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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....
I want to show you what types of content you should be producing in order to generate strong sales from the rest of your content marketing efforts.
Some of these might overlap with the content you’re already producing to generate traffic, but some will be new.
If you’re starting to see a solid level of website traffic but aren’t sure how to turn those visitors into customers, this post should help you a lot....
You can use many methods to improve your conversion rate.
But very few can improve your conversion rate as much as case studies can.
Case studies have a few big benefits: - they resonate with prospects
- they show that your product or service can work
- the transparency increases the trust a reader has in you
All of these benefits are important, but the last one—in particular.
Trust is one of the most important factors in conversion rate optimization....
Too many businesses produce content on so many topics that it’s clear they haven’t taken the time to learn what their audience really wants to read.
In other words, these content marketers don’t know for whom they’re writing. There are two ways to solve this problem along with some helpful tools:
Identify your target audiences, find out where they reside, and the topics they discuss.
Find out what your competitors write.
What does your target audience want from you?
Finding where your target audience hangs out online and what they share should inform your content development....
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....
In just the last couple of weeks marketing consultant and best-selling author, Mark Schaefer, published “The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business.” It takes an in depth look at how brands can overcome content shock in an age of content abundance. This book answers a question: I am a professional marketer working as hard as I can. I am producing content, engaging on social media, and spinning right along with the revolving door of every digital marketing innovation and new platform. Why is my business not getting anywhere?
Mark writes that “Content is no longer the finish line. It’s the starting line.” He estimates, based on CMI and Marketing Profs research, that by 2020 the amount of content on the Internet will grow by 500 percent. That will make it even more difficult for marketers to get their content seen. As a result, marketers must learn to ignite their content by cracking The Content Code.
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… And Others Don’t is a Jim Collins classic that shares an eye-opening study on how top companies managed to manifest great results and maintain them for more than a decade.
After the study was completed, Collins found key business traits and strategies that transformed these companies into successful, elite companies.
So how do these traits apply to content marketing? What makes a ‘good-to-great’ content marketing strategy? Here are the seven steps for you to take your content to the next level...
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.)...
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...
I’ve been building SEO-driven, Adsense/Affiliate monetized sites for 4 years now. I’ve been through every Panda update and Penguin update. I've survived a lot of them, but I've been absolutely crushed by some of them as well. If getting crushed is how you learn, then I've learned a lot.
I started out building hundreds of microniche sites with content as cheap as $3/500 word article, to creating sites that received thousands of FB, Twitter, Reddit, and Stumble upon shares - even though my goal was solely to drive organic search traffic.
One article got over 100,000 likes on Facebook and millions of visitors. It cost me $30 to outsource and I made no effort to optimize it for social.
I don’t claim to be a content creation expert, but I’ve picked up a thing or two over the years, and this is the guide to SEO content creation I wish I had when I started....
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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You want to be writing the right content, right?
I mean, if you're not getting anything out of your blog, why are you (or your content creators) spending hours researching, writing and formatting?
This article will break down the 10 most important pieces of content and how they can be used in combination to attract readers, generate leads, nurture those leads into signups and those signups into upgrades....
Since last year, the distribution landscape has changed considerably. One company on the old list went out of business. A few have lost a lot of their relevance. And Facebook has gotten much stronger, continuing on its path to world domination, one suggested post at a time.
Clearly, not all distribution platforms are created equally. Social networks each have certain types of people drawn to their respective news feeds—think of lunchroom cliques from high school. For marketers, it’s crucial that precious ad dollars are spent wisely on the clique that’s most likely to respond to your work. There needs to be clear objects for any distribution initiative so marketers can pair smart content with the right platform, and as a result, the right audience.
As you think about how to make your content more effective, here’s our updated breakdown of the most important distribution platforms in 2015....
It’s not just marketing and advertising executives who’ve discovered the benefits of a content marketing campaign.
According to Insideview, B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads on a monthly basis than companies that don’t. And a whopping 80% of business decision makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles—and not via advertising.
If content marketing isn’t a part of your overall marketing strategy, you should reconsider....
Quality content marketing does more than sell. These days, people want to be engaged with humor, stunning visuals, and great conversation. Some companies exude creativity with content such as survival guides and maps that track best-selling items.
To help you rethink content marketing, we asked 12 startup founders for their pick of companies that really know how to capture an audience....
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....
Content marketing is not just a passing trend, it is here to stay. Even those convinced of its utility might object that it is not right for them because they see it as expensive. While this perception is not un-founded (Coke and Redbull, two content marketing luminaries, have budgets in the millions), money is not a prerequisite for a quality content marketing strategy.
If you follow a well thought out plan and adhere to it diligently, you can succeed at content marketing on nearly any budget. This article will help your business lay out a cost effective content marketing plan, explaining the reasoning and theory behind my recommendations....
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...
The key factor is not keyword density, back-links, tags or optimisation, it is sharing performance on social networks.
Now brands looking to benefit from content are faced with a tougher question: How to create content that people enjoy enough to share?
Adding value gets better long-term results than extracting it.
Understanding this statement as your top-level motivation is the key to the success of content strategy today....
In today’s climate of radical transparency where everything your business says and does is subjected to scrutiny, the most valuable way to attract leads and sales is through education and trust. The vehicle for education and building trust is content marketing.
What Delivering Real Value Means Today
Real value is manifested in the content you inspire, create and publish.
- Informative, helpful content that educates your buyer and helps them decide on their purchase.
- Informed customers make better decisions.
- Better decisions make happy, loyal customers.
- Happy, loyal customers are inspired to tell others....
What is the difference between content marketing and social media? And, with the burgeoning interest in the former, will the latter wane as a tactic or as a marketing term?
These were the questions posed to me by my very wise friend Jeff Cohen of the SocialMediaB2B blog. Jeff asked several other content/social thinkers and consultant-types to weigh in as well.
Here’s what I said:
Content marketing is a device used by companies to educate, inform or entertain customers or prospects by creating attention or causing behavior that results in leads, sales or advocacy. Social media is used by customers and prospects to communicate among themselves, and occasionally with companies. This communication can result in leads, sales or advocacy, but is often less structured and conversational, and can be reactive too, as social media is increasingly used as a customer support channel.
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....
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Interesting social media/social marketing case study lessons on where and how to allocate resources. Great social media lessons.