With standard content marketing, you share tips, guidelines, templates, checklists, and other resources to help your audience achieve a certain goal or solve a problem at hand.
By adding thought leadership, you add your own voice, experience, and values. You add something that no one else could copy or replicate successfully.
Content marketing helps you reach more people through relevant channels and answer their questions, which ultimately builds trust.
Does that mean that content marketing and thought leadership are interchangeable concepts?
Thought leadership allows you to develop and share an authoritative voice that helps others make the right decisions. In other words—it helps you develop trust from an audience.
Not quite. However, they feed into each other. Smart marketers and business owners infuse thought leadership into content marketing to carve out a unique, memorable position in the market for their company.
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Meta: Simplifying your content curation streamlines your employee advocacy program and takes the heavy-lift off your social media team, too.
One of the hardest parts of executing a successful social media strategy and employee advocacy program is content curation.
It’s incredibly important to share quality third-party content to your followers in order to keep them interested in you, grow your followership, and remain a valuable source of information. Anyone could share content about themselves, but finding quality content that’s relevant to your target audience on a frequent and consistent basis can be extremely challenging.
“For me, this was the biggest challenge to running [an employee advocacy program],” said Kristen O’Neill, Corporate Social Media Manager for TransUnion in a webinar. “[It requires] constantly populating a platform with fresh content that’s going to be relevant to our many users.”
An employee advocacy program is a huge advantage to your social media strategy. People trust messages coming from your employees more than they trust messages coming from your brand. In fact, according to the MSLGroup, messages shared by employees are reshared 24x more frequently than those same messages coming from a brand account.
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Keeping up with the latest customer expectations is the key to attracting more prospects, increasing sales, and improving customer lifetime value. Using personalized content is one of the best ways to deliver relevant and outstanding sales experience at scale so you can drive conversion at every stage of the customer journey cost-effectively: 51% of buyers […]
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A company’s content is how that company exists online.
Of course, it’s not the only way it exists: there are customer reviews, partnerships, word of mouth on social media, and many other corners of the internet that enable people to find you even if you’re not the one posting there.
But your content—your website, blog, emails, social media—is how you get to control and monitor that presence.
Content is the vehicle for your key messages. Yes, content marketing generates three times as many leads as channels like paid search (and costs less), but that’s not where its power ends.
As Content Marketing Institute stated, the content marketer of the future is the leader of their company’s communication strategy. They aren’t just focused on SEO, or sales enablement, or churning out content on demand.
in this eBook discover how to engage your audiences (internal, external etc) by using curated newsletters!
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If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’re no stranger to content curation. It’s the core of the content here and you’ve probably already discovered content curation mistakes you should avoid, how to make your content curation a success, and other helpful tips for businesses.
For e-commerce store owners, they already have a lot on their plates. There’s marketing, e-commerce SEO, inventory, audits, and many other aspects of running their business. Fortunately, content curation doesn’t have to be as demanding as other facets of running your store, but more on that later.
If you’re practicing content curation already following the tips found here, kudos to you. You may even have found some applications for e-commerce sites too! But for others who feel it applies only to tech companies, let’s change that, shall we?
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Content marketing is a powerful tool for any business, yet some shy away from it because they simply don’t know how to do it.
The truth is building a remote content team has never been easier thanks to the emergence of the gig economy and the ascendancy of technology that makes remote communication and collaboration more reliable than ever before. While having an in-house content team may be preferable for some firms, the reality is that remote teams are just as effective and much less costly.
In addition, by building a remote content team, you can draw from a global talent pool to find the perfect voice for your company’s brand and messaging.
Ready to get started? Here’s everything you need to know to build a world class remote content team:
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When you’re looking for advice, do you ask your friends, family, and peers, or do you rely on, say… Facebook ads?
Our relationships are powerful: they come with a built-in level of trust that no generic company message can replace. This is why employee advocacy is among the strongest assets a company can use.
At its core, employee advocacy is the promotion of a company by its employees. It primarily takes place online, with social media as the leading group of channels.
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Top marketers leverage both their creative writing skills and their data analytics to inform every step of their content strategy. By crafting a great story and also analyzing data around open rates, click-through-rates, and behavior analytics, they can create campaigns that convert. By constantly reviewing data, content marketers can uncover deep insights into consumer […]
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If you operate in a crowded industry, you may find it difficult to compete on price. As more players enter the niche, competitors continue to drop their prices in order to attract customers.
At some point, though, you have to consider whether this is even a valid strategy anymore. Shouldn’t value be the focus of differentiation?
