 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
We're going back to the basics. Expert content marketers with defined and working strategies can skip this article. For the other 90 percent of you, use these 3 building blocks to start developing one... I average about three speeches a week revolving around the topic of content marketing. At every one of those events I ask, “How many of you have a documented content marketing strategy?” That answer has never been more than 20 percent, and usually just a few hands are raised. Think about that for a minute. Content creation and distribution is booming. We’ve never seen brands more active in developing content to attract and retain customers. Our latest research tells us that more than one in every four marketing dollars is spent on a content marketing initiative. Yet, almost no one has a concrete strategy for the deployment of those content assets. (I’m virtually shaking my head.)...
How do you decide what to write about? Does your blog have a content plan? Do your social media posts have some structure and relationship to your blog posts or your other marketing programs? If your answer to any of these questions is “no,” you are likely missing opportunities to extend the reach of your marketing, to reinforce other promotions and activities, and to encourage your audience to make connections to your website, your blog, and other content you are producing. Effective social media marketing strategies need a powerful content plan....
Are social and content teams working closely enough, especially at enterprise organizations? Here are four tips for finding common ground between your social media and content marketing strategies. To maintain a healthy relationship between the two teams, some marketers look at social as the creation of micro-content. Yet, others might see this as limiting, considering how the rules of content engagement differ from those of social engagement across various channels.
Crafting a Unique Brand Story to Help Your Small Business Win ... The right story will help your small business stand out in the marketplace by building trust through emotional connections, demonstrating that you understand your customers’ needs and showing that you are the brand that delivers. Ask yourself how you add value, and then find ways to present your brand as human and caring. Here are 11 questions for you and your colleagues to seriously ponder as you work to determine what kind of story you want to tell. Like a fingerprint, your story is your brand’s unique point of difference. Once you have defined your story, you will need a platform that you can use to tell it. One of the best ways to tell your story is through a blog....
There are still a number of marketers and business owners that need to be persuaded to try content marketing for the first time. Here are 2 foolproof methods for getting that buy-in. ...If you present your content marketing plan as a pilot, you’ll immediately see the key decision makers let their guard down. It’s not as much of a commitment as a full-blown content marketing strategy. But as you sell the Content Marketing Pilot, be sure to include the following: The length of the Pilot – should be at least six months.The overall goal of the Pilot…or how the business will be different after the Pilot.Agreed-upon metrics that, if you hit, will enable you to move forward with “more episodes.” This could be an increase in leads, more subscriptions, shorter time to close business, an increase in “quality” leads…just to name a few....
Nichole Kelly explains why an amazing content strategy and a big trash can are the key to success in social media. In marketing circles we’ve been talking about content marketing for a few years, but for some reason it hasn’t resonated with executives. And it’s partly on the shoulders of marketers who ask for budget approval on a “social media” campaign instead of a content marketing campaign. It also doesn’t help that content marketing isn’t a big company that the news stations can report on. It is a disparate, disconnected, organic being that safely hides behind the curtain generating success or failure of online campaigns. Respectfully, it is the elephant in the room. When a marketer’s social media campaign fails too many times they chalk it up to the social network being wrong versus the fact that their content strategy was wrong. We need to stop talking about “social media” and start talking about digital content marketing. Because content is the backbone to any successful campaign or strategy. The best digital marketing strategy will fail every time in execution if the content behind it sucks. The problem is creating amazing content consistently isn’t easy. It takes focus, creativity, a willingness to test and a preposterous threshold for failure....
Ikea UK pops on Pinterest and provides some great examples of boards showing other brands how it should be done. Pinterest saw massive growth in 2012 and this is set to continue in 2013 as people continue to engage with photos and videos. Pinterest is a great platform for businesses and brands to raise awareness and to literally show off their products. Here are 5 reasons to join Pinterest today.
A great example of how to use Pinterest comes from Ikea UK...
Content on social media networks Is vital to create engagement with your prospects and customers. There is a fast emerging trend for content to be written and produced in snack size bites. This could be video, text or visual mediums. Our attention spans seem to be following the development path of micro-processors. Smaller and faster. The art of the long conversation, the slow contemplation of the future of the planet over a meal and prolonged human concentration have maybe become so endangered that we don’t value depth of thought and long form communication anymore. Dinner parties could soon become 15 minute events....
As we wave goodbye to 2012 and say hello to 2013, there’s a good chance, you, like many other people, have been working to put together a content marketing strategy for the new year. No doubt you’ll have the objectives in place, created a well thought out strategy and work plan as long as your arm. It’s that last element I want to help you with in this blog post, by sharing a clutch of tools and services which will save you time, improve your results and give you the freedom to work on the creative aspects of your campaign....
