Last editions: #1: The best content marketing tools for the research phase. #2: The best content marketing tools for the creation phase. #3: The best content marketing tools for the optimization phase. We mentioned how much content marketing…
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“I like to compare evergreen posts to the foundations of a house. You may put up new wallpaper, patch up the roof, or even change the tiles on the floor – but rarely do you…
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Last editions: The best content marketing tools for the research phase. The best content marketing tools for the creation phase. We mentioned how much content marketing is an opportunity to build an audience in an authentic…
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Your content has a lot of competition. That’s a big challenge, but there’s a hidden opportunity there, too. With just a little bit of research you can find out how any piece of content performed….
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Content marketing – as an industry – is quickly migrating towards mobile devices. After all, that’s where users are reading and engaging with content. For the first time ever, the number of mobile-only internet users…
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Last week we listed the best content marketing tools for the research phase, first phase of your content marketing cycle.
We mentioned how much content marketing is an opportunity to build an audience in an authentic way, if you’re willing to invest the time to do things right.
Some carefully chosen content marketing software definitely help. To give you the specifics on how it could help and which pieces of software might help, we’ve put together this series of walk-throughs of all the basic functions and tasks required for content marketing, plus which pieces of software to use for each function.
This doesn’t include every piece of software you could use. But it does include the heavy hitters and the most popular tools.
I hope it gives you some ideas for how to better use software in your content marketing. Excel and whiteboards and notepads are all great tools, but we probably shouldn’t be running an entire content marketing department with them.
This week, we’ll go over the best content marketing tools to help you in your creation phase.
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As a business owner or marketer, you always have to be thinking about how you can improve and complement existing strategies by leveraging available technologies. In terms of content marketing in 2015, this means you…
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A few weeks back I wrote an article called “How to write good blog posts for your audience and SEO and make sure they perform” in which I laid down the steps I used to 1. write good blog posts consistently, and 2. help them perform better. The above infographic is a great visual way to respond to #2.
Many influencers talk about the 80/20 rule: you should spend 20% of your time creating content and 80% of your time promoting it. Although I think this ratio really depends on your job, needs and company, it does capture one thing: if you write amazing content but don’t shout out your did so, no one will hear you.
And as far as promoting your blog goes, you can pick and choose on the list above the items that make most sense to your company. If for instance you work for a very technical B2B company and your target audience is above 50 years old, you might want to consider investing in LinkedIn rather than Facebook, leverage influencers and invest time in guest blogging. It all really depends on your audience, where they are and what they care about.
There is one very important point I’d like to add to this infographic: it’s not content repurposing (which I thing is one of the leanest way to do content marketing, it saves an incredible amount of time), it’s content recycling.
Imagine if radio stations had played Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean only once: would it have become the 80’s biggest hit? Probably not. This is the same with your content. If you want it to be seen among others, you have to share it on a regular basis with your audience.
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Content marketing has a lot going for it. It’s 63% less expensive than traditional advertising. It’s an opportunity to build an audience in an authentic way. But it does require quite a bit of work and management if you want to see results.
These are the 6 phases of content marketing:
This week, we’ll go over the best content marketing tools to help you in your research phase.
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In the content marketing game, getting people on your website is typically the main objective. Posting great content improves your reputation, increases your visibility, and can serve as a funnel for referral traffic, but inbound…
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We are visual creatures. Our brains process images 60,000 times faster than text. And while we retain only 10% of what we hear and 20% of what we read, we remember 80% of what we…
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Content marketing is built on beautiful principles. Instead of interrupting people’s day to day lives with TV adverts, skyline-blocking billboards and glossy magazine ads, content marketers create useful resources for their customers and for each…
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The marketing definition of conversion is “get the prospect to take action.”
How do you get someone to take the action you want? You need to make them comfortable.
Marketers are hard to trust, right? We brought it on ourselves because we were “full of it” for decades. Or, at least, we were full of ourselves.
So when a potential buyer arrives in your marketing den for the first time, they’re not exactly in a hurry to proceed to the bedroom. Or relax into a chair.
At best, they’re curious. Realistically, they’re anxious. And usually, they do just the opposite of what you want. They leave.
Why? Discomfort. It’s the almighty conversion killer—the meanest mutha’ in marketing.
