Successful Blog

How to Use Content Marketing to Retain Existing Customers

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When my twins were born, it was around-the-clock, crazy, unstoppable madness. For the two and a half months they spent in the NICU, we commuted every day to spend time with them, feed them, and learn how to take care of them.

It could have completely consumed our attention, to the exclusion of everything.

Except…

The twins had a brother who was 20 months old at the time.

One of the most important things we did was to make sure he was included, cared for, loved, and given his own personal time with us. Ten years later, he still talks about the special time he spent in the park with his dad while I was at the hospital.

Why am I sharing this?

Because most of the focus right now is on cranking out a steady stream of content that will attract leads. Content marketing can be a useful tool in the marketer’s toolbox, but don’t forget to share the love with your existing customers.

How to Use Content Marketing to Retain Existing Customers

Blog posts – Yes, you want to use your blog for outreach, thought leadership, and lead generation. Why not sprinkle in the occasional post that specifically addresses a need for your existing customers? It could be a how-to, could be an inspirational case study (two birds with one stone), or it could be corporate news.

Training/tutorials – Create visual content that helps your customers do their jobs better. Listen to their most frequent questions, and create training materials that speak directly to those questions.

Knowledge base or FAQ – Your knowledge base can be a place to apply content marketing skills. Concise writing, engaging visuals, and use of keywords will get your expert content found by both existing customers and potential customers.

External guest posts and articles – Typically you would think of a guest post as an opportunity to get “new eyeballs.” What if you focused your next article on the needs of your current customers? Provide insights that make your product or service more valuable in their eyes; make them feel smart for choosing you.

In-person events – If you have on-site events for your customers, are you offering them anything of tangible value? Think about collaborating with them during the event to create content they can use themselves. (Because they’re probably trying to create content the same way you are.)

Chat events, Blabs, Periscopes, etc. – Streaming video or text-based chat is being heavily used to demonstrate expertise, as a way to get brand awareness and leads. I’d suggest experimenting with these formats for customer communication as well. What if you invited your best customers to participate in a streaming event to discuss your product roadmap?

 

 

Are you using content marketing techniques to retain your existing customers? Please share your ideas with us!

 

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for Social Strata — makers of the Hoop.la community platform. Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Featured image via Flickr CC: rachaelvoorhees

How to incorporate audio into your marketing content

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Periscope, Blab, Snapchat, Vine, and other apps are making it easy to create and share video clips.

But if you try watching a Blab while you’re jogging, you might end up eating pavement.

Allow me to propose audio as a great addition to your marketing content tool kit.

Audio clips and podcasts have some advantages over video:

  • Multi-taskers love to listen to audio (think treadmill, commute)
  • You don’t have to be “camera ready” to record audio
  • People learn well by listening, reinforces message
  • Intimacy, being in someone’s ear is a very distinct connection-builder

Audio also has a few drawbacks:

  • Can be harder to find via search (make sure you post a transcript to alleviate this issue)
  • More difficult to repurpose
  • Works best with special equipment (sound leveling, microphone)
  • Might be hard to monetize, need sponsorships
  • Some audio platforms don’t provide embed code for easy sharing

If you’re ready to give audio a try, here are some tools that will help you record and share.

Anchor

Anchor is like an audio social network, where members can post audio messages and receive audio replies from others. Consuming the content is like listening to a never-ending interactive talk show that covers a lot of random topics. The platform is still fairly new, so there’s lots of opportunity to get creative and become an “Anchor star.”

Once you’ve recorded a clip, you can share it to Facebook or email a link to yourself, but there’s no embed code as of this writing (which makes it harder to incorporate Anchor clips into a blog post or other content).

AudioBoom

AudioBoom is a global, streaming audio platform with a wide variety of content, from small local podcasters to big brands like the BBC. It’s mostly geared toward those big podcasters, but with a free account, you can still upload audio files and share them to Twitter and Facebook. If you upgrade to a paid account, you get access to all of the bells and whistles of a professional recording platform, with ad support, distribution, and social sharing tools.

Clyp

Clyp is a very lightweight, intuitive way to upload and share audio files. There are some social networking aspects, like voting up other members’ clips, but the thing I like the most is the ability to just drag an audio file onto their home page and instantly get a shareable link. Warning, since it’s free to upload, the list of popular clyps can be NSFW.

