; a half-dozen spots for a variety of large companies, including AT&T, Volvo and Zima, they made their debut on HotWired, the web offshoot of Wired Magazine, on Oct. 27, 1994. People who took part in their creation say the first banners were a resounding success, garnering adulation from readers and advertisers.
But their success birthed a monster that went on to swallow the web whole and has created two decades of havoc. “It’s almost like a prank that was played by the technology industry on the media industry 20 years ago,” said Chris Dixon, a technology investor at the firm Andreessen Horowitz who has long lamented the reach and permanence of the banner ad....
... It’s so easy to forget where we were 11 months ago as a company. Inbound marketing with HubSpot has completely transformed the way we do business and how we create new customer relationships.
In fact, this exercise of reporting has been good for me, because I quickly forget how things used to be. The results, reports, and data are awfully compelling....
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....
The company behind the .co domain has been working to associate .co websites with startups and innovation. Now its founders are trying to make it as easy as possible to start a business online with a new company called Pop.co.
thisBasically, Pop.co is a bundle of online services that should remove any barrier between coming up with a cool idea and building a web presence around that idea. This approach is particularly important in a future where entrepreneurs run “three or four micro-businesses at a time, easy come, easy go, and you don’t have to keep the domain forever,” said CTO Tom Lackner — he suggested you should even be able to set all this up from your smartphone.
Lackner and CEO Juan Diego Calle gave me a quick demo of Pop.co. You just pick the .co address that you’re interested in (assuming it’s available, and if it’s not, Pop.co will suggest alternatives), then the company automatically claims it for you, and you can either use Pop.co’s simple web page editor to create the page with just a little bit of typing, or use its simple DNS editor to point the website to a page you’ve created on another service like LaunchRock or Barley....
The young girl in T-shirt and shorts paces up and down her dorm room, occasionally stopping to vault herself on top of the bunk bed and then back down again.
For four days last month, Target live-streamed five YouTube personalities as they mused, joked, ate, slept and generally passed the time in makeshift dorm rooms outfitted with products sold by the Minneapolis-based retailer.
Not quite commercial, not quite reality, Target's digital experiment, dubbed Bullseye University, represents its most ambitious attempt to penetrate the digital universe of college students.
By scrolling over each room on BullseyeUniversity.com, viewers could also activate pop-up boxes that give information about the merchandise and links to purchasing them on Target.com.
Brian Kelly, a retail consultant and former top marketing executive at Sears, says live-streaming Millennials interacting with Target products gives Bullseye University an air of relevance "that's not as creepy" as other voyeuristic projects....
Earlier this July, video technology company Unruly released the results of its 20-page study, “The Science of Sharing,” measuring the viral effects of 12 Super Bowl commercials. Using a complex algorithm from their sharing analysis tool, ShareRank, Unruly was able to identify the parts of each video that triggered the strongest viewer responses, and grade the advertisements on their overall shareability (see below). By doing this, Unruly was able to give an in-depth look at why some viral ads perform well online, while others don’t. ...
Fake web traffic has long plagued the online publishing world, but Dr. Paul Barford, computer science professor at the University of Wisconsin, is claiming the problem might be worse than suspected. And it's costing some of the top online advertisers millions in wasted ad impressions.
Dr. Barford, who is also the chief scientist at startup MdotLabs, is slated to present a study at an Internet security symposium Wednesday in Washington, D.C., where he we will claim that 10 traffic networks are serving up more than 500 million invalid ad impressions a month.
"We estimate the cost to advertisers for this fraudulent traffic to be on the order of $180 million annually," he said in a statement in advance of the presentation.
Dr. Barford reached his conclusion by posing as a web publisher and signing up for several different traffic generation services, also called PPV networks, which he filtered through software that uses anomaly detection to identify fake website traffic....
Having a web presence is no longer option; companies must actively try to reach potential customers using the power of the Internet. Further, companies should try to integrate as many different venues of web development as possible to reach as many demographics as they can. Here are four steps to increasing your web presence.
