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Nine months ago, I analyzed a report that would transform not only my role on the HubSpot blogging team, but also the whole blog's editorial strategy. The results have been nothing short of eye-opening. And I'm not just talking about the findings from the report -- I'm also talking about the business results we've generated from the shift we made in our blogging strategy because of those findings.
That shift is an ongoing internal project we call "historical optimization." The goal? Update old blog content and generate more traffic and leads from it in the process.
Great for us, right? Hang on -- it's great for you, too. I'm writing about all this because any experienced blogger who's tasked with growing and scaling the results they generate from their blog needs to know about it. The thing is, no one is really talking about it ... yet....
How do you find, build, foster, and manage influencer relationships? Three subject-matter experts – all influencers themselves – offer valuable how-to tips.
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....
Demand marketing combines content marketing, public relations (PR), and social media to create the perfect outreach vessel, and this infographic dives right in on how this approach can be used to bring your message to the exact place you need it: right in front of your customers.
70 percent of consumers prefer getting to know a company via articles rather than ads. Don’t get lost at sea with your marketing plan – You need all three components in order to keep your ship afloat....
If you don’t use content marketing, there is a big chance your brand gets left behind, and it’s your competitors (who’re using content marketing) that run away with your customers.
You can’t afford to let that happen.
You must learn to not just survive but thrive in a landscape that is constantly changing. While there is no easy way of doing this and it is imperative you do the hard yards, there are a few not-so-clandestine secrets that can make your job a little easier.
Let’s unravel them....
Ten years ago, AdAge published a survey of young adults which asked them what sources of information they trusted most to inform a purchase decision: nearly seven of ten identified word-of-mouth as the most influential tactic to them. This is when 2 percent of all adults used social media on any given day.
In 2015, social networks have demonstrably changed the word-of-mouth distribution model. Forty-seven percent of all U.S. adults use Facebook daily, 25 times the number of total daily social media users a decade earlier. While Jonah Berger’s research in Contagious: Why Things Catch On indicates that face-to-face word-of-mouth is more effective than social media word-of-mouth, social media is not an insignificant contributor to word-of-mouth “buzz.”
What I want to do in this piece is highlight nine diverse word-of-mouth campaigns....
Consider this: Each month, U.S. consumers are engaging with media across a spectrum of devices. In Q4 2014, traditional TV reached an average of 285 million viewers each month with more than 181 million of these consumers watching time-shifted TV. In terms of mobile and computer users, 122 million viewers watched video on a smartphone, 146 million watched video on the Internet and 164 million people used an app/web on a smartphone. Radio is also a vibrant means of engaging with content, reaching 258 million listeners per month.
While the average American adult spent nearly a week (149 hours 14 minutes) on average watching traditional television each month in fourth-quarter 2014, other ways to connect with content were desirable as well. In that same quarter, U.S. adults spent well over 15 hours each month watching time-shifted content, close to 30 hours using the Internet on a computer, and over 43 hours using any app/web on a smartphone!
In addition, consumer’s monthly time spent listening to radio was also a resounding 58 hours and 36 minutes.Consumers are also spending a lot of time on social media: 133 million are connecting via computer, 142 million are using social media on an app or smartphone, and 124 million are using social media on the web on a smartphone....
SUMMARY: We recently published data about how customers want to communicate with companies. A MarketingSherpa reader wrote in to ask for empirical data showing how different age groups and generations prefer to communicate with companies. In this Chart of the Week article, we take a deeper dive into the data to discover how age affects channel preference....
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...
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....
B2B marketers also need an artistic side to go with their scientific roles in attracting potential buyers.
One of my favorite books of all time is David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart in which he highlights the ways in which we’re deluded into thinking we are rationale individuals and yet we all fall prey to the whims of psychology. The same is true for marketing psychology and I felt compelled to put this guide together on nine ways marketers can use it to influence consumer behaviour....
In a global world, brands need to speak a lot of different customers’ languages. And, as mobile, social and software increasingly break down traditional communications borders to transform how brands communicate with consumers, marketing leaders are facing new strategic challenges as they look to develop global marketing fluency....
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Everyone makes it sound so easy. Post a few times on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and the traffic will pour in.
In reality, it’s not easy. And like with anything else, you need to spend some time learning how to do it properly.
I assure you it’s possible. My nutrition blog case study received over 9,000 visits from Facebook alone last month, despite being a new blog.