So here’s what I propose: drop the transformation ambition and aim a wee-bit lower. Aim to overcome the causes of discomfort. You need to craft your content to put prospects in their comfort zone.
Who’s in charge of the comfort zone?
The copywriter is the chief conversion officer.
The copywriter’s output must seal the deal or at least write something compelling—and comforting—enough to start some sort of relationship.
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If you didn’t know that content marketing is your best bet to generate leads today, then at least I would have warned you!
No but seriously, if I didn’t convince you, here are a few facts that will.
– Inbound marketing delivers 54% more leads into the marketing funnel than traditional outbound marketing. (Source: State of Inbound 2014, Hubspot).
– You have 758x more chances of closing an inbound lead (that came to you through your content) than an outbound lead (that you went to get with telemarketing, cold calling, etc.) (Source: Search Engine Journal).
“There is nothing new under the sun.”
What do you think of that quote? Is it depressing? Dismissive?
True?
True or not, that quote evokes a dilemma every content creator struggles with. We have a lot of content to create, and in one way or another, it’s all been created before.
Before you get on the defensive, let me explain what I mean by that.
Our job is to create content that both serves our audience and meets business goals. To do that efficiently, we use proven formats (blog posts, white papers, tweets, etc). We answer common questions. We do this in ways that are familiar to our audience and easy for them to understand.
If we get too creative and too cutting-edge, we become hard to understand. As soon as our audience doesn’t understand us, they’re gone. The rest of the Internet – the easy-to-understand and endlessly diverting Internet – is only a click away.
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Find out how you can double the amount of traffic and leads you get from “old” blog content through historical optimization.
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We’re sad summer is ending… so we decided to make it last a bit longer!
Come at our content marketing happy hour to discuss marketing best practices with our team and your peers over food and drinks!
What – Happy hour in our office
Who – Marketers and content marketers
Where – Downtown San Francisco
When – Next Thursday August 27th starting at 6pm
We’ll stack the fridge with wine and beers and there will be cheese and pizzas.
Come with your marketer friends and let’s make it a party!
Of course, it’s free 🙂
But hurry… our office can’t host the entire content marketing scene so it’s first come first serve!
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The most popular digital marketing mantra in recent years has been “Content is King”, and while the mantra itself may be a touch overused, it is by no means inaccurate. Now more than ever it’s incredibly important to create – not just a content marketing strategy but – your own unique content marketing strategy if you hope to drive traffic and boost brand awareness from online channels.
This article dives into a bit of background on the recent popularity of content marketing, why you need to develop a content marketing strategy that is unique, and shows you where to find some of the newest strategies to set yourself apart from your competitors.
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Content marketing sucks. What’s more, the coolest content marketers no longer have blogs. Wait. What? Has guest blogger Barry Feldman (please excuse the weird switch to the third-person voice) flown kamikaze into the Scoop.it blog…
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“No matter what your business model is, content is still king. One research study a few years ago revealed that many B2B marketers have documented plans to increase their lead generation budgets by up to 50% the…
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When I try to write good blog posts, it automatically becomes more difficult than it would be to have an interesting debate with someone, even if I had the same discussion and arguments. Ok first, what is a good blog post? It’s – of course – a post that converts. That brings you traffic. Leads. Revenue, you might dare? For that, your content needs to delight your audience. And if you want your audience to find this beautiful piece of content you spent hours writing, it needs to be SEO-proofed.
I was discussing with a friend last week and he asked me if I had a “process” in place that I followed when writing a blog post. No, I didn’t have a checklist with items that I crossed off to make sure I didn’t forget anything. But shouldn’t I?
That got me thinking about the methodology I built over time for my writing purposes (and that I’m sure I did not invent but whatever) and also to promote it accordingly. Unconsciously I use that methodology to try and write good blog posts, curate an existing post, or even re-work an article of a guest blogger. So I tried to lay down a list of these steps for you, hoping you can relate and use it at some point. Let me know if you liked it or if you’d add anything to it!
The key to content marketing success is to publish good content, but also to publish more content: you need to blog more and to blog consistently if you want to get tangible results. The times where you could publish an occasional epic piece of content such as a quarterly white paper or a yearly survey report and be “good to go” are gone.