1. Start and maintain a blog
Blogs are a great way to reach new customers. It is important that the blog is not used as an overt sales platform; it must be primarily informative or entertain. With regular updates, it is possible to gain a large and loyal following who will provide links from their own websites or blogs. You can also use traditional techniques for gaining new readers such as link exchanges, guest posts and commenting on other blogs. Blogs also grant a bit of freedom, so do not be afraid to use it to take some risks.
2. Double down on social media
By now, most companies and businesses have a presence on social media. Many, however, have not put forth the effort necessary to make their social media properties work for them as well as possible. Consider running promotions to get more followers; discounts or even free products can help. Promising to donate a certain amount of money to a charity once the account reaches a particular milestone can help as well. The best long-term strategy, however, is to post entertaining or informative information on the page. The ultimate goal should be to get followers to share your posts with their friends.
3. Give video a shot
Internet video is constantly becoming more popular. With the increased bandwidth of typical Internet connections and the availability of video-hosting services, the Internet has the infrastructure and the technological capability necessary to spread videos far and wide. Companies can check out an official host review to see if a particular host has the capabilities to match their needs. By using videos, those running a company can give it a personal touch that text cannot match. Video also reaches out to Internet users who would rather watch a video than read an article.
4. Target mobile Internet users
The fastest-growing demographic on the Internet is users with mobile devices. These devices, however, are not simply smaller laptops; their capabilities are advanced, but their screen sizes are too small to display normal websites, and their input methods are radically different from the mouse and keyboard standard. By specifically targeting mobile platforms, a company can tap into a large segment of users. The Internet provides a tremendous number of users, and this base of users is growing every day. With a bit of labor and some creativity, it is possible to tap large segments of the Internet’s population who have not yet been reached in an effective manner.
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Among the key findings of the survey: - Blogs and newsletters are most valued by B2B buyers early in the sales cycle, when they are starting to learn about a topic and evaluate products/vendors.
- Whitepapers are most valued in the beginning and middle parts of the sales cycle, when buyers are attempting to understand a problem.
- Videos, webinars, and detailed tech guides are most useful toward the end of the cycle, when buyers are considering specific vendors and finalizing selection.
- 80% of buyers want to continue to receive content after a sale is completed...
Although psychology has been an integral part of marketing for many years, in recent years we have seen it become an even bigger component as more and more consumers turn to the Internet for information. In its most basic definition, psychology is the science of behavior and the mind. As online marketing develops and grows out of consumer demand, so does psychology and an understanding of how consumers think and behave as they use the Internet for purchasing decisions.
How does psychology work in the process of lead conversion? First, let’s gain a better understanding of lead conversion in online marketing, specifically inbound marketing. As you may know, call-to-actions (CTAs) and landing pages are an integral part of lead conversion and inbound marketing.
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....
L2 conducted a study to assess the digital performance of 382 leading consumer brands in the world, drawing them from eight verticals across 17 platforms and concluded that they are active, on an average, on seven social platforms each.
The researchers also found out that presence across lots of social platforms does not guarantee greater engagement from fans. It was also observed that local networks are capable of delivering better results in areas where they have a strong social presence instead of bigger sites like Facebook and YouTube....
Humans will remember something longer if it made them feel rather than think. They gravitate towards provocative images -- think food, sex and danger. They’re drawn toward images of faces. The color yellow puts them on edge.
Understanding how the human brain works is fascinating, but it’s also good business.
Marketing campaigns rooted in neurology are more likely to get and hold attention. And in the attention economy we are living in, where consumers have access to more emails and tweets than they could ever manage to read and digest fully, being able to get and hold attention is what separates the wheat from the chaff. That’s what gets consumers to spend.
If you are looking to get more of your marketing efforts seen, then have a look at this infographic, embedded below, generated by Nashville, Tenn.-based Emma, an email-marketing software provider. The infographic highlights 12 biological trigger mechanisms that make the human brain light up....
Type the name of almost any successful consumer Web company into your search bar and add the word “addict” after it.
