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Make Content Marketing a Leading Strategy

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Child scratching head with question mark on blackboard concept fContent marketing has been around for hundreds of years, but only recently has it been getting a lot of attention.

Essentially, content marketing is the process of advertising without advertising. This is to say that content marketing provides valuable content to consumers without overtly advertising, all while slyly incorporating a brand’s products or services.

A good example of this may be where a pest control service provides 10 essential pest control tips on Facebook with the hook that, if these tips fail, contact XYZ Pest Control.

The objective, getting the brand out there, is achieved by providing real-world tips that are valuable to the potential customer.
What Qualifies as “Valuable Content”?

Before you begin a content marketing campaign, stop and think … what would be valuable to me if I were a consumer?

While it’s easy to get lost in the world of industry jargon and technicalities, the consumer will, by and large, not understand what you mean. Therefore, try to think in simplistic terms.

What does the potential customer hope to get out of your company? What are the fears holding them back from doing business? What makes your company unique from the competition while ensuring that you can provide all that the consumer needs?

Consider all of these questions when crafting your business’ content.
Content Marketing is Great at Generating Leads

One of the biggest advantages to using content marketing is that it generates not only web traffic, which can boost search engine ranking, but it also boosts leads. The more valuable the content, the more likely people are to share this content.

In the article, “How to Generate More Leads Than Ever in 2015 With Content Marketing“, it’s pointed out that leads need to be nurtured through content.

Basically, you need an overarching theme to your brand message that transcends the content at hand.

You’ll want to form a full-force brand message about your new or existing product or service that implements value through your company’s website, social media channels, and traditional advertising in order to gain traction.
Don’t Just Throw It All at the Wall

Finally, one of the worst mistakes you can make is to generate content, throw it at the wall and see what sticks.

While it’s true that you need to monitor metrics in order to see what works and what doesn’t, taking a shotgun approach can prove to be disastrous.

Many business owners try to offer up valuable content from across a very wide spectrum of their offerings, only to find out that they lose business as a result.

Instead, plan out a strategy, determine which content marketing channels are the best bets, and then focus on target audiences in order to achieve success.

Valuable content isn’t valuable if you aren’t reaching the right people.

About the Author: Andrew Rusnak is an author who writes on topics that include content marketing and social media.

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

 

How to Use Curated Content for Content Marketing

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By Jessica Davis

Content is at the center of everything digital. It is what people look for when searching for something on the web and it is what makes them share, like, subscribe, comment, follow, buy or donate.

But creating valuable content can often be quite challenging, and when you are not quite ready for this challenge, curated content comes to your rescue.

What is curated content?

Content curation basically involves sifting through relevant information on the internet and sharing the best of what you can find on your social profiles. However, curating content manually takes a lot of time and effort. To make things easier, you can use tools like DrumUp, Scoop.it and List.ly and overcome this hurdle. Using high quality, curated content projects you as an expert and an authority in your field. It gives you the reputation of being a reliable source of information, which will act as your social capital.

Why use curated content?

  1. To save time and money
    Original content can be expensive and takes a lot of effort and time to create. Content curation is a way in which you can make sure that you have quality content when you’re strapped for money or time.
  2. To become the trusted source of information
    Prudent use of quality curated content will turn you into an authoritative source on the web. Sharing high quality content can make you the preferred source that others refer to for advice, tips and suggestions.
  3. To create round-ups for better engagement
    Your audience could easily miss some content you share because information moves quickly on the web. Doing a round up of the best stories of the week on a specific topic can help them stay up to date. They will be grateful to find all the noteworthy advice and news that interests them in one post.
  4. To reach out to a wider audience
    Using different content formats such as audio,video, presentations, and infographics on different social media platforms will add variety to the content you share and will help keep it interesting.

Top 3 ways in which curated material can be shared and how

  1. Social media
    In a survey of 400 marketing professionals, 76% of the respondents said that they share curated content on social media. When using curated content on Twitter, try expressing an opinion or asking a question. But you’ll have to keep it short since you only get 140 characters. Facebook and LinkedIn on the other hand give you a little more scope for long-form content. You could write a summary, add a commentary or ask a question to begin a conversation.
  2. Newsletters
    Use newsletters when you need multiple pieces of fresh curated content all put together in one place. Remember that newsletters should include the latest in industry trends and data from the previous week, fortnight or month. Along with curated content, a good newsletter will include a note from the editor, original articles, calls-to-action and information on how to contact you.
  3. E-mails
    Though email has often been prematurely declared dead and irrelevant, there are marketing tactics that live on. Curated content can be used in email marketing. You can charm your subscribers with interesting and quality curated content sent straight to their inboxes. Share links to your blogs and social network profiles in the mail. You will only earn more loyal subscribers.

There are three main challenges you face while creating original content – paucity of time, inability to create sufficient amount of content and inability to create engaging content. Curated content can help you overcome all these challenges effectively.

