…you need good content.
Last week, back from Content Marketing World 2014, Jay Baer noted that over the last 12 months, the number of content marketing software vendors had exploded, forcing the vendor and expo area to massively expand. How many exactly were participating? Too many according to him. And because these companies were not sustainable yet but spending their VC’s money, he predicted a big shakeout will happen.
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I tend to find inspiration in strange places. Last week, I was listening to a podcast with a few of my favorite stand-up comedians expecting nothing more than a few chuckles. Interestingly, they began talking about what it’s like to be a comedian in the age of the Internet and the pressure to “keep their personal brands alive” and “stay relevant” with fresh jokes on a more consistent basis than they can write.
As comedians, these two were put off by the notion that everything online these days is about marketing, whether it be your product, yourself, or even your jokes. One of the quotes that specifically inspired me went something like this: “Everything online is marketing these days. Why can’t we just make good stuff and then people who like it will watch it?”
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Twitter strategy might be shifting and the implications for our personal and business experience could be profound.
Source: www.businessesgrow.com
If you’re in social media marketing, you probably cringe at the mention of the word EdgeRank. I know I do, because it makes me think of how frustrating it is that even the best of my brand’s Facebook content might not be seen by more than 200 or 300 of our 57,000 fans unless I spend money to promote it.
Brace yourselves, social marketers, because algorithms just like Facebook’s EdgeRank might be coming to Twitter. In this post by our friend Mark Schaeffer, you can learn about some of the reasons why Twitter is thinking about implementing this, including the pressure from investors now that Twitter has gone public.
Mark brings up some great points for both sides like the fact that, with so many active users, “an unfiltered news stream can seem overwhelming,” but one of the best things about Twitter is that it’s completely unfiltered because it allows for news to break in real time; something we see happening more and more each day.
According to Mark – and most marketers including myself happen to agree – Twitter will ultimately end up implementing an algorithm that determines what updates you see depending on elements like trending topics and interaction history, which will make organic reach plummet which would effectively eliminate the main differentiator of Twitter from Facebook.
What can do you, then, to prepare for this change?
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Without a doubt, content fuels your sales pipeline. At least it should.
Whether it’s snackable content for easy consumption, or “heavy” content for persuading peeps to buy from you, your content marketing goals should align with the sales pipeline.
“As content marketing has become a vital strategy for brands and agencies, the need to measure the success of that content has grown as well. An Aberdeen Group report revealed that the most effective content marketers are also those most likely to measure.”
Source: blog.visual.ly
This report by the Aberdeen Group highlights the need to measure results as a key success factor in content marketing.
Beyond this key findings – companies which measure tend to do better – there are interesting numbers as those in the above chart. The companies surveyed in this report had a customer acquisition cost of $20-$30,000.
Does this feel a lot to you?
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“I had always believed that most of the marketing content used by a company should be developed internally (…). Because of three recent research studies, I now have a different view on this issue.”
Source: customerthink.com
Some people still think that the only type of content that can demonstrate your expertise and show your thought leadership is the one you create.
If you’re still thinking that, think again as the data has spoken.
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When it comes to content marketing, businesses can easily lose their personality behind lackluster, “robotic” blogs and other web content. This can result in disengaged audiences, reduced thought leadership standing, and lower search engine ratings.
According to GetResponse blogger Marya Jan, creating quality content requires that you infuse the unique, mutual personality characteristics of businesses and their customers into whatever gets written.
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SEO has become a cornerstone in content marketing campaigns as businesses look to establish a presence on the Internet. However, SEO is about more than just making sure you have the appropriate keywords placed in landing pages and blog posts. Search engines are getting smarter – specifically Google – which is constantly trying to keep the playing field leveled with every new update.
Google’s goal is to ensure that Web surfers are getting quality results each time they submit a search query, and you need to keep these guidelines in mind to make sure your company site actually reaches your target audience. That being said, it helps to know how to optimize your SEO strategy to make sure that you’re always tapping into the potential of the Web. Here are eight tools you can use to enhance your current SEO plan.
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Jeff Zabin, CEO of Starfleet Media and celebrated business researcher, recently released his 2014 Benchmark Report on B2B Content Marketing and Lead Generation. The report was created with the intention of “provid[ing] a rich, up-to-date snapshot of how B2B companies are creating, licensing and utilizing content assets in their incessant quest to demonstrate thought leadership, raise brand visibility, and, perhaps most importantly, generate qualified leads.”
B2B content marketing is a unique field that’s still constantly developing, and this report has some important insights into it’s current state as well as where it’s headed. I’d recommend reading it for yourself, but in the meantime, I’ve pulled out some of the most interesting statistics and findings.
