Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

If you are creating content for your website without a strategy or have clients who haven’t tracked any of their on-site content creation, it’s probably time for a content marketing audit.

An on-site content marketing audit allows you to gather insight from work that has been done, determine work that needs to be done, and decide how to direct your future strategy.

Go through the following steps to identify the best-performing content on your website from social media, link generation, user feedback, and keyword relevancy perspective and create a content audit template. Through this process, you will collect, review, and analyze data to produce actionable takeaways and build a strategic on-site content marketing plan for the future....

To improve the impact of content marketing, companies need to put together a data-driven content marketing strategy, part of which includes looking at buyers’ personas and buyers’ goals.

Below are five steps to build a to connect buyers’ goals to your content marketing strategy.

Here are 5 steps you can use to connect your content to buyers’ goals....

With so many campaigns targeting every conceivable consumer demographic, it’s become increasingly difficult for businesses and marketers to ensure their message is heard.

This is one reason why it’s important to give your initiatives more substance and tap into consumer psychology. Fortunately, there are many factors that influence the buying decision process, and as such, there are many points at which you can secure a conversion.

Here’s how marketers and business owners can leverage a variety of approaches to influence buyer behavior....

Whether you’re starting a social media marketing plan from scratch or redefining an existing social media strategy, we’ve found that taking a moment to reflect on some key questions can be a really valuable exercise.

These Big Important questions—capital “B,” capital “I”—can help point you down the best path with your social media efforts and ensure that the time you spend is aimed at the right places and toward your top goals.

I’ve listed here 25 of the questions that I’ve found most helpful when coming up with social media strategies for my personal brand and for sharing with Buffer. Plus, I’m happy to share how I think about answering these questions as well. It’d be great to hear your thoughts and experience on the topic, too!...

I’ve found that many brands pay for content and software and then realize they don’t know what to do with it. And that’s OK. Content Marketing is still relatively new to many of us and we’re here to help.

I have also seen many ominous signs from brands that showed they just weren’t ready for content marketing.  And that’s OK too. Content marketing is a strategic solution to a strategic problem. Content should be an asset inside your company. One that provides a real and measurable ROI. Content is not a cost. And we are here to help show you how.

We created this document, and these 21 questions, to help facilitate the discussion and guide the journey towards a documented content marketing strategy....

The way I see it, demand generation is the direct opposite of the old-school cold-calling approach. It's the process of turning cold leads into warm leads, then guiding those warm leads down your funnel towards a sales conversation. And for those who fall out of the funnel, it's the process of establishing regular touch points with them until they (a) become customers or (b) tell you to get lost. 

What demand generation is not is a campaign. The goal of demand generation is to establish relationships, some of which can go on for months or even years before the prospect is ready to enter a sales conversation....

I recently attended a workshop in which we created a customer-journey map for content planning. Before doing this exercise, I had only a fuzzy notion of what a customer-journey content map might look like, how to make one, and why anyone would bother.

It turns out, this map looks like a spreadsheet. You make one by filling the cells. You bother because doing so helps you answer the perennial question, What content shall we create?...

A much-ballyhooed Gallup study uncovered some ugly “truths” about social media, including a reputed inability to influence purchasing decisions. According to the study, 62 percent of Americans say Facebook, Twitter and their ilk have no influence on whether they purchase a product.

Although asking consumers to accurately recount the advertising methods that ultimately drove them to purchase is likely a fool’s errand, many marketers who have attempted to correlate standard social metrics to sales and other conversions have struggled to make a connection.

As a result, in many marketing shops the number of likes, shares and retweets a brand receives daily is lessening in importance. But that doesn’t mean social media offers nothing of value — advanced marketers are leveraging social data for reasons beyond direct marketing tactics....

When I went rock climbing for the first time, I had no idea what I was doing. My friends and I were complete newbies about ropes and rappelling and every other bit of jargon and technique that goes with climbing.

Developing a social marketing plan is sort of like rock climbing. Here's a basic checklist to help you get started....