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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....
In a platform world, publishers face tough decisions on where to place their resources. In August, The Economist faced this head on and axed its ailing Pinterest and Tumblr accounts while ramping up its commitment to LinkedIn.
The publisher had been experimenting on Pinterest for the past six months. But even with a social media team that had grown from two to 10 people, The Economist couldn’t make it click. “From day one, it was a struggle,” said Denise Law, community editor at The Economist. “We found it difficult to articulate what our raison d’être for Pinterest was. It’s not the place to share serious content; it’s more where people go to share ideas.”
For Pinterest, The Economist was posting pieces from 1843, its culture and lifestyle magazine, then called Intelligent Life. Articles from travel blog Gulliver’s Travels were also going there, as well as pieces from its archives and links to items from The Economist Store. But it was gaining no traction. When it cut the account, it had 5,000 followers. “Not enough to move the needle,” said Law, adding that its Tumblr account shared the same fate. Earlier this year, The Economist also culled a number of its Twitter accounts.here's
The Economist’s approach to social media is, according to the publisher, to promote quality over quantity. It’s taken that mission to LinkedIn, which it uses for brand awareness rather than to drive traffic. By tweaking its approach to publish a broader spectrum of content, The Economist saw its LinkedIn follower count grow from half a million last year to 2.4 million, and it continues to grow at a rate of 25,000 followers a week, according to Law....
Some people go to great lengths to find the best ways to share to social media.Social media management tools definitely help, and so too do the workflows and tactics that social media marketers discover to save time each and every day. This is especially true for busy marketing agencies who run social media marketing in addition to a host of other duties. The folks at iM Image Marketing, a digital agency from Youngstown, Ohio, most definitely fit this description, juggling social media management on top of web design, branding, and so much more. Their team manages more than 100 social profiles! And they do so with some really smart workflows that help them save time and gain great results for their clients. The iM team was kind enough to sit down with us and share some of these secrets. Here’s a bit more about how they do it....
Creating your social media strategy and tactical plan1 - Building the strategy noun Strategy / A plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim. First you need to understand what a strategy is, and isn’t it. A strategy should define the main aim of your social media presence and set the parameters for what it will deliver and how it will be delivered. It will be supported by a tactical plan that defines how the strategy will be delivered, including the channels, resource and budgets to achieve it. Tip – ensure your strategy is no more than 3-4 pages long. A strategy has to be concise and provide the governing principles that guide the plan. Below is a summary of key content to include in your strategy document....
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.
There’s an assumption that traffic will just naturally convert to leads, but that isn’t always the case.
And what if you don’t have traffic, but want to generate leads for your business today?
In that case, you have to pursue other avenues.
I’m going to be covering 13 different ways to generate leads for your business, many of which are free, simple, and can be started now....
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....
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...
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.)...
In a recent post, I pointed to research that shows that as much as 70 percent of social sharing is unknown to us. And perhaps we only know 2 percent of our non-lurking audience!
This presents a real problem for marketers. Getting content to move through a loyal audience is critical to business success. A study commissioned by Google shows that your most-loyal audience is more than 250 percent more likely to transmit your content and 200 percent more likely to make purchases from your company. These engaged customers don’t just buy your products again and again, but encourage others to do it, too.
In my upcoming book, The Content Code, I describe this elite group as the Alpha Audience – fervent supporters, and a rare breed we can rely on for loyalty, ignition, and most important, action. We urgently need to find more of those people for our businesses, but if most of this powerful audience lurks in the shadows, how do we know they’re there?...
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.
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If there is one entrepreneur who knows the real value of building social relationships, and how they can extend into the world of social media, it’s health and fitness mogul Andy Frisella: founder of Supplement Superstores, Paradise Distribution, and the renowned fitness brand 1st Phorm International. These brands, among others, bring in more than $100 million a year.
How?
He has built a true community....
When you create landing pages, sometimes you’re forced to make some tough calls — deciding on the type of headline, all the way down to the colors on the page, and CTA button copy.
Every single decision has a significant impact on your conversion rate. Of course, this puts added pressure on you to get all the elements perfect before you publish the page.
The data you collect with A/B testing puts a lot of the CRO questions to bed, but the thing with testing is that it’s not an immediate solution. You can’t rely on A/B testing data as soon as you publish your page.
This is where CRO best practices come into play.
We’re going to make a case for both types of pages and argue why one should take precedence over the other. Then, we’ll give you a list of factors that will help you decide the length of your pages once and for all.
Let the debate begin....
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....
Wondering how to use Medium for business? Want to use Medium to engage with prospects? Medium’s Letters feature lets you communicate directly with prospects so you can build meaningful relationships with them. In this article you’ll discover how to use Letters on Medium to nurture leads....
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....
It’s been an amazing month at Buffer working on some funsocial media strategies and thinking ahead to some big new ideas.
What’s a good Medium strategy?
How can we gain more followers on Instagram?
What might a Buffer podcast look like?
I’d love to share with you what’s been on our plates recently, along with all the social media stats from our Buffer accounts. It’d be great to hear your thoughts also on the content we can write that would be most helpful for you!...
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....
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....
You’re walking along a busy sidewalk, dodging passersby, when a small group of people catches your eye. They’re standing in the middle of the path, heads tilted back in unison, staring at the sky.
You look, but you can’t see anything. Still, the crowd stares. You stand with them, searching for the source of their fixation. The crowd grows around you, and soon dozens of people are staring wordlessly into the sky.
Believe it or not, this is a real-life study conducted in 1969 by psychologist Stanley Milgram. A small group of people staring silently into an empty sky was influential enough to cause 80% of passersby to copy their actions, without any reason for doing so.
The Power of Social Proof
This is the power of social proof: our innate psychological tendency to use the wisdom of the crowd to influence our own decisions....
Content marketing is often the focus of an inbound marketing strategy, but there’s more to it than that. A good corporate website is a crucial foundation for this type of marketing. Good inbound marketing websites rely on a careful combination of these five must-have characteristics:...
There really is no getting away from it, these days Social Media is no longer just an option for your business marketing, it is now an absolute necessary function - and not just for excellent customer service and content management.
Last year we featured your Recipe to Social Media Success and have given a lot of great tips for managing your social media presence . However, without proper planning, a lot of time can be lost to the Social Media function. It is therefore very good practice to spend the time creating a robust Social Media Strategy. In this article, we look at some tips that will assist you in doing just that - and what perfect timing for the New Year too!...
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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!