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This is a guest post from our friends at Tackk.
Social media needs no introduction. Although initially created for personal use, social media is particularly important for many business marketing strategies. The social content your business creates gives your business a personality, creditability, and most importantly, expertise in your area. Here are some one-liners to use on your Facebook and Twitter accounts to show you know your stuff:
Read MoreOne thing I pride myself on – and you’ll know this if you’ve read anything I’ve written in the past – is always continuing my quest for new knowledge. One of the most important parts of working in a field that evolves so quickly is keeping up with the trends and the experts.
If you’re a content marketer, digital marketer, or B2B professional in need of some inspiration, I’ve got some for you. Read, learn, be inspired, and share!
Curation is the key to consistently delivering relevant content to your target audience, but how does it impact SEO?
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Have You Made the Business Case For Content Curation? If not, this data will help persuade your management to invest in content curation.
Source: heidicohen.com
This is a solid summary by Heidi Cohen on why content curation is besoming essential to businesses. Its role to content strategy mix has evolved from being anecdotical a few years ago to becoming central as it not only helps fill the gap but provides meaningful synergies for your created content.
Now as Heidi puts it, content curation is not free: while it’s – as she puts it – “a low cost way to fill your content marketing pipeline“, low doesn’t mean zero. I still regularly have debates with people who think that automated aggregation can replace content curation: it doesn’t. There’s no way to set it up once and forget about it. You’ll need to invest as little as 15 minutes a day to achieve results but these 15′ need to be spent.
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Last week, we announced lots of exciting new features on Scoop.it, including WordPress integration, topic embeds, and templates. for topic pages.
Now, we want to hear from you. We’re firm believers in the old (ok, not that old) adage “you are the content you publish online,” and the increasing importance of branding the content that you’re sharing to your websites and social media feeds. As we continue to grow as a platform, we want you to tell us how we can make this branding process easier for you.
Over the next few weeks, we want you to put on your creative hats and submit some designs of templates you’d like to see on Scoop.it for your topic pages.
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With 18.7 million bloggers online (Social Media Today), reading and writing blogs has become an essential part of everyday life. Among the most popular: personal, business and education blogs spark major interest in readers across the globe.
The one-liners below are suggestions to include in your next blog post to capture attention, engage readers and increase conversions.
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We started Scoop.it for a simple reason: back 4 years ago, we observed that Web 2.0 didn’t just bring all of us an opportunity but also created an expectation that would require new tools for busy professionals. With blogs, social networks and content platforms, you don’t just have a chance to become a media if you’d like to: you are now expected to regularly publish content. The content we publish determines not only how visible we are online but also shapes other people’s perception of our interests, our areas of expertise, our skills etc.
In short, you are the content you publish.
Of course, this means first of all you should participate and that’s what we’ve been focusing on enabling so far: an experience and a curation technology that makes it easier and time-efficient to discover, curate and publish quality content on our interests. But because this content is intimately connected to our online identity, reputation and brand, we’re pleased to launch today awesome and super easy new ways to brand your curated content with Scoop.it:
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Here is a 50 point Second Half Content Marketing Checklist to help you create content like an A-lister. Use these questions to get your content on track.
Source: heidicohen.com
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One of the Lean Content best practices we’ve seen several speakers at our meetups recommend is to leverage existing audiences on top of your own to increase the reach and the impact of your content. While your blog may or may not yet have a strong audience, there’s always more people to reach. By placing your content on publishing platforms which offer interesting discovery mechanisms or having blogs that are read in your industry re-publish it, you could in theory multiply your own reach by not doing much more.
Though the idea makes perfect sense, it also comes with questions:
1. Re-publishing on other platforms can be more or less complex: some like LinkedIn publishing platform or Medium are public or in the process of being public; some industry blogs (for example, in our space, Social Media Today or Business 2 Community) recruit contributors based on their own selection criteria.
2. Re-publishing content is creating potentially duplicate content which could hurt SEO and defeat the purpose.
3. Re-publishing content means it’s read on a platform from where we can’t convert our audience: to subscribe to our blog, to sign up for a demo of Scoop.it, etc. As part of our own Content Marketing efforts, conversion is an important metric.
At Scoop.it, we like to put ideas to the test so we did an experiment a few weeks ago to come out with data that would support or reject this.
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Know or die: risk and opportunity of Knowledge 2.0
“And the web stormed the enterprise and disrupted roles, tasks and jobs: it cast speed, openness, flexibility and efficiency throughout, sparing no business processes: manufacturing, logistic, accounting, customer relation management, lead generation…”
The digital mutation is also profoundly disrupting how knowledge is acquired, organized and shared. Knowledge is an intangible, yet strategic asset of any enterprise. With businesses becoming more virtual and dematerialized, its value is patently and rapidly growing.