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Curated content is the best way to keep your social channels and newsletters stocked with some of the best-written and most engaging articles on the internet. You can use it to research and fuel your own content creation efforts, while simultaneously keeping your audience up-to-date and informed on topics related to your industry, as covered by others.
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When it comes to picking the best content management system (CMS) and website platform, you can’t ignore content marketing potential.
After all, 79% of B2C content marketers agree that content marketing increases audience engagement. And 65% report that it increases leads.
There are many options to choose from when selecting your CMS and creating a website these days. But, WordPress backs the most features out of the box for stellar content success.
WordPress powers over 32% of all websites (that’s over 60 million) on the internet and with good reason. Thanks to its powerful flexibility and adaptability, WordPress is consistently named one of the best blogging platforms on the market.
Here are eight reasons why WordPress dominates the market.
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As a content marketer, sooner or later, you’ll be tasked with writing an article on a complex topic. Maybe your industry is naturally complicated and difficult for newcomers to understand, or maybe a new piece of legislation will affect your industry, and your job will be dissecting it and presenting it to your audience.
This problem can kick in a number of different circumstances; abstract ideas, high-level terminology, and nuanced topics can all be challenging to parse and present to a lay audience. Fortunately, there are some strategies that can help.
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Personalization can be defined in ways that suit your needs or supports your biases. In digital marketing, that may solely depend on your specialization. For example, we can define personalization for e-commerce, PPC, demand generation, and email.
But generally, personalization means using customer insights including but not limited to their behavioral pattern or demographic information to increase the relevance of our content. When done well, personalization gives the feeling that you’re speaking directly with a particular consumer or groups of consumers at a particular time. Why should you bother with personalization anyway?
A study by HubSpot shows that personalized CTAs converted 202 percent better than default versions.
A Deloitte study found that apart from just basic personalization, 36 percent of consumers expect personalized products or services.
88 percent of marketers in a survey by Evergage said personalization has helped them realize better business results and 61 percent say personalization has helped them achieve superior customer experience.
I can keep reeling out these numbers endlessly. But it will do little or nothing for you if you don’t know how all of this personalization stuff works. Let’s go into that next.
Content curation has been a powerful tool in a smart marketer’s toolkit for years at this point.
The benefits of content curation are endless. Curated content takes less time to generate and publish. It builds trust and authority. It engages your audience. It connects you with influencers and big names in your industry.
And, best of all, content curation brings you tangible results: qualified traffic, new leads, targeted engagement, and even more sales down the road.
We’ve always been proponents of strategic content curation. With strategy in mind, you can set and accomplish huge goals as a business, such as establishing partnerships, breaking into new markets, hitting revenue milestones, and more.
By focusing on the right topics at the right time, you can provide real value to your ideal audience.
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Is there anything better than being a freelance content writer? You get the opportunity to express your thoughts, ideas, and opinions on a variety of topics, all while enjoying the flexibility to work remotely and carve out your own hours. It’s a rewarding career path with plenty of growth potential and exciting opportunities. But if there’s one thing that will prevent you from being successful, it’s distractions.
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Social media marketing is like home repair: Everyone thinks they’re an expert — until they learn the hard way that they’re not.
Even companies that work with social media personalities all day get it wrong. Mediakix points out that many influencer marketing agencies, which should be master content strategists, are stuck on self-serving and stodgy content. But while around half of users will unfollow brands that post irritating content, the bigger danger is actually poorly thought out content that catches on.
It’s only April, but the first quarter of 2019 has had more than its share of social media snafus. The following three offer valuable lessons for all the “experts” out there:
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It is no longer news that content curation will boost your content marketing efforts. It is an excellent way of sharing useful content to your audience if you have one already. And if you don’t have an audience, it is a wonderful way of building a community around the topics you care about most.
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Copywriting and SEO can’t be viewed as two separate endeavors. They’re closely connected, and you can’t be successful in one area without emphasizing the other.
Unfortunately, a lot of copywriters either give SEO a half-hearted try, or they unknowingly make costly mistakes that limit their success. In this article, we’re going to focus on the most common blunders and how they can be remediated.
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Content marketing generates 3x more leads than outbound marketing and costs as much as 62% less. It is cheaper and more result-oriented. And at the heart of every successful content strategy is not just the brains behind its execution, but the content itself.
This is what makes content the driving force on the internet. Search engines and social media sites exists largely because of content.
Today, more than half of 18 to 49-year old people get their news and information from the internet and this number is growing. When you create content your target audience devours, they will fall in love with you and your brand.
