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It is vital for organizations to examine their content creation strategies in light of the rapidly evolving content marketing industry. Find out what we see as 12 essential roles for the future.... ...As Robert Rose says, “In many businesses (especially in B2B), the marketing department is an order-taking, tactical function that runs on the hamster-wheel of demand generation, trying to keep up with “client” orders for new collateral, press releases, case studies and, at times, marketing-qualified leads (MQLs).” If our new call to arms is around creating and growing owned audiences, it’s clear that our marketing skill sets may be, well, a bit out of date. The new roles of content marketing While there is no perfect structure for a marketing organization, it’s apparent that we are starting to see marketing departments transform themselves into publishing organizations. And with that transformation comes a shift in the key business roles that marketers must now fill. Don’t think of the list below as new job titles, per se, but rather as the core competencies that need to be accounted for across the enterprise...
Jay Rosen asks, reasonably, that people start drawing useful distinctions between buzzy terms like content marketing, sponsored content, native advertising, and even brand journalism. Here’s my stab at it:
The Native Matrix - Who is it written by? Editorial staff, Sales staff, ad agency, Brand execs - Who is it published by? Publisher: Public relations, Sponsored content/ Native advertising, Brand journalism/Thought leadership or Brand: Content marketing, Marketing, Blogging *Sponsored content is designed to be read; native advertising is designed to be shared. None of these distinctions is hard and fast, of course, but at least it’s a start; basically, it all comes down to who writes the content in question....
LinkedIn may not be the most exciting or fun social network out there, but it’s an amazing tool for businesses – if you master it and make full use of its features you can really help your business in the long run. I personally use LinkedIn quite often for business reasons (what else, after all?) and I found it has lots of amazing benefits. LinkedIn is great for: - Networking - Lead generation - Promotional purposes (paid and un-paid) The trick with LinkedIn is to know all the little secrets so you can make full use of the popular social network. It has lots of interesting features that not everybody knows about and they launch new ones at a very rapid rate, probably due to their perpetually increasing number of users, so it can be very hard to keep up and know which features to use to get the most out of LinkedIn. This has been bugging me lately so I decided to make a to-the-point list with LinkedIn’s most relevant features for businesses....
Tips for developing a SEO content marketing strategy for your business blog. You need great content and a plan to get that coveted top spot. The coveted #1 position in Google is sought by everyone with a business site. How are you going to beat out everyone jockeying for that number 1 spot? You can make it to the top with a strategic SEO content marketing plan. Do you know what that means? Not certain your strategy is working? I’m sharing my 5 five tips to developing a SEO content marketing strategy that will send your business blog to the top. ...
Yowza! Take a look this huge list from Beth Kanter. Includes social media monitoring and a long list of tools for every social media need. Fill your hat... and your toolbox.
Content Marketing is the new buzzword. And as with buzzwords, every agency is trying to capture a slice of the action – but this means they all have their own definitions. Which leads to confusion. Naturally SEOs were the first to jump on Content Marketing as content and links are so intrinsically linked to success, but there’s a lot more to it than SEO. So to try and ease this confusion I spoke to our resident SEO specialist, David Freeman and we came up with this advice....
A recent study conducted by the online marketing firm Vertical Response and reported on in Forbes concludes that small businesses are spending more time on social media but struggling with the added workload it represents. Perhaps as a consequence, most are doing social media marketing in a vacuum because they’re not tracking results, which means they have no way of quantifying if their time and effort are paying off. “Our survey confirms that small businesses are understanding the value of social media,” says Vertical Response CEO and founder Janine Popick. “They’re spending more time doing it, and investing more money into it at a faster rate. But the extra work will likely lead to time management issues, especially for the small business owner who’s handling social media on top of all the other responsibilities of running a company. This implies that small businesses are in need of tactics and tools now to help them save time.”...
While social media appears to be ideally made for budget conscious marketing small business, the reality is that social media can be a resource hog. During 2012, small businesses stepped up their social media activity across a variety of social media platforms. With the exception of Facebook, where small businesses, like their larger counterparts, had followed the masses, these firms had limited participation on social media. More than four out of five small businesses had staked out their turf on Facebook as of December 2012, up seven percentage points from May 2012. While Facebook can be effective for consumer-oriented businesses and not-for-profits seeking to engage a mass audience, it’s not ideal for every business. Without time to examine the options available, many small businesses aren’t necessarily selecting the optimal social media platforms for their firm. While about 30% use LinkedIn, the top professional social platform, it’s mainly for their ability to reduce hiring costs, not marketing. The omission of blogs is surprising and may be attributable to the fact that many companies consider it content marketing, not social media. Blogs should be at the center of your social media strategy since they provide information that answers customers questions and shows them how to use their products. Further, beyond creating the posts and distributing them, blogs don’t require constant engagement like other social media venues. As a bonus, they support search optimization!...