SoundCloud

SoundCloud is the granddaddy of audio sharing sites, and has more recently skewed toward musician uploads, but still has great tools for uploading and sharing other audio files. What I like the most about SoundCloud is the nice embed code you get for each clip, making it super easy to incorporate sound clips into your blog or other web content.

You get up to three hours of free space to store your audio files, as well as the ability to engage with comments on your audio. Upgrading to a paid plan gives you more pro tools including analytics and unlimited space.

Next steps

  • You don’t have to launch a major new podcast in order to take advantage of audio options. With some of the tools I mentioned, you can just record a quick 10 minute audio note and include a link in your next newsletter. You can start engaging and interacting via audio on some of the social tools, to get used to the idea.
  • Remember that you still need to pay attention to your tone of voice, your enunciation, and make a good impression. It’s OK to use the microphone from your earbuds for those short, casual clips, but if you plan to routinely record audio, invest in an external microphone. They’re not that expensive, and will sound much more professional. Here’s a fantastic episode from the Content Pros podcast that will help you get started.
  • If you’re recording for business, try to find a space where there will be minimal ambient noise. Hearing your dog bark or your phone ring in the background will undercut your message.

Are you currently incorporating audio into your marketing outreach?

Feel free to share your handle or podcast name in the comments, we’d love to hear from you.

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for Social Strata — makers of the Hoop.la community platform. Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Featured image via Flickr CC: Patrick Breitenbach

Swing for the Fences with Gated Content

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The word ShareFunneling gated content into your websites is the lifeblood of your business.

When you have a sufficient stream of content flowing through your company’s site, you could have a guaranteed steady flow of customers.

If you want that circulation to continue, you must keep a steady stream of content behind the gates.

Uber active websites with daily and hourly content will build a devoted viewership base that will grow exponentially, while websites with dribbles of articles will plateau at a certain level and eventually wither away.

Here are some top tips on how to get more relevant content centered on your business:

  1. Recruit a Few Dedicated Writers for Your WebsiteYou don’t have to hire a full-time staff writer for 40 hours a week. You don’t even have to find writers and hire them directly. One of the best ways to keep gated content streaming on your website is to hire a marketing agency. Marketing agencies hire freelance writers for you, come up with the topics for them to write about, and bundle it all up in a neat little package that you don’t even have to publish yourself. With a marketing agency and dedicated writers behind you, your pool of gated content will overflow. As the following article looks at, here are 3 more of the4 simple ways to increase your amount of gated content.
  2. Center Content on Customers’ DesiresYour customers always know what they want. To build content and keep your customers happy, center content on their desires. Of course, to do that, you have to actually find out what they want. You can do this with surveys, opinion panels, behavior tracking and analysis and more. Their desires and wants are a wealth of information on what type of content should be published. Emails and comments that they give you either directly or on your business social media pages are clues telling you what your customers want. You can learn what they aren’t getting or understanding, what needs to be better iterated, and what they are interested in getting from your company.

    Watch What Other Websites Are Doing

    Pay attention and observe what other popular websites are doing. What are they publishing, which pages are getting more comments, what’s making them gain page views and comments, and what premium content are they selling? If a website is getting attention while yours is not, spot the key differences and make the change. Grab your market share.

    4. Share the Load

    Your premium content doesn’t all have to be from you. Consider partnering with a non-competing website. Offer to link-back to their site in return for content that doesn’t require a lot of man hours; video interviews, podcasts, and such. This media rich environment for premium content will give your readers value and give you a much needed break from content creation.

    In the end, your gated content has to deliver on your promise to your customers.

Make sure your content enhances your reputation by following these tips.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

About the Author: Kate Supino writes extensively about marketing and best business practices.

 

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Guest Posting

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Market Segmentation Background Concept GlowingWhether your business is a major one or a one-person show, the importance of spreading the word about your brand can never be taken for granted.

Think about it; more and more consumers are visiting company’s websites and social media initiatives. If your company is not actively pursuing potential business via the Internet, can you really survive over the long haul?

While some companies can keep the revenue door open because they’ve been around forever and/or rely primarily on walk-in business, a much larger number needs some degree of web presence.

One of the ways you can increase your web profile is by guest posting.