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Try “Facebook addict” or “Twitter addict” or even “Pinterest addict” and you’ll soon get a slew of results from hooked users and observers deriding the narcotic-like properties of these websites. How is it that these companies, producing little more than bits of code displayed on a screen, can seemingly control users’ minds? Why are these sites so addictive and what does their power mean for the future of the web?...
How to you generate more marketing qualified leads? Why, you run an inbound marketing funnel-focused campaign! Here's how to get started.The purpose of this article will be to outline a campaign process you can use to generate a marketing qualified lead.
This includes a website visitor clicking on a call to action, downloading an information qualifying offer from a landing page, email nurturing and downloading a marketing qualifying offer.Today I’d like to teach you about how a campaign works, and give you a scenario that you can adapt and reuse in your own inbound marketing strategy. But, we need to first speak a little bit about your sales funnel....
You devour online marketing lessons. You feast on articles, reports, books, and eBooks.
....Perhaps it’s so important to you, you spend some of your precious time attending webinars and conferences and you can’t help but join the conversation on blogs and via social media.Good for you. There’s a ton of information to take in, the rules change daily, and if you’re going to succeed with online marketing, you must master a good many practices, techniques and tools.
The experts keep serving up specialized dishes: content marketing, social media marketing, search marketing, permission-based marketing, inbound marketing and any (fill-in-the-blank-here) marketing. The more these ingredients get heaped onto our plates, the more the meal calls for a bowl and spoon. It’s digital soup, my friend....
Defining Strategy Ahead of Time can Save You A Lot of Time in the Future
Any solid startup strategy will include a plan for customer acquisition and systems which are built to scale. Success will make team growth inevitable, but it can be devastatingly difficult to rebuild a system that’s reached critical mass.
However, entrepreneur and venture capitalist David Skok has found that the success of your company relies on two factors, regardless of any external forces: - Finding a scalable way to acquire customers - Monetizing customers at a higher rate than your cost of customer acquisition.
A successful content marketing plan can seamlessly scale with other projects, but it will be much more difficult to gain traction online in the first place if you delay getting started....
The benefits of video in the ecommerce arena are well known – no other approach generates engagement and sharing, boosts search traffic and conversions to the levels that video does. But there's more to video than just creating and posting product information. Are you doing everything you can to make the most of these incredibly valuable assets?
Because video does such a great job of attracting and holding consumer attention, it can contribute to a wide range of successful marketing initiatives aimed at everyone from current customers to new prospects.
For example, video can be used in a bounceback strategy – promoting relevant products to consumers who have already visited or made purchases at your site. And its strong search value can be used to hook consumers who are researching potential purchases on the web.
In addition, try these five ideas for making video a powerful contributor to your successful campaigns....
Twitter’s latest ad product provides a call to action right inside a tweet — showing the company is finally creating marketing tools closer to the “bottom of the funnel.” Even as Twitter has grown into a media and marketing giant, not everyone is persuaded that the social media site is useful for selling things. As one marketer recently lamented to me, the platform’s effectiveness is hard to measure — and justify to clients — because “no one’s going to buy a car off Twitter.” [Update: Twitter says "au contraire" and sent this research] The perception, then, is that Twitter is useful for what the ad types call “top of the funnel” marketing — building brand awareness and so on — but that it has yet to deliver paying customers in the way that GoogleAdwords can. Today, though, it appears Twitter has responded with a new ad product that will make it easier for brands to assess what they get for their marketing bucks. The product, called a “Lead Generation Card,” lets marketers post expanded tweets that invite users to sign up for stuff right inside Twitter. The company showed what this might look in a blog post describing the product...
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Vlogging, Surveys, Contests, and Apps are all great ways to drive traffic to your website(s). Are you using these and other ideas to build your content marketing plan for 2015?
I've been busy developing my first information product like this. Hubspot always beats me in my ideas, which is frustrating and motivaing at the sam time. But this article rocks, it is so very complete.
big to do list !