Via Stefano Principato, massimo facchinetti
Here's a 10-minute guide that spells out what a business practitioner needs to know to get content marketing efforts off to the right start. Thought leadership about content marketing is full of truisms that apply to all marketing: Know your audience, measure results, etc. This post does not do that. Nor does it try to convince you to do content marketing (I’ll assume you’re already there). This aims to be the stuff you should know that relates specifically to content marketing, and only to content marketing — particularly for the business practitioner. I work in a content marketing agency, and we look at new content marketing programs on a regular basis. This is what we’d ask all new customers to do from the get-go, to maximize our shared potential....
|
Are you creating content to help your buyers? If not, you need to build a content marketing hub. Here are 8 steps to build a content hub that converts.... Before you can begin building your content marketing destination, you need to understand (and be able to articulate) that your role as a B2B Marketer is not to explain to the world what it is that you sell. But to show the world how what you sell helps your buyers. That’s right, B2B Marketing is not about promotion. It is about telling stories. Stories from your customer’s point of view on how what you sell has helped them. In my presentation I present a brief history of how the world has changed for marketers. And yet, stories remain a critical component of marketing. Stories present an opportunity for B2B Marketers to not just meet the needs of our buyers, but to delight them as we enable them during the buying journey. The Content Hub Business Case The next step is to present your business case. To build a content marketing hub, you need to show how your current content marketing efforts fail to meet the needs of your buyers. A couple of ideas: Search metrics: show how your business is missing out on vital conversations happening in the earliest stages of the buying process. Web analytics: show how most visitors to your site already know who you are. Content analytics: show how the content you create is mostly late stage or isn’t being downloaded by anyone. Calculate the costs of this waste....
From PaidContent Live 2013, we brought you five different entrepreneurs who talked about ways in which they are changing up business models for media and the ways in which people consume content.... It’s fair to say that the future of news consumption and media won’t look like a bunch of traditional newspapers copied onto the desktop web, and when five different entrepreneurs addressed paidContent Live Wednesday about the ways they’re bringing content online, the approaches were as diverse as the startups themselves. However, a few themes came out of our presentations from Paul Berry, founder and CEO of RebelMouse, Jeff Fluhr, co-founder and CEO of Spreecast, Matt Galligan, co-founder and CEO of Circa, Aria Haghighi, co-Founder and CTO of Prismatic, and Josh Miller, co-founder of Branch. Here were the ones we found most compelling...
Ikea USA serves as a blueprint for social media content creation. There are some great ideas to steal from Ikea USA’s editorial calendar. If I were to reveal a hidden talent of mine, I’d say I’m good at assembling Ikea furniture. As most Swedes, I’ve grown up with flat packages and family quarrels around mounting manuals. I’m practically born with a hexagon key in my hand. Therefore, as a devoted brand advocate, I wanted to check out Ikea’s social media strategy; curious to know if it is as innovative as their products. Ikea Sweden is not on Twitter while Ikea USA tweets according to a clear content strategy....
CMI's blog strategy is a case in point on how engaging influencers in your industry can lead to content marketing success. Find out how it worked for us.... ... we didn’t have the resources to pay for raw, educational content about content marketing, we knew exactly where we needed to turn: our influencers. When we announced the original CMI blog, the first group we reached out to was our database of social influencers. Dozens of these influencers were more than happy to help us out, as we had been promoting them for years without ever asking for anything in return....
Are you looking for the best content curation resources on the web. Look no further as I provide 30 of the best content curation resources I use every day. Today, there are so many options available and we each have to find a way to find, filter, consume and share the information that is relevant for us. I use email alerts from RSS feeds, Twitter lists and a few key websites I visit every day to make sure I can stay on top of the latest trends and news in business and marketing. So here, I have curated my own list of the top sites of business and marketing information – some of which are great examples of content curation themselves. I invite you to visit these content curation resources, subscribe to their RSS feeds or follow them on twitter. I’ve also created a twitter list of these resources and other influential bloggers that you can also subscribe to…
Michael Buller shapes content marketing strategy at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Learn how he targets a consumer audience and overcomes industry challenges.... Beyond our traditional social media channels (Facebook and Twitter), I think SlideShare has been the most successful. Some of our videos have really done well separately, just as YouTube videos and the videos that we link from our site.
For our research publications, we’ve created separate apps for all the various tablets. That’s been a little disappointing in terms of the number of downloads. They’re free apps, but we can’t seem to get as many interested eyeballs as I would like. I think it’s difficult, as people aren’t actively searching for this type of info. It’s not something they say: “Oh, cancer research. That would be a fun app!” So trying to get some attention to that amidst all the thousands and thousand of apps out there, and trying to drive traffic to the apps that we’ve created has been challenging for us....
The Content Marketing Strategy Checklist will help you sharpen your strategy and focus your very next piece of content.
It's time to go beyond 'random acts of content'. It's time for a strategy....
Great content marketing attracts prospects and converts them to buyers. However, there is more to great content than churning thoughtful, attention-grabbing blog posts or articles. Many businesses are finding lead generation difficult because they do not produce content that works. Are you among the business owners that do not see the money piling up despite producing high-quality material? Before the dollars start rolling in, you need to put some time, thought and planning on the marketing side of content. This means having to strategically think of the type of content to distribute to your prospects and make sure that it is aligned with your buyer personas....
Do you know why your content marketing campaign is going to fail? It’s not because you can’t write great content… it’s actually because you don’t know how to promote it.
You can learn how to write great content, but if no one reads your content and links to it, there’s no point in putting it out there....
|
![8 Steps To Build A Content Hub That Converts [Slides] | B2B Marketing Insider | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/Oo-iYwkYGjCZmyC4Yu5TJTl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
![Making Content Marketing Work in a Social/Mobile World [Infographic] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/xOPL8ugJ7AbfN5rTExTZJDl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
Give your head a shake. Start with a content strategy if you really want results.