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Every day, there are more than 500 million tweets sent out onto Twitter. Approximately 30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook each month. On a social networking website that has loads of traffic, how do you attract attention?
Read MoreSocial media marketers are keen to drive engagement but it may not necessarily be a viable strategy. In fact, it comes at a cost.
Source: www.slideshare.net
Mark Schaefer has a great point: we often confuse the means with the end.
In a blog post that I wrote a couple weeks ago, I explained why I thought social media publishing was dead – as we know it. One of these points was that the impact of publishing on social media for our goals is the combination of volume, quality and engagement. As Mark explains, engagement is only one variable in that equation.
So how can you convert your social media activity to make it count towards your goals?
One of the important basic first step you can take is to make sure you publish through a content hub that you can make your own and from where you can convert visitors: to subscribe to your content, to reshare your previously published content or to sign up for whatever pre-sales activity makes sense in your business.
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SEO may be one of the biggest buzzwords of the decade, but what is it and why does it matter? SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization, has become a critical component to the way that companies do business on the Internet. This guide will help you understand the definition of SEO, why it matters and how you can measure it in terms of your own business.
Read MoreIn this talk, Mark Burgess brings to our attention how employees, through social media, are changing how companies market to, and engage with, customers and prospects. With the transparency and opportunity for personal connections that social media offers, pushing fabricated, unauthentic sales pitches doesn’t work anymore. Instead, we are witnessing the rise of the social employee who creates a win/win proposition by leveraging their personal brands to build trust and increase the digital “surface area” of the brands for which they work. The result is nothing short of a revolution.
Source: www.youtube.com
“Employees are the brand at IBM” said IBM’s Ethan McCarty. But isn’t it true in a lot of companies?
Are your employees thought leaders then? Or rather, what are you doing to develop – and show – their thought leadership?
As Burgess develops in his talk, there is a clear synergy between developing employees into thought leaders and building the corporate brand.
But how can this be achieved?
As shown in this topic, thought leadership is highly connected to knowledge. Empowering employees to share their knowledge easily and in an engaging and rewarding way therefore becomes critical:
– easily because they don’t have (much) time,
– engaging because they won’t do it if it’s not impacting,
– rewarding because that’s what’s in it for them.
Aggregating, promoting and spreading that knowledge through collaborative content hubs like the ones Scoop.it Enterprise offers that show the collective curation work of your brand’s employees is one of the most efficient ways to promote your brand: by promoting them.
A win-win deal for all.
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Content Repurposing – Updating or changing content into a different form than the original to serve a different audience or the same audience differently.
Source: www.toprankblog.com
When I started to publish content, I felt frustrated that it didn’t have the impact I wanted. I had spent hours, sometimes day on trying to get thoughts, data and examples together and when hitting publish, the post only lasted for a few minutes before being drowned in the social media flow.
Several techniques like the ones Lee Odden mentions here addressing just that and prevents your content from “melting like wet snow as soon as it hits the ground“.
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“Do you have a content marketing strategy? Do you have the resources necessary to implement your content marketing strategy? Do you find it easy to create unique content on a consistent basis? If you answered NO to any or all of these questions, you’re not alone.”
Social Media engagement does not only happen on the social network itself.
Ask yourself the question: what’s better for you? That someone likes one of your picture on Facebook or that she subscribes to your blog’s newsletter?
Why I’ve decided to stop taking “content” gigs and other journalists should, too.
According to Forrester, 74% of consumers prefer to receive commercial communications via email. In a world of social conversations, that powerful stat supports that email marketing can still be a huge asset in your marketing campaigns. No matter what industry you’re marketing to, if you’re sending emails, you better be doing it well.
Check out this list of email one-liners [broken out by industry] that can drastically impact your email campaigns.
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Social media needs to be part of an overall sales and marketing strategy that includes your website, not something that is isolated from everything else you do to promote your business. It isn’t a one hit wonder that will magically drive people to your business.
Source: socialmediatoday.com
Sue Cockburn makes a great point on SocialMediaToday; and one that I’ve often seen underestimated: just like in ancient Rome, all your social media roads should lead to the center of your online presence, aka your website (as a matter of fact, I was highlighting it myself in a talk last week).
As she pointed out, one of the reasons for this is certainly the hype on social media (and its apparent simplicity).
With the Scoop.it team, we’ve been trying to identify the other reasons explaining that by observing many companies – small or large – implementing their content strategy:
– small businesses are often finding it difficult to…
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