So how exactly is this done?
Here are four ways to use content for personal branding.
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If you’ve spent any time reading digital marketing blogs in the past few years, you have probably heard the buzzwords “content marketing” and “sales automation” mentioned.
What you may not have heard was how to combine the two sales and marketing approaches to really hit a home run with your prospects and customers.
Before we discuss combining content marketing and sales automation, let us look a little closer at these two digital marketing approaches.
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Content curation is a great asset available for marketers to maximize the impact of social selling programs. Scoop.it recent integration with social selling solutions such as GaggleAMP, unleash the power of content curation + social selling. But why is curation such a nice tool to leverage employee advocacy? All the answers below, and also in […]
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Though being an influencer looks easy and glamorous from the outside, those of us on the inside know it is anything but. Building an audience and putting out great content that people respond to takes a lot of hard work, experimentation, and trial and error. Coming up with original content on a daily basis is no small task. Yet no matter what industry you’re in or who your audience is, you’ll need to pump out high-quality content regularly if you want to see your fan base grow.
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One of the best ways to build trust with your audience is by opening a two-way communication channel.
Social media has provided this for a long time now. Everyone can now tweet, message, and tag brands through channels they hang out on.
When you’re on the business side of this interaction, there’s a problem (and it’s not quite obvious): these platforms dictate the rules of your engagement with the users.
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Here’s a scary fact: 50% of businesses fail in the first five years of business, and 66% in the first 10 years.
In other words, if you’re in business for less than five years, you stand a 50-50 chance of surviving.
Here’s some more food for thought: lack of understanding for the market is among the leading reasons businesses fail. Where’s the demand? How is competition doing? What are the problems and opportunities?
Market intelligence is the answer to these questions. Market intelligence includes consistent collection and analysis of all data that’s relevant to a company, such as customers, competitors, market trends, suppliers, and more.
The real benefit comes from turning those insights into data-driven decisions and actions that keep the business growing and evolving.
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Content insights powers up your market intelligence and your chances of surviving in the market.
We’ve already drilled into the importance of content intelligence, and it became overwhelmingly clear that for something so important, companies are collecting market knowledge quite sporadically.
As it turns out, marketing departments are the ones usually taking the lead on this. However, it’s no secret that almost every marketer already has more than they can handle on their plate.
In fact, one study revealed that 88% of marketers would prefer spending more time on strategy as opposed to preparing reports and analysis. It’s easy to see how content insights that empower market intelligence get neglected in the pursuit of strategic work.
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On April 2nd, 2019, the world said goodbye to Google+, a social network created by the search engine giant.
In the tech world, this isn’t the first time for an entire social platform to disappear. We saw it when Vine, a 6-second video platform shut down, as well as when MySpace faded away.
In other words, when you place a lot of your effort into a platform you can’t control, it’s important to be prepared for the circumstances in case it disappears someday.
Size of the user base of Google+ was hardly comparable to that of Facebook or even Google’s own YouTube. Almost half of US internet users never visited Google+ as of 2018, and Google+ held less than 0.3% of social network market share in the UK.
But Google+ was incredibly valuable to many users around the world.
The reason? Private Google+ communities. They provided a protected online space for coworkers to share knowledge and distribute intelligence, industry news, and key information in a timely manner.
This was easily amplified for companies that already used G Suite products and accounts as it made their Google+ accounts exist by default.
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When marketing and sales work together in close alignment, they can help companies close 38% more deals.
Sales enablement connects marketing and sales by the key roles each plays in educating prospects, closing deals and contributing to growth.
Marketing teams provide sales organizations with tools and curated information. This includes blog posts, external content, best practices and tools.
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For better or worse, content marketing and SEO are inextricably linked. If you’re going to operate in content marketing, you have to grasp its relationship to SEO and how the former affects the latter (and vice versa).
Although your primary focus should stay on building your brand through thoughtful content strategies that satisfy search engines and engage the ideal human audience, you’ll find a darker underbelly to the industry. If your brand becomes sufficiently successful, you may experience the ill-effects firsthand.
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As any successful content marketer knows, the key to building a business and remaining profitable is to regularly onboard new clients. As part of this onboarding process, you have to show prospective clients that you’re worth being hired. And with the right portfolio, you can do just that.
The Purpose and Utility of a Portfolio
Portfolios are often used in creative fields like graphic design, architecture, or art. But they can also be used in more traditional fields, such as marketing. As a content marketer, a portfolio can set you apart and give you a chance to reach more prospective clients and show them you’re worthy of being considered for their projects.