That’s the ultimate goal, isn’t it? You know that you need to have a blog, and a blog that doesn’t suck like many do. But having a blog and publishing a good piece of content every month is not enough. Why? Because for your audience to find your content when they ask Google a question, you need your content to answer the new SEO rules:
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Ahh, Facebook. We love to hate on them don’t we. It’s no surprise by now that Facebook organic reach is on its way out. We feel it on our pages and I’m sure you feel it on your pages too.
It’s getting harder and harder to avoid paying Facebook for visibility. The idyllic days when you could build a following and engagement on social networks through the shear strength of your community management skills seem like a fading memory.
When you curate content the right way, you should never get in trouble with Google or your readers. In fact, it should do just the opposite: improve your search rankings and delight your readers and followers.
One common misconception about content curation is that it’s simply reposting entire pages of other people’s content on your own site. But let me be clear: this is not curation.
So, what is content curation? While there is some variance among definitions, I like how marketing expert Heidi Cohen defines it: “Content curation assembles, selects, categorizes, comments on, and presents the most relevant, highest quality information to meet your audience’s needs on a specific subject.”
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I find the best titles come to me AFTER I have already written a post. Sometimes you need to have a clear idea of the ‘hook’ you’re using before you can come up with a killer title – and often that hook only comes to you WHILE you are writing the post.
Read the full article at kimgarst.com
Kim’s article is great: she gives you 6 easy and highly effective ways to create the perfect blog titles. And just like her, it takes me a while to find the title of my blog post: in fact I often have a title in mind but end up changing it until I publish it.
Why?
Because the title may be the last thing you should worry about when you’re writing a blog post. Not that you shouldn’t think about it and optimize it, that’s not what I said. But if you write a good blog post that adds value to your readers and is SEO-proofed, then the perfect blog post title should almost automatically be revealed to you.
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There are so many content curation pros that it can seem too good to be true, especially if you struggle to create your own content. The idea that you can to attract and engage an…
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Companies tend to struggle to create and publish good content on their blog. If you’re a marketer, you’re most likely not a professional writer. Hence it can be difficult to figure out what your audience is interested in, write good content around those topics, all while running your other marketing tasks. And when your segment has many big actors with content marketing teams dedicated to maintaining an efficient blog, it can be challenging to try and compete with them. So it’s important to understand what matters in terms of content quantity and quality.
Publish good content, yes indeed. Here’s how.
If “Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left” – according to Seth Godin (best selling author, entrepreneur, marketer and public speaker) -, you want to do things right.
If you want to do things right and publish good content, you should…
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The success or failure of a piece of content is often measured by how many shares it gets. Hopefully, those shares are also part of a content strategy that’s driven by ROI. But whether they are or not, there’s almost always a push for more shares.
Social sharing and psychology are linked: if you want to get more shares from your content, it helps to take a look at the psychological drivers behind why content gets shared. These are the motivations behind sharing that are deeper than the typical techniques to get more shares. They go beyond tricks like including an image, choosing the right time to share, and crafting a click-worthy headline.
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As content marketing has grown in popularity, marketers have become more familiar with how customers like to interact with information online. Visual content is a great cure for short attention spans, conveying a message succinctly, and it has the added benefit of presenting information in a shareable format. When a customer can see concepts illustrated in colorful, well-designed and compelling infographics, that customer may be better able to grasp those concepts than if they were outlined in writing. But if you want to make compelling infographics, you have to put some effort into it. Infographics are often driven by content, so it’s important to have a solid background before starting. Marketers should also have several unbiased people review the infographic to make sure it makes sense before publishing it. Here are a few ways infographics are gradually changing content marketing as we know it today.
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If you don’t know how to promote content on social media, putting all the pieces together can feel like quite a challenge. There are so many options, so many technologies, and so many tips and tricks all clamoring for your attention.
To help distill the process down to it’s basic elements, we’ve created two imaginary business owners: Marisa, who owns a retail store, and Ted, who owns a professional services firm. This post will outline their businesses needs and their content promotion goals. Then it will lay out a detailed weekly content promotion plan and schedule for each of them.
Each promotion plan is a little different, because the businesses are different. Your business will be different than these plans too, of course. But after reading this you’ll know The basic elements of a promotion plan, how they should change with different business priorities and how to decide which options are best for you.
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