It’s a wired world, so let's allow our products to help them market themselves! Here are five ideas you can use to do that.... If you sell a web app or a software product that has web elements, it’s time to consider how your product can help market itself. More and more we’re seeing marketing built into products, allowing the code to do some of the advertising work for you. Here are five methods to consider.
In the wake of Monday's Boston Marathon bombings, it's apparent that we need to continue the conversation about how people and brands communicate during times of tragedy and crisis. Here are some social dos and don'ts to help prepare for a tragedy.... Let’s face it, social media isn't always in the hands of accredited public relations professionals with years of crisis management experience on their resume. Does your community manager know the answers to these questions? Chances are if they don’t then neither does the organization: - Do we comment when there is a natural disaster or national tragedy? If so, what does that sound like? - Cease all scheduled or planned content for X period of time. - Check ad schedule and pull content promotion or campaigns for X amount of time....
...That’s why I’m writing this post. I’ve compiled a list of websites that produce great content, each of which has its own unique qualities. I’ll break them down and explain why they’re good and what you can take away. So whether you’re new to content marketing or have been involved in it for years, my goal for this blog post is that it will give you some ideas and inspiration. Now, let’s examine the best content sites and what we can all learn from them...
News today from down under that Qantas Airways is closing its Twitter PR account. What are they thinking? This is like going back to the media relations days of the caveman. Australian marketing magazine mUmBrella reports Qantas will shutter its Twitter news account on April 19th. It expects it’s online newsroom to deliver the news.
Video is a powerful way to reach audiences both for publishers and advertisers. Marketers already know people are watching online video more than ever. A new Adobe Digital benchmark report reveals what, when, and how people are watching.... Based on data recorded by the Adobe Marketing Cloud customers, video consumption has grown dramatically over the past two years. To put that into context, the 15 billion video streams measured in Q4 of 2012 are 11 times more than all of the U.S. movie ticket sales in 2012. Adobe’s research found: - Digital video consumption has grown 30 percent year over year in Q4 2012. - From Q3 to Q4 2012 alone, video consumption grew 13 percent. - There has been 50 percent growth in video streams since Q1 2011. - New TV and sports content drove the highest growth in video streams in Q4 2012. This means publishers should find ways to create personalized digital video experiences for their viewers, visitors, and advertisers. While most videos are consumed on PCs, views on mobile devices have tripled from 2011 to 2012. Publishers should look for opportunities to weave more video content into their marketing channels, such as social media....
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COUNTERPOINT... I'm probably not going to make friends in the public relations or journalism communities with this article, but here goes. I recently attended an event titled "Meet The Press" in which 5 local business journalists shared their thoughts on how businesses should approach them in order to get press coverage. I was struck by the journalists' imperious attitude. They covered things like how to email them, how often you need to follow up with them and generally how you can kiss their rings to potentially get press coverage. At a certain point, I heard Charlie Brown's mother's voice, but instead of "whah, whah, whah" I was hearing "me, me, me, me." What these journalists don't seem to realize is that they are being disrupted. Let me explain....
You must understand that social media marketing does not see you as equal to everyone else. Whether you are a blogger who has just started out, or a professional, then you must realize that in order to produce results on these platforms, you’re going to need certain social marketing skills to obtain the traffic, and finally the sale. I will be doing a series of guest posts on this blog that will cover major social update strategies for different platforms. Today I want to focus on driving traffic from Twitter, posting tweets, and using your blog as a mixture of success in social media....
Small business on a tight budget looking to promote their business in 2013 might want to consider making this the year they start tweeting. Twitter can be a great way to drive traffic to your website. Twitter is free to use and if done properly, tweeting can be a powerful tool in helping your site get found while raising your rankings on search engine results pages. One of the quickest and easiest viral campaigns you can start right away that can increase your SEO rankings is to start a Twitter petition....
It is very easy to confuse social media and social business. The graphic in this post, created by my colleague David Armano, is a great illustration of the differences between a social brand (for the purposes of this post, this is synonymous with social media) and social business. At a very high level, a social brand is what we all do from a communications perspective to include marketing, public relations, customer support and so on. So what is a social business strategy? It helps evolve the thinking and preparedness of an organization by bridging internal and external social initiatives, which results in a more collaborative company and shared value for all stakeholders (customers, partners, employees). If you study the above graphic, a social business is very much focused on the internal dynamics of a company, from training and governance to knowledge sharing and culture. Social media policies and employee engagement also play a pivotal role in shaping a social business. A social business strategy can almost be considered an enabler, because if you have your internal process and structures sorted out, it is much easier to scale your social media initiatives externally. Whether it is launching a global Facebook page or empowering employees to engage in social media, having a solid social business plan will help minimize mistakes. As a marketing guy by trade, I will try to communicate the value of how a better social business strategy enables a better social brand....