Are you curating yet?

Author’s Bio: Jessica Davis has a keen interest in social media and content marketing, and writes about it extensively. She represents Godot Media – a leading content development company.

Stop Calling it Content

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It’s official. The push for “content” has pervaded society so completely that I had this actual conversation with my 10 year old the other day:

10 Yr Old: “Mom, no-one is visiting my website.”
Me: “I visited it just yesterday.”
10 Yr Old: “I think I need to make more content.”

Boom. Throw down the microphone and walk off stage.

assembly line

There has been a robust conversation surrounding the sheer amount of “content” debris (go read Mark Schaefer’s original Content Shock post), but I think the larger issue has to do with the attitude of the “content” creator.

I propose that we just stop calling it “content,” and whip out some Barron’s vocabulary words to describe what we’re doing instead.

  • Research paper
  • Investigative journalism
  • Marketing video
  • Customer photos
  • Online brochure or catalog
  • Case studies
  • Interviews
  • Company news item

See where I’m going with this?

One result will be that we ourselves recognize when we’re writing sales copy vs telling a story. If you call it “content,” it could be anything.

If you call it what it is, maybe it shifts your point of view as a creator. You are no longer a robot on the assembly line, you are an artist, a designer, a writer.

It’s the difference between mass-produced frozen fish sticks and fresh-caught grilled trout.

Your homework today, should you choose to accept it, is to go through your marketing plan, campaign strategy, and/or social media plan and highlight everywhere it says “content.” Replace that word with phrases and words that mean something to your customers.

Are you content with “content?”

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Photo Credit: jamesjyu via Compfight cc

Proven Ways to Make People Read Your Content

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By Katherine Crayon

You have created the blog of your dreams. You regularly update it with valuable content. Everything is perfect. Except…

Except the readers don’t come.

Cat typing on laptop

No comments, only a handful of shares and tweets — and that’s all. What went wrong? Think you need to perfect your writing skills? Actually, it’s not about the way you write. It’s all about the way you promote your content.

The web is flooded with thousands of recommendations on how to attract users to your website.

It’s important.
It matters.

The Internet was created to let you share your thoughts with millions of other people — it’s meaningless if they don’t read them. That’s why today we’ll concentrate on the ways to get people to actually read your content.

If you think that stuffing your posts with keywords and optimizing them for search engines will draw armies of followers to your resource, you are mistaken. Your blog will undoubtedly rank higher in search results, but will people come back?

The way people perceive your blog posts should be your highest concern. Combine catchy writing, impressive design and some basic ways of promoting content (described in this article).

Success will follow.

Written vs Visual Content

There is a general misconception that people ignore online content. They do read it. However, the way they perceive online data has changed a lot. Content marketing has generally revolved around written data, though more recently, visual content has greater appeal.

Modern users prefer skimming to reading. In order to make them actually read your post, you have to grab their attention (with a relevant image, video, infographic, etc.).

Statistics show that blog posts featuring at least one image are more popular among web users, which results in more shares.

Relevance

Will you read a post on a topic you’re not interested in? Most likely, you will scan the article and leave. As a rule, people surf the web searching for content that meets the basic criteria of relevance:

  • Publish content that coincides with the current time and season. For instance, will you read about Christmas on July 4th? Do you find it relevant posting about winter vacations in summer? Relevance has its own chronological order.
  • Consider your readers. You will hardly be able to attract artistic people to a chemistry blog. Each web resource has its own audience. Working on your blog, think about the target user who will most likely enjoy your content. Specializing on something particular will help you look like a pro and build trust with ease.

Skimming

Users will scan your posts first to decide whether the content before them is relevant. If they come up with some points that look relevant, people will likely stay and read the entire post word-by-word. How to organize content in such a way that users will easily find exactly what they need?

Here are several points to consider:

  • Headlines are the first thing people will pay attention to. The more relevant and to the point they sound, the more likely it is that readers will come — and stay.
  • Subheads help give users a quick overview of the things you discuss in the post. Once again, if they find these relevant, chances are they will read till the end.
  • Text formatting helps to highlight the content you want to draw skimmers’ eye to. Remember that highlighting too much content in bold or italics will equal highlighting nothing. Put emphasis on the key points so that users will quickly pick them out.
  • If skimmers find your headlines and subheads relevant, they will move to bullet points and numbered lists that will help them with decision-making.

Let People Choose

Readers’ tastes differ, so if you want them to keep returning to your blog, you should provide them with several forms of content to choose from.

We have already found out that people are more attracted by visual rather than written data. However, there are many web users who prefer reading detailed posts word-by-word, without missing a single thought.

Try to publish different forms of content through multiple channels and see what works best. Diversify your content marketing with images, videos, and infographics to let people choose what they want. And don’t forget to make all of your content look good no matter what device is used.

