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You hear a lot of talk these days about crowdsourcing — the idea of using a large online community to complete tasks as diverse as compiling an online encyclopedia (thank you Wikipedia!) or creating a database of popular bars that directs you to watering holes around the world. It’s such a great concept, and yet, based on my conversation with other B2B content marketers, I’ve found that it hasn’t been incorporated into many content creation and promotion strategies. That’s why I’ve put together this short list of questions that will help you gauge how good a job you are (or aren’t) doing of crowdsourcing your content creation efforts. If you can’t answer yes to all of them, chances are that you’re missing out on a few opportunities for easy wins....
If you are serious about turning a blog into income and then your business, then laying the right foundations is important. It means sitting down and doing some planning. It means asking some questions What am I going to focus on? What should the branding and design be like? What should I develop it on? The list goes on. If you do mean business then you need to create the right framework and foundation for your blog. A framework for the future Sometimes a little thought, the right framework and resources can be time saving and stress relieving in the long run. Here are 10 key building blocks to get you started....
How to get better social marketing and content marketing results... A lot of our digital generation publishers are enjoying the benefit of the large audience created for them by their prominence in the social media. Notwithstanding, some are still trying to find their feet. They aren't able to strategize properly, execute and incorporate their plan into a unified program. Here are eight social media questions that publishers should be asking themselves....
Social media and content distribution are often chief tactics included in a content marketing strategy; but, it’s not possible (or recommended) to share your own content 100 percent of the time. As a result, having a content curation and/or aggregation plan might be something to consider as a part of your long-term content marketing strategy. There are many tools available to aid in finding industry-specific quality content that you can share with your audience to continually position your brand as an expert. Additionally, these content pieces can serve as inspiration for future content concepts. Below are nine tools and concepts to utilize for content curation...
Today, the entire business community is aware of the fact that social media marketing (SMM) is a hugely rewarding way to retain existing customers.... Social Media has remarkably altered the way people connect, interact, and share information. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are the most prominent sites where social interactions constantly take place. SMM may be defined as a method to profitably use social media to build relationships, obtain repeat business, and attract to convert prospects through friends sharing with friends. In short, SMM is word-of-mouth powered publicity leading to enlargement of customer-base. SMM means connecting with customers and prospects where they hang out online and actively participate in conversations about the topics most interesting to them. Remember, there are already ongoing conversations between your customers and prospects and it is up to you to take advantage. As a rule, people like doing business with people they know and transact business with people they trust. Though prospects are available aplenty, successfully connecting with them calls for a well-conceived and meticulously executed strategy....
Excellent learning... One of the simplest ways to boost your conversion rate is by tweaking your headline copy. If you don’t believe me… just look at KISSmetrics.com, I was able to boost my conversion rate by 40% just by adjusting the headline copy. That’s right… 40%. So what was the original headline? It was… KISSmetrics helps you get actionable metrics for your business. And the new one is… Google Analytics tells you what happened, KISSmetrics tells you who did it. So how can you boost your conversion rate through headlines? Well, there are a few simple strategies you can test....
Although social media has been around for a few years, plenty of businesses and entrepreneurs still get it wrong. When planning your social marketing strategy and being active on social channels, avoid these 5 common content mistakes....
As Americans turn their attention to the web for both professional and social purposes, marketers will follow suit, as evidenced in Global Web Index’s “A Global Analysis of How Consumers Spend Their Media Time” report. The data found global digital marketing, including social media and mobile internet usage, accounts for 57 percent of daily media time. Overall, consumers spend 5.6 hours per day engaging with digital content. People dedicate 10.7 hours a day consuming all forms of media. While the U.S. market is slightly behind emerging markets like Argentina and Thailand in digital consumption, American brands still see the future of advertising online. In fact, Ascend2 found that social media marketing remains a top priority for many organizations, as both B2Bs and B2Cs use web content to drive website traffic. A significant percentage of businesses also use social media content to improve search engine rankings, despite not fully understanding how social influences SEO.
While putting together our recent series of posts looking at how major brands use the four main social networks I’ve somehow managed to overlook Coca-Cola, so today I have rectified that startling omission. Coca-Cola is one of those instantly recognisable brands that would rake in fans and followers without even trying, so it’s to its credit that it has active account across the social web. So, here’s a quick look at how it uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+....
...Adobe’s 2013 Video Benchmark Report, released today, showed how incorporating video content in social media campaigns can help brands and media companies get better results. In 2012, video social engagement rose from 42 percent to 70 percent compared to 2011, the study found. But “for marketers and advertisers wanting to know how to unlock the potential on social,” Gaffney said, “it becomes very clear that one of the biggest levers that they’re not pulling as hard as they could is video.” Getting the content can be a challenge for marketers — videos don’t produce themselves — but Gaffney said the increase in engagement and reach will be worth the effort.