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....
The term content marketing has been gaining a lot of attention over the last few years and rightfully so. Content is the lifeline in today’s social eco-system so it makes sense. But content marketing means nothing without a strategy. A content strategy enables and positions a brand to tell a very consistent story across the media landscape. It helps draw parallels between what’s important to customers and what the brand stands for. It enables marketing teams to create more relevant content based on what the brand is comfortable talking about and what it’s not comfortable talking about. It allows employees, partners and customer service to also participate and be a part of the story too. Here are 3 things to consider that will up-level your content strategy in 2013..?
In a crowded conference hall filled with digital ad marketers, Citibank North American head of consumer marketing Vanessa Colella explained why it made perfect sense that one of her first orders of business was, in fact, "eliminating the digital marketing department." While having a group of digital specialists who "all come with incredible backgrounds, they speak in jargon, and wear blue jeans" could be comforting, Colella explained at Ad Age's Digital Conference, that it is often a crutch. Why? Because everyone in a company's marketing department needs to be fluent in digital strategy. "There's no path for you if you don't," she said. So Citibank trained everyone, from those who specialized in bus shelters to TV marketing, to be digitally savvy....
Unfortunately, like other marketing channels out there, social media, is still not without its own set of growing pains. Most businesses today commit critical and costly mistakes when setting up their social media marketing campaign. So to help you, I’d like to discuss the top 3 mistakes in social media marketing and ways you can avoid them so you can get the biggest return for your marketing investment....
Social media marketing is the fastest growing area of influence in the digital world. It encompasses social media campaigns, strategy and optimization, and increases brand visibility, engagement and conversions. 83% of marketers say that social media is important to their business. That number continues to elevate as Internet capabilities advance, necessitating a brand social presence. At ZOG Digital, we have quite a lot of experience in digital marketing (In fact, our CEO, Jeff Herzog, started iCrossing before Google was around!). So we decided to share our compiled social media marketing “wisdom” in the list below...
Many marketers today are looking to increase their Facebook fans, LinkedIn memberships and/or Twitter followers. Social media marketing is a new buzz-word in both b2b and b2c domains. But, when it comes to engagement, how easy is it to measure the engagement-level of your Facebook fans or LinkedIn Group Members? How easy is it to interact with them and nurture them? How easy is it to get usage and engagement metrics out of Facebook, LinkedIn et al? Is it even possible? Can you act on the metrics? External social sites are good for brand-building (or reach) but not for interaction or engagement. A recent Gartner report cited that a mere six percent of marketers claim that marketing on social networking sites is their top priority. What is even more powerful is that 45 percent of those surveyed said corporate websites were key contributors to marketing success. And from the customer perspective, four out of five customers claim to visit a website for product information and only a mere 19 percent would visit a Facebook page, according to Incyte Group....
Today’s annual report on the State of the News Media shows that new technologies really are pressing journalists to do much more with much less. Last week, we learned that newspaper industry ad revenue was down 7.3 percent this year to its lowest level since 1984 (or 1954, adjusted for inflation). As a result, newsrooms continue to shrink. But The Project For Excellence in Journalism’s report shows us that the needs and demands of the audience are growing and fragmenting. Social media is an important source of news, the report says, but remains smaller and only “supplemental” to other discovery methods like directly visiting a news website, searching the Web or browsing an aggregator....
Critical content marketing strategy.... Do you have a Company Page on LinkedIn for your brand and business? If not, stop reading and use this guide to take care of that first. Back already? Ok. Now that you have a LinkedIn Company Page, that means you have a home for your business on LinkedIn. One of benefits of having a Company Page is that you can share Status Updates. Just like your personal LinkedIn account, and any other social network, status updates can include something about you or your business, an article you've written, or an article someone else has written that you want to share. On LinkedIn, those status updates can even include files and video and SlideShare presentations. After you've been sharing updates for a while and have attracted some followers to your Company Page, you're going to want to start paying attention to the analytics that LinkedIn provides. These are called Insights, just like on Facebook Pages. LinkedIn actually provides three sets of statistics: Per Post, Follower and Page....
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![Top Video Trends & Opportunities: Mobile, Social, Ads & TV Everywhere [Report] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/60jS1w05L7mVPJ_Rf-YFPDl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
Some pretty cool ideas about a brand new marketing department layout.