Do You Hire SEO Help Along the Way?

For those companies looking to either start with guest posting or ramp up their current efforts, one thing to consider is whether or not you can do the work in-house or will require outside assistance. If you find the right guest posting services provider, your work may become all the more easier.

At the end of the day, it all boils down to properly promoting your brand, with search engine optimization (SEO) playing a key role in that process.

Let’s use the example of a company blog.

If you have a blog, how often are you updating it? If the answer is frequently (and that means with relevant content, images, data, infographics etc.), that’s a good start. If the response is infrequently, then there is work to be done.

With the right SEO plan in place; your content marketing efforts can outdo the competition and then some.

By strategically placing a keyword link in the content, you are much more likely to drive traffic back to the site listed in the link.

If you’re providing guest posting content related to your brand on other sites, by all means push for having a relevant link back to your site added to the article you author. In doing so, you increase the odds of having more visitors pay you a visit online.

So, what are the keys to writing good guest posts that ultimately will bring more traffic your way?

Among them:

  1. Write with a purpose – For starters, make sure you have a purpose behind your writing efforts. If you’re trying to make a sales pitch instead of providing worthwhile content to readers/potential customers, you stand a good chance of losing their interest. The purpose of your content should be giving the reader something valuable, not something they hear from way too many other business;
  2. Don’t be pushy with sales – When you stop and think about it, consumers get all but hit over the head daily with sales pitches, so don’t pile on. You can be rather discreet with your sales initiatives by noting that current or first-time customers could be receiving deals if they do business with you without shoving a sale down their throats. Share with them the benefits that come with being one of your clients. When you do that, you stand a much higher percentage of landing a sale;
  3. Clean and exciting copy – Last but certainly not least, be sure to have content that is not littered with errors, boring or no images at all, and is easy to share amongst consumers. Make sure your keyword links all work and lead to the relevant page/s you want consumers to go to, not an error message. If a consumer has trouble surfing your site, especially if they want to see content they think would be worthwhile to them, don’t hold your breath waiting for them to return.

When it comes to solid content marketing, are you writing copy that will sell itself?

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

About the Author: Dave Thomas writes on a variety of business topics for different websites.

Should I start a podcast?

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“All my friends are doing it!”

That excuse doesn’t fly in our house, and it shouldn’t drive your marketing decisions either.

Podcasting is experiencing a well-deserved renaissance, because audio-based content is the perfect way to squeeze more productivity into our busy lives. Learn and laugh while you’re on the treadmill, while you’re driving, and while you’re brushing your teeth in the morning.

All of the great podcasts out there, and all of the discussion about podcasting, may have triggered an urge to start a podcast of your own. Before you go out and invest in that professional microphone and headphones, you need to test the idea against your marketing strategy.

A podcast can be a powerful component of your content marketing, but only if it fits into your overall business plan.

Key considerations – should you start a podcast

  • Do you have a voice for radio? If you’re going to be the primary host on air, you need to evaluate the quality of your voice when it’s recorded. Do some test recordings using your equipment, and have colleagues listen to it. Not everyone is cut out for broadcasting.
  • Are you committed to a schedule for the long term? You don’t want to burn out or ignore your primary business. Just the same as for starting a blog, you want to be sure you’re going to commit before launching your podcast. Don’t leave your listeners high and dry after three episodes!
  • Do you have a promotional plan? Producing a podcast is just the first step. Once it’s recorded, you need to know what you’ll do with that great show, and how you’ll find your audience. Check out this fantastic post from Jay Baer on producing and promoting a podcast for some inspiration.
  • Have you found a topic that you are an authority on, and is not saturated already? I don’t buy the whole “I can’t create content about X because everyone else is already covering it,” because no-one else has your specific point of view and life experiences. However, you do want to give yourself a fighting chance, so find a topic where you are the ultimate authority and can spend lots of time talking about it without running out of ideas. What are you endlessly curious about?
  • Do you have a content plan? Is the format of your show like a talk show? Will you be monologuing? If you’re going to be conducting interviews, start with a dream list of guests and do some outreach to get bookings. Bone up on the structure of a good interview, while you’re at it.
  • Do you have professional equipment and resources? The bar has been raised. You can’t just use your little white iPhone earbuds and hope for the best. The top podcasts have bumper music, logos, high quality sound, and other professional touches. You don’t have to build a studio in your backyard, but put some care into your sound equipment and it will pay off. Here’s a good summary from ReadWrite on podcasting on a budget.
  • Does your target customer listen to podcasts? Do some market research…ask your current customers if they’d listen to a podcast from you. Check out the professional research on podcast listeners and trends.

