Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

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....

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....

There is no fun in “it depends” when it comes to content length so here are a few guidelines, from tweets to blogs.

How long should everything be?

When Twitter was born, suddenly we learned to converse more efficiently, directly, and creatively. Once in a while, we still complain regarding Twitter’s 140-rule but according to a research by Buddy Media, you won’t be needing all 140 characters when you want to get your message across. The research found that tweets shorter than 100 characters get a 17% higher engagement rate. A similar research by Track Social in a study of 100 well-known brands garnered the same result.

Why less than 100? The research said that these “medium” length tweets get more re-tweets because they are long enough for the original poster to say something of value and short enough for a re-tweeter to add his or her comment....

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....

So what are social media’s biggest questions?

To find out, we asked.

We solicited feedback and questions from our list of 40,000 email subscribers, asking each of you to ask us anything. And you did! We received hundreds of questions in response, each of which we’re eager to research and reply to. For starters, we grabbed 17 frequent asked questions about social media marketing. Come see how we might answer them....

A brand is essentially the sum of what people say about it. We’re connected and social now. And that’s not all. We’re hypercritical, hyperactive and so hyper-online, we’re barely offline when we sleep.

...Along the way, it’s nearly impossible to avoid subjects such as blogging, search, social, and some of the other tricks of the trade. Why? Because the best website in the world won’t make you a dime unless people come to it and find themselves engaged with the content there. There I go again. I can’t stop spouting the gospel.

I want my clients to understand the key to effective online marketing, or any marketing, is to get customers to know, like and trust you. That’s a high bar seldom achieved with a heavy dependence on ad or brochure-like communications. Ugh. Stop me now before I talk you into doing content marketing against your will....