But as I noted in that second-month update, it could be doing even better. My friend Mike, who is running the site, is a really smart guy, but it’s still taking him some time to really understand how to use social media to its fullest potential.
You should care about social media traffic because it is one of the biggest referrers of traffic at your disposal. In early 2015, social media traffic made up 31% of overall traffic.
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....
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 order for the model to work, however, businesses first need to develop a strong following on social media. "If you have 10,000 followers on Facebook or Instagram, hopefully you can convert 1 percent a week on sales," he says. This allows for experimentation with both product design and marketing strategy; John advises that entrepreneurs consistently play around with both, using social media to "see what works."
Time spent as both an entrepreneur in the fashion industry and a host on Shark Tank has taught John a lot about how brands can go about successfully building a loyal social media following: Here are three of his strategies....
According to the “Customer Experience Optimization Report” by Econsultancy and Ensighten, 96% of company marketers and agency respondents (including vendors and consultancies) consider customer experience optimization somewhat important or critical.
Marketers who take pride in their customers' experiences can leave a major (paw) print on their organizations. In fact, 94% of marketers and 79% of agency respondents say that higher engagement and conversion rates are among the many benefits of customer experience optimization. Better brand perception and loyalty (66%, 47%); renewal, cross-sell, and upsell (50%, 41%), and increased average order value (22%, 29%) are also benefits for marketers and agency professionals, respectively....
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....
In summary, the article argues that social media does not contribute to sales in a measurable way and, therefore, is a hype-ridden waste of time.
Unfortunately, by defining the value of social media purely in terms of sales, the author ignores the value of social media in building relationships with customers, offering responsive technical support, and engaging efforts to establish a sustainable base of consumer advocates.
As an academic, the author has impeccable and impressive credentials. However, this is one of those times we must ask people working in the field for their comment. Therefore, I invited top several marketing and analyst practitioners to share their thoughts...
'‘Is Social Media just Media? The Future of Paid, Earned and Content’ – MRY’s Matt Britton, Lisa Weinstein from Starcom Mediavest and Mike Shields from The Wall Street Journal had an interesting panel discussion that addressed everything from Facebook going public to Apple TV coming out of the shadows. There were some starkly overpowering themes that every stakeholder needs to consider with respect to paid, earned and content.
Forrester Research said it best, “the forces of digital revolution have reached critical mass…the digital revolution threatens every incumbent firm in every industry.” The only cure for disruption is innovation and transformation. And yet, according to a recent study by Boston Consulting Group, 75% of business transformations fall short.v If ever it felt like being between a rock and a hard place, it’s now.
The irony is that one of the biggest causes of disruption, technology, is also one of the keys to transformation. The other big factor producing an almost constant state of disruption is the change in the way people engage with brands and interact with each other. The popular wisdom is that this is the fault of the millennial generation. They don’t act like their parents. Well, that’s been true of every generation.
But what is different this time is in concert with the advances of technology and the uncertainty of the economy, the age of sharing is replacing the age of coveting. Millennials don’t need to own their own car, they can rent a Zipcar. They’re quite happy subscribing to a service rather than outright being it....
The last 48 hours of my life were total madness. This is what I did.
Since I’m involved with startups on a daily basis, working on product development and (business) strategy, I’ve always been keeping lists of interesting tools and resources that could be interesting to use. Thinking of something I could create, I thought it would be fun to build a simple and useful site that could help makers find resources and tools while building their startup.
The first thing I did was writing down all categories I could think of that would suit a startup’s needs. I ended up with 50, and made a huge Excel sheet where I entered all the stuff I’d already saved. From there on I started collecting more resources and filling up the empty spaces....
Forget metrics and marketing objectives. Ask yourself what business challenges the marketing team is accountable for solving. Then, set the content performance indicators based on the ultimate results you want to bring to the table. Not every type of content will resonate with all audiences at any stage in their buying journey. That’s why you need a strategy.
As you approach content marketing, set your priorities before you decide on formats or frequency. Ask yourself questions like: - Do we need to build more brand awareness, because buyers don’t even know who we are?
- Do we need to get more traffic to our website?
- Do we need to do a better job of engaging online visitors?
- Do we need more email subscribers, and more contact names for sales?
- Do we need to do a better job of nurturing our leads, or cross-selling products to our customers?...
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![How To Thrive In An Evolving Content Marketing Landscape [VIDEO] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/C9aVLEHktDmQVK4Lr6dXvzl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
Pamela Vaughan shares a valuable blogging it's a strategy that is highly recommended. 10/10