You went through the checklist above, and oops…you got derailed on a few of them. But you still want to take advantage of the power of podcasting. No worries, there are other ways you can incorporate audio into your marketing plan.

Alternatives to producing your own podcast

  • Sponsorship – Invest some of your advertising budget in sponsoring a popular podcast in your business niche.
  • Be a guest – All of those podcasts are constantly seeking interesting guests and good stories, so why not go pitch yourself to some of your favorites?
  • Invite a podcaster to your blog – Flip the tables and interview some popular (and relevant) podcasters on your blog. They’ll probably promote it to their audiences.
  • Create content that accompanies a podcast – Create a partnership with a podcaster and help develop written content (or video) that compliments the audio.

I’d love to hear from any readers who are doing their own podcasts. Post a link to your show in the comments so we can all listen!

 

Featured image via Flickr CC: Patrick Breitenbach

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for Social Strata — makers of the Hoop.la community platform. Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

 

Steal This Growth Idea: The Power Of Group Expert Interviews for Your Blog

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By Jessy Troy

The Power Of Group Expert Interviews for Your Blog

Lately, there have been a lot of groups interviews showing up around the web, Transcripts, email group discussions, Google Hangouts on Air footage… everyone wants to put together influencer round-ups on their blog, and it is no wonder.

These mastermind roundups have become a primary way to produce high quality content, and offer something truly valuable to the user.

The problem many people have is that they don’t know how to go about getting an expert to take part in an interview, especially if their blog is not yet huge enough. Pitching to someone who already has a full schedule may seem nearly impossible. Perhaps you have even tried, but never managed to land the opportunity that you so badly wanted.

MyBlogU, the absolutely free community of bloggers I’ve been using for several months now to feature and get features in expert interviews, has you covered on that front.

 

Group Interview Feature

Group Interview Feature

Rather than having you contact experts, the Group Interview feature takes you to where they already are. You ask your question of people within your industry, and they answer. Since they are already there to connect, and are interested in both sharing and taking part in the creation of content, you are guaranteed results every time you post a question.

Not only that, but you are able to get multiple quotes from various sources, and bind them together into a group interview transcript. It is much faster, easier to organize, and doesn’t require all of the planning usually needed to find a good time or chance to bring people together for a discussion.

Building Your Reputation

Once you start publishing these interviews, you will notice a jump in your own reputation because you are producing and promoting quality content, with established names attached from your industry, you are going to get more attention. With this attention comes a chance to connect with other influential people in your niche.

This can lead to what? More interviews! It is a great way to climb up the ladder and produce more and more popular content while offering a really helpful resource for those who are reading it. Who doesn’t want tips from those who are already successful, and have had to work their way up to the top?

I don’t suggest publishing only interviews on your blog! Too much of anything could become harmful as you risk losing your voice! But making it a regular colums (once a month or once a season depending on your editorial calendar intencity) covering hot trends is a great idea!

Brainstorming With The Pros

Another great feature is the brainstorming tool. MyBlogU allows you to put ideas out onto the site, and get feedback from others who are a part of the community. If you feel uncertain of an idea, just want some opinions on what should be included, or even want to bounce off of someone else to generate more ideas for future content, this is the place for you.

You can also help to influence the others in the community. Offer your own feedback on their ideas, and let them know what you would personally like to red. Share insights from your followers and what you have learned through your target audience. Build yourself as an authority, and soon people will want to interview you!

Conclusion

MyBlogU is a great tool that allows users to join a community of like minded individuals. While there you can take advantage of their expertise, and create unique group interviews that will provide you with excellent content.

Try it for yourself!

Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with the site except for I am a member.

Example interview from the screenshot can be found here. Here are more examples from MyBlogU and their members.

Featured image via Flickr CC: aboutmodafinil.com

Author’s Bio: Jessy Troy is a creative writer and editor at Social Media Sun. She Tweets as @JessyTroy.