According to the report, social media users are more than twice as likely to engage in video content than non-video content, meaning that videos get more likes, comments, and shares than photos, links, and text. Viral reach for video, which is measured by the number of people who see a post in their feeds through friends or a brand page, accounts for 77 percent of all reach on social media sites....
... Utilizing content marketing as part of a digital marketing strategy can prove to be beneficial for businesses and brands if these strategies are well executed. However, many marketers unfamiliar with content marketing don’t know where to begin to develop a successful plan. They understand the concept, but still don’t know how to get started. In this post, seven content marketing experts share their advice for those looking to begin their content marketing journey....
There are several people asking the same question: “How Long Does It Take for Content Marketing to Work?” In today’s video, Arnie Kuenn answers the question in several ways... ...What’s it really going to take to get that payoff? Well, this slide here shows you that both business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies with 100 to 200 pages will generate 2.5 times as many leads compared to those who have 50 pages or fewer. It gives you an idea of where you are with your website. If you’re far exceeding that, you have thousands of pages, well then you’re in a different league. But basically for small businesses, this is the target you want to have. Companies that blog more than 15 times per month, we used to tell our clients that they really need to be looking at trying to blog or post new content on their website 3 to 4 times a week. This pretty much right there, 15 times a month for some new content. If you do that, you’re looking at generating five times as much traffic to your website compared to people who aren’t blogging or aren’t generating any kind of new content at all. That’s significant. That’s five times as much traffic....
Not to take away from the amazing results that can be achieve by reaching a large and highly targeted audience with your blog content, but not every benefit of maintaining a business blog is dependent on having huge readership. The reality for most business blogs, at least when they’re first starting out, is that readership can be low… very low. It can be discouraging to those who are contributing content, and working like crazy to keep a blog afloat to not see unique visitors, page views and subscribers come in droves from the get-go. Additionally, it can be tough to justify the ROI of your business’ blog to supervisors, management or ownership without having incredible reach. If this feels familiar, don’t sweat it. There is huge value to be had in maintaining a business blog, even if your readership is low....
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We all need to acquire new customers to make our products and businesses work. Whether there are a few users paying big bucks or thousands visiting your platform for free, how you get and retain customers is what is important. But ask yourself: are you really ready for more customers? Is your team set up to handle an influx of users? What’s your promotion strategy – inbound marketing or traditional PR? This extensive guide will walk you through what user acquisition is and how to execute a plan....
If you want to be a successful marketer today, you need to be part data analyst and part publisher. We hear a lot about the former, but the latter is critical too. We’re all publishers (that includes me and our own marketing and sales site, of course) but many companies are only starting to come to terms with what that actually means in terms of talent and processes.
Anyone who’s a marketing leader in a large organization should watch this video. Robert Tas, managing director and head of digital marketing at JP Morgan Chase, explains what’s important when it comes to becoming a sophisticated publishing company. As he says, one of the areas JP Morgan Chase sees as a big opportunity is content experiences across all sorts of devices 24 hours a day.
It requires a fundamentally different way to look at information, and how to present it to people. It’s part of the content avalanche I’ve discussed earlier. Part of the great complexity around content is not just generating it, but the pipes you need to have in place to vet it and place it wherever (and whenever) your customers are. So this isn't about managing writers and designers; it's about publishing, which means the ability to manage a sophisticated content supply chain with processes, checks, oversight, metrics, and operations....
More brands and people continue filling the channels with their blogs, infographics, white papers, etc. As a result, we’re experiencing a deluge of content, most of it suffering from over-messaged, self-important corporate sales talk, or worse, shoddy workmanship. There’s no better example of this issue than our own marketing space where the effort to produce consistent content creates an ever increasing level of drivel. In fact, there’s so much “me, too” content, getting beyond a headline skim requires some real shake-up in the social media marketplace or a dramatic post. When readers find themselves inundated with ever increasing quantities of the same, creators find themselves producing content with diminishing value. The situation devolves to the point where content becomes spam. We all know what happens to spam. It doesn’t get read, it’s unsubscribed from, deleted, and relegated to the annals of digital indexing somewhere deep in Google....
I’ve been in several duels myself. Not of the pistol-slinging variety — but the copywriting kind. You’ll probably recognize the scenario … I trot out my idea. The client cringes and says, “It will never work.” He’s got a better idea. “Fine,” I say, “let’s test them both and see which one works better.” And so, we let the marketplace declare the winner....
Flipboard, Zite, Pulse, and their peers are giving news companies a second chance at dealing with the rise of aggregators. Will they come out of this round any better than the last?. What are we to think when the aggregators start getting aggregated?... ...It’s absolutely clear why companies are (over-)spending on mobile aggregator plays. Mobile is the greenest field around. We — news consumers — are flocking there. The speed of our migration is breathtaking. About a third of all traffic to news sites now comes from mobile, up from just 25 percent a year ago. Tablet usage, as early adopters are joined by legions of others, keeps growing, and smartphones (which just officially passed dumb phones) are markedly increasing news audience consumption worldwide. (The New York Times debuted a new mobile site yesterday, with the promise of more mobile movement to come.) The common belief: Mobile traffic will exceed web traffic within two to three years. But mobile monetization still gives everyone fits. Match up the 33 percent usage number for news publishers against ad monetization that amounts to no more than 10 percent of their overall digital advertising; for most, it’s considerably less than that....
