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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....
During November 2016, HubSpot launched a free Content Marketing Certification course. The course offers 10 classes covering the following topics:
- Understanding Content Marketing (class length – 14:41)
- The Power of Storytelling (class length – 24:55)
- Generating Content Ideas (class length – 15:29)
- Planning a Long-Term content Strategy (class length – 19:00)
- Building a Content Creation Framework (class length – 20:11)
- Becoming an Effective Writer (class length – 22:48)
- Extending the Value of Your Content Through Repurposing (class length – 24:47)
- How to Effectively Promote Content (class length – 22:07)
- Measuring and Analyzing Your Content (class length – 26:19)
- Developing a Growth Marketing Mentality (class length – 20:24)
The free certification course is designed to provide foundational principles needed to become an effective content marketer....
Visual content, done well, can be incredibly popular. Infographics, videos, data visualizations, and other forms of visual content can generate tons of engagement and attract links to your site.
More importantly, visuals help tell your story. Visual content can be an incredibly powerful marketing tool, one that helps your target audience remember you – better than a 1,000 word text article alone (no matter how great it is) ever could.
Here’s what’s trending in visual content marketing for 2017, according to a survey of 300 online marketers from Venngage, a platform that helps you create free infographics....
Marketo vs. Eloqua vs. HubSpot. Kapost vs. Newscred vs. Percolate. Sprinklr vs. Buffer vs. Hootsuite. And so on, and so on. The list of marketing technology vendors keeps growing. Which makes sorting through and implementing those martech tools a job in itself. But how does the explosion in martech help your marketing team get sh*t done today? It doesn't. So, while waiting for you to evaluate, decide, deploy, integrate, and optimize the spaghetti of solutions, try feeding your team a few lightweight apps that cost next to nothing and are dead simple to use....
If you’re trying to increase the number of leads that your business gets from online channels such as SEO, PPC advertising or Social Media Marketing, you need to consider how well you’re attracting prospects who are top of the funnel. These are people who are part of your target market, but who may not be ready to purchase a product or service at this time. Draw these people in with top of funnel content.
I think it helps to visualize the entire buying process in the shape of a funnel. People at the top of the funnel (often shortened to “TOFU”) are doing general online research related to your industry. Continuing down the funnel, we describe people who are further along in the buying process as being in the middle of the funnel (MOFU) or at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU)....
Many small business owners today think that owning a brick-and-mortar business excuses them from having to learn and master digital marketing.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, mastering SEO and local optimization for your locally run business will bring a higher ROI than just about any other marketing activity you use.
It’s one of the quickest ways to quickly and simply (notice I did not say easily) get your business in front of thousands of new eyes and earn customers for life. With a few simple steps, you can set yourself on the path to long term digital marketing success.
But how do you start marketing your brick-and-mortar business in the digital world? What steps do you need to take over the next 30, 60, or 90 days to successfully grow your online reach and increase sales like you have never seen before?
I’m glad you asked.
In this article, I’m going to give you a step-by-step and day-by-day plan for marketing your brick-and-mortar business....
Four years ago, I shared that your content must resonate with your audience so they follow you where you want to take them.
I also asked what kind of content universally resonates with people. It’s content that: - We never get tired of
- We always have time for
- We don’t forget
- We want to share with others
This is the kind of content we must create if our goal is to influence, inspire, and move to action the unique group of people we have chosen to reach.
To help, I originally created a list of 21 types of content we all love to consume.
You know how much hard work it is creating content, don’t you? Well… for all that hard work, you need to get some rewards for doing it! This is where a content conversion funnel comes in.
A content conversion funnel is where you share a piece of content that gets attention from your potential audience and then you lead them down a path to a potential sale.
This could be text, images, video, voice… whatever form your content takes.
In this article, we break down some examples of content conversion funnels and, of course, we take a look at the tech side to building the funnels....
In this post, we’re going to review 15 marketing guides that can speed up your success.
We’ll look at the finer details of each guide, ensuring that you have a clear understanding as to how you can use each one to your advantage.
By the end of this post, you’ll have a better idea of how each guide can push you down the path to reaching all of your content marketing related goals....
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....
Despite much of the hype around social media “Buy” buttons and shoppable links, social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest continue to drive only a small portion of online retail sales.
In fact, according to the Custora E-commerce Pulse Holidata Report (Disclosure: Custora is my employer), less than two percent of e-commerce sales this past holiday season were attributed to social media.
While many other marketing channels saw significant year-over-year growth, the percentage of orders from social media actually decreased from last year.
The bottom line is that when it comes to driving sales, marketers have yet to unlock the formula to produce real results from social. While the jury may still be out on whether social media will live up to its hype, the following are some best practices for marketers looking to optimize their return on social media.
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!...
The Force was strong with Lego this year.
The toy maker, one of many brands that partnered with Disney and its record-setting Star Wars: The Force Awakens, outpaced every other brand in 2015 in online engagement, according to data from social analytics firm ListenFirst Media.