Post Regularly

Publishing content on a regular basis will make people come back. Though it requires significant and sustained effort, this is a proven way to build up a following. Whether you are posting 10 articles a day, three posts a week or simply update your blog with something new once a month, doing this consistently will increase traffic to your blog.

Leverage Social Media

With so many users learning about the latest news and valuable information in social media, including ‘Share on Facebook’ and ‘Tweet This’ buttons will make it much easier for your readers to spread posts online and draw new visitors to your blog. The easier you make sharing data, the more likely people are to do so.

It doesn’t require much time and effort to add social share buttons to your site. Make this one-time investment and you will reap great rewards.

Communication

Communication always matters. Make sure you respond to all of the comments left on your blog. Your readers put an effort into leaving their feedback under your post, so don’t miss an opportunity to show how much you value this. Communicating with people on your blog, leaving comments on other web resources, as well as participating in discussions on social media platforms – all this combined will show how much you care.

Final Words

When it comes to content marketing, always write with personality.

Engage your readers by sharing interesting posts on a regular basis and starting a debate online. Keep the writing short and sweet, and never forget to refresh it with some relevant photo or video content.

Are you an experienced blogger or just plan to start your web resource? Which of the aforementioned techniques do your find effective? Maybe you know some other proven ways of how to blog effectively. Share with us in the comments below.

Author’s Bio:Katherine Crayon is a copywriter with a fresh voice, reporting on tech news and all aspects of the web design industry. Meet her in person on Google+.

Photo Credit: atomicshark via Compfight cc

5 Reasons Why your Business Needs a Blog

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By Teddy Hunt

Blogging might have come to prominence in the late ’90s, but rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated. Social media might have become the focus for many businesses, but they’re missing out on a valuable marketing opportunity. Read on to discover why your business needs a blog now.

A Blog Helps the Public Relate To Your Business

A blog can turn your company from a faceless corporation to a much more human firm. It’s the place where businesses can show their personality and act a little more light-hearted than they do in other professional avenues.

It may seem daunting to loosen your tie, but it’ll do your brand some good. The friendly voice of a blog can help you cultivate long-term relationships with your customers and increase their brand loyalty. Eighty-two percent of customers say they enjoy reading relevant blog content from brands, and three in five say they feel a company’s positivity through their blog.

Potential employees also read company blogs to help them decide on the best employer for them as they generally create a better sense of what a business is about than a stiff corporate site.

Through your blog, you may find you’re attracting more appropriate candidates for available positions.

A Blog Gains Consumer Confidence

A steady stream of relevant blog posts shows readers you are dedicated to your industry and a good source of information. As your business blogs on a regular basis, you’ll start to establish yourself as experts in your field. Studies show that 81 percent of readers trust the advice they receive from blogs.

The key to gaining this trust is using the blog for more than self-promotion. Share your knowledge about your field, such as your insights about trends and your commentary on local affairs. Posts that are packed with insider information presented in a clear, accessible way are powerful marketing tools that are likely to be shared through email and social networking channels.

A Blog Improves Your Position on the Web

Your social media presence will drive visitors to your website and increase brand awareness, but it doesn’t improve your position on the web the way that blogging does. Every time you update your blog, you add new content to your site, and search engines take notice. Remaining current is one of the best ways to stay on top of internet search engine rankings.

Ranking well is a complex science, but the most important factor Google considers is the number of inbound links. So it’s worth noting that companies that blog have 97 percent more inbound links than businesses that don’t.

Search engines also consider the number of indexed web pages when calculating your ranking. Websites with blogs perform so well because they typically have 434 percent more indexed pages than their competitors.

Web position is so important because three-quarters of browsers never scroll past the first page of Internet searches. A blog can help your business stay in pole position and more than double its website views.

A Blog Increases Sales

As you might expect, a blog doesn’t just drive readers to your business website. It also encourages customers to spend up. Roughly three in five consumers say they’ve made at least one purchase based on the information they’ve read on a blog post.

There’s even evidence to suggest blog posts may be even more important than traditional advertising, with 70 percent of consumers insisting they learn about businesses through articles rather than ads. This may be because customers can mentally switch off when they feel like they’re being marketed to. Blog posts are a much more subtle form of advertising, so they can capture the interest of these customers that don’t warm up to commercials.

A Blog Can Become Part of Your Social Media Strategy

Coming up with all those pithy status updates for your Facebook and Twitter pages can be taxing, but your blog can help you out. It’s easy to blast every new blog post into your social networking feeds (just be sure to tweak the update to suit each social network, and engage with those who share it).

This means you can spend less time social networking yet still give your connections fresh, new material. Integrating your blog with Facebook and Twitter will also drive traffic back to your blog and company website, which gets customers one step closer to making purchases.

So what are you waiting for? There’s no better time for your business to get blogging!

Author’s Bio: Teddy Hunt is a freelance content writer with a focus on technology. When not behind a computer, Teddy spends the majority of his free time outdoors and resides in Tampa, Florida.