With social selling, you’re no longer simply pushing information about products and services out to your audience. Instead, you’re discovering what they’re passionate about, which can lead naturally—organically—into a discussion of how you can solve a problem or improve their lives, and why your company is the right choice to help them,” Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara said recently, as I was researching technologies that enable this kind of social approach. Building a socialized selling strategy involves completing the following three basic stages: Research: This stage is all about identifying your ideal customer – also called your Buyer Persona – then finding out what their fears are when buying your product: Content: This stage is all about creating content that speaks to the buyer persona you identified in the first step. Distribution: This stage is about getting the word out about your content, then using the results to refine future content.
There's never been a better time to be a marketer — and content marketing is probably the biggest, most exciting opportunity of all. Here are four content marketing lessons that will help agencies ... ... while criticizing agencies is like shooting big fish in a small barrel (low barriers to entry means our average performance is shockingly low), I thought it was important to turn the tables a bit and look at this issue from the other side. So here are my own thoughts on the issue, compiled as four truths about content marketing clients. If you’re a client-side marketer, rest assured: I don’t mean you — I mean those clueless guys in the office across the way....
Today is my first day as a marketing fellow at HubSpot. In my last job, I was the editor in chief of a technology news site called ReadWrite. Before that I was the technology editor at Newsweek, and before that I was a technology columnist at Forbes. I’ve spent my entire career in the media business, and now I’ve bailed out. In the end it was a pretty simple decision. I came to the realization that advertising is dying, and therefore any business that depends on advertising to pay the bills is a dead end. I also had grown less and less enchanted with the kind of work I was doing as a “mainstream” journalist. Media companies need a new way to make money -- one that doesn’t depend on advertising. But so far nobody has come up with anything. That wouldn’t be so bad, if at least they were aware of this problem. The truly scary thing to me is that publishers either aren’t aware of this, or won’t admit it....
... According to a study by SimplyMeasured, 69 of the world’s top 100 brands now have Pinterest accounts, and Pinterest is still driving more traffic to websites and blogs than Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, or YouTube. For right now, Pinterest doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, and the stats for marketers are still very encouraging. One in five Pinterest users have purchased something they’ve seen on the site, and when they do buy, they spend around $80 per purchase — twice that of Facebook buyers. And now, Pinterest is shaking things up — there have been some very interesting changes to the service in the last few months. Let’s take a look at some of these recent additions and modifications, and what they mean for content marketers....
Guest blogger Eric Schwartzman shares an interesting perspective on social media strategy – the Homeland / Embassy model.... ...The importance of proximity is huge. We don’t have that advantage on a social network. We may get to use Facebook for free, but our competitors can buy ads against our conversations. We can’t even buy out the ads that appear alongside our posts. The option just doesn’t exist. When we engage prospects and customers, we need to be mindful that it’s always going to be easier for competitors to siphon away our traffic on Facebook than from our own site, where we control the layout and the conversation opportunities. On your own website, you control the user experience. On your own website, you lure new visitors with content. As long as the content intersects with their interests, you can present click-through options in the sidebar that generate leads, capture email registrations and drive sales. That’s why your website is your sovereign nation. It’s your homeland. Your Facebook Page, on the other hand, or your Twitter feed, are more like embassies. When a country has an embassy in a foreign country, diplomatic immunity aside, it must abide by the local laws of the host nation. Facebook and Twitter are also sovereign nations. You’ll find the laws of those lands in their Terms of Service. Violate them and they can export you anytime....
For the latest in our series of posts looking at how the world’s biggest brands use social I’ve turned the spotlight on Microsoft. Bill Gates’ empire still looms large over the global software market, though its fortunes are often overshadowed by Apple’s astonishing level of success. And much like Google, Microsoft also runs a few of its own social platforms – enterprise network Yammer and Pinterest clone Socl. So it’s interesting to see how Microsoft makes use of other social networks to promote its products and maintain its fortunes....
Twitter is an effective social media marketing tool for your business. With over 500 million users, your business needs to be here.... Setting up your business Twitter profile is easier than you think. This simple step-by-step guide shows you how . (Note: The following is an example only, made for Wishpond (@wishpond). @SocialUserOnly Twitter account is not in use. Do not follow!) 1. Go to Twitter.com and sign up. Use your name, your email, and a password. Use your real name and email. You will be able to customize your profile later. Note: Twitter only allows one account per email. If you have a p ersonal Twitter account, you will need to use a different email to set up your business Twitter account....
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Kevin Cain shares four gtreat ways to crowd source content including:
- leverage customer comments
- source surveys and polls
- work with influencers
- take advantage of social media.
No better fundamentals.