Bolstered by collaborations with Star Wars, Marvel and The Simpsons, Lego collected some 727,023,059 engagements this year, per the company's Digital Engagement Rating, which measures engagements across a variety of social platforms. Lego was especially strong on YouTube with its vast array of commercial spots, becoming the most-engaged brand on the video platform with some 1,841 uploads this year....
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So the question shouldn’t be how can I create content on the cheap, but rather, how can I do more with less?
The answer: create masterful content that is worth more.
Content that generates traffic. Content that inspires shares. Content that gets written and talked about. Content that earns conversions. Content that wins trust. Content that positions you as an authority. Content that wins business, retains customers, and invokes referrals....
As social media marketing becomes more challenging and time-consuming, it’s time to get more organised when managing your brand’s social presence. It’s not easy handling a brand’s social presence, but its successful management can lead to great results. Social networks keep growing and they are heading into a more mature phase, which means that the challenges grow for every brand that tries to stay competent. No matter what goals you set for the new year, you still need to stay on top of your brand’s social media marketing and the right checklist may help you with all the tasks you need to do at the beginning of the year....
I recently wrote an article about how you can "crush it" on social media in 2017--and the real truth everyone needs to hear in terms of actually seeing a worthwhile return on your investment. However, based on the amount of people who have reached out asking how to formulate effective social media strategies for the new year, I thought it would be helpful to dive a bit more into the weeds. Cutting right to the core, here is the number one rule every single business, brand, freelancer and online influencer needs to remember when it comes to social media marketing: Don't try to be everywhere at once....
Are you looking for the newest social media tips and techniques? Want to know how the experts are staying ahead of the social media marketing curve? We asked top social media pros to share their favorite tips for getting the most out of social media. In this article you’ll discover 25 ways to improve your marketing and save time....
My job as the Social Marketing Manager at Instapage is to be on the lookout for the latest trends then figure out how we can use them to promote our brand. We identify trends here two ways. The first is by testing. Every day we're trying new methods of reaching social users. Through time we're able to establish some new norms, and discover what others are doing to successfully move the social media marketing needle. Second, we listen to our users. By listening to their feedback, then taking it a step further and reading between the data points into what type of content they are engaging with over time, we come to understand what works and what doesn’t. Here are a few of the new best practices and emerging trends that are happening right now on social media....
So we need to do some of the following despite the inner voice trying to keep us plugging away.
- Reading and researching
- Acting on the ideas that emerge
- Creating
- Publishing
- Building digital assets.
To help you find some inspiration I have been crawling through the most shared content marketing articles on BuzzSumo and come up with these 10 “must read” posts on content marketing.
So if you are a savvy digital marketer or an entrepreneur that understands the importance of building great online content, then these are worth a long glance....
Are you ready to give content marketing the time, money and resources it deserves?
While your answer may be yes, it’s never easy to get up and running with a new marketing strategy. There are questions to answer, challenges to overcome and various tasks that need addressed.
With 88% of B2B marketers currently using content marketing as part of their overall strategy, neglecting to do so will put you in the minority.
As you get started, you’ll soon find a variety of ways to better research, plan, create and distribute content.
What I’ve created here is a list of content marketing tools that you’ll want by your side as you roll out your first campaign.
These tools cover the most important details you’ll need to address before you get started, as well as in the early days (and weeks) of running your campaign....
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....
This past year, we've seen the importance of visual content emphasized by the changes that occurred across almost every major social network, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. At the same time, both video and infographics have become powerful tools for brands looking to communicate more easily with their readers.
To help you keep pace with these trends, let's take a look at some statistics that demonstrate the impact visual content has on reach, engagement, and sales....
Social media networks are continuously adding cool little features here and there, and it can be tough to keep up -- especially if there's no big announcement.
For instance, did you know you can add life events and milestones to your personal and business Pages on Facebook? That you can remove certain users' tweets from your Twitter feed without having to officially unfollow them? That you can add hidden relationship notes to your LinkedIn connections? (That one's my favorite.)
There are so many cool things our favorite social networks can do that may have fallen through the cracks. To help you discover these hidden treasures, we rounded up 20 of the lesser-known features on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest. Check 'em out....
Content marketing is not as complex and complicated as we make it be. You don’t have to be an Einstein to be successful. Einstein himself said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
So, let’s talk about a simple content marketing strategy!
Many marketers and sales professionals still struggle with the concept of modern marketing. They struggle with social media profiles, improving their reputation currency, and using content to develop an audience – so the by-product of all of these actions is more sales and higher value sales....
Via Stefano Principato
Wish you didn’t have to keep creating new content?
Do you need a better return on the content you create?
Having a plan in place for posting, and repurposing your best content will give your content a longer life and make the most of the time you spend creating it.
In this article you’ll discover how to get more value out of your social media content....
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![31 Types of Content We Crave [Infographic] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/vfdXRAWq06YDq62E0Z1NeDl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
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!