Social media is a critical channel for businesses looking to distribute branded content to their market. It puts companies in front of marketing qualified prospects who may not yet have thought to conduct a basic Google…
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Jon Miller, one of the most influential leaders in MarTech (founder of Marketo and now Engagio) recently hosted an informative discussion during ContentTECH, Content Marketing Institute‘s one-day virtual marketing event dedicated to content marketing technology. With so…
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We wanted to share with you the Best Of Content Marketing articles we wrote in the past 3 months. Let us know if you like them in the comments! On track to Content Marketing ROI? Take…
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Google is a great tool. But it has its limitations. Like when you’re tired of doing keyword searches for content to share with your audience. You want to find the good stuff, but not the…
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Never tried content curation? Not sure it could work for your business? Then this is the post for you. A beginner’s guide to content curation First things first: What is content curation? It can be…
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To “do” content marketing, you need to “do” content. But when marketers set out to actually build a content creation team, there’s the dream, and there’s the reality. Since 90% of all the data in the…
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Hi everyone, We wanted to share with you the Best Of Content Marketing articles we wrote in the past 3 months. And in extra, get the list of the best tools for the publishing phase…
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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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Small business owners aren’t usually on social media to share cat videos and indulge in celebrity gossip. They’re on social media for business. They do social media to gain exposure, but ultimately the goal is to get more business. Getting more business usually means getting more leads.
Unfortunately, getting leads from social media is not so easy. If you’re doing well at it, pat yourself on the back. Most marketers struggle with getting social media to work well for lead generation.
That’s what Ascend2 discovered when they tallied up the results of a lead generation survey of 300 marketers last month. Only 26% of the marketers they surveyed marked social media as among their more effective lead generation tactics.
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“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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Want to try one of the best marketing time savers… just in time for the lazy days of August? We’ve got just the thing. If you’ve been curating content on social media but haven’t taken…
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Ever since we started to work on Scoop.it, we’ve had this question: is it fair to use other people’s content for your own good: in other words, how ethical is content curation? Is it even legal?
A quick look at history clearly shows that artists and scientists never created in a vacuum but have always leveraged pre-existing work to develop their own. And that’s for the greater good. Closer to us, there is a multitude of online media sites which embraced content curation as an alternative or a complement to the content they produce: the Huffington Post is a famous example but Upworthy and BuzzFeed are others and even the respected New York times started doing it.
Of course, such an answer won’t satisfy your legal department or your own need to have a more pragmatic answer. So as we’ve now been arounds for several years and, more importantly, have seen millions of users publish more than 100 million pieces of content, we feel we can not only give you a recap of the facts that make content curation ethical but also back that out with data.
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Content curation is a bit of an art form, and takes some time to perfect. But once you’ve figured out a strategy that works, you’ll have a process in place for regularly finding, compiling and editorializing content your audience will love!
In order to curate content, you first need to find it. The net is teeming with information ripe for curation, but the challenge is finding relevant content in a timely manner.
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This is a very interesting case study by the team at B2B Content Engine on content curation and website traffic: it analyzes the impact content curation has on a B2B web site’s traffic. B2B sites typically have niche audiences which are hard to find from untargeted methods and costly to generate with targeted advertising.
What this study shows is that consistent content curation provided not only impressive results on traffic growth but also lead generation conversion at a 12% rate. In addition to many other great benefits such as brand visibility, awareness, etc…
It also gives an idea of the volume of content that was required to achieve that, which is very reasonable.
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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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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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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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Want more leads? You’re not alone. According to IDG Enterprise’s 2015 B2B Content Marketing Spotlight Report, lead generation is the #1 priority for content marketers.
But while everybody says they want more leads, in the very next breathe they’ll add that they want better leads, too. That’s why you’ll see lead nurturing come in as priority #4 on this same graph. Lead nurturing is basically lead generation 2.0. First you get the leads, then you warm them up.
In this article, Mike Huber rightly says “more is what you need when it comes to content marketing”, and then points out in 6. that “your team needs to be all in”. And since “the best time to start a content marketing program is 5 years ago and the second best time is today”, you’d better start publishing content regularly now.
Our experience adds one lesson to this post: “curation helps you publish more”. And not just more, also better.
The launch of Sccop.it Content Director in February was a huge success and a number of you already love the product! We wanted to thank you for the continuous feedback to help us improve it, and are happy to announce the release of a new version of Scoop.it Content Director that takes into account the many enhancements you asked for and that will help you generate more ROI with your Content Marketing.
This new release is centered on three main areas:
– Scale your content marketing with contributors,
– Create engaging newsletters in minutes with a new drag-and-drop editor,
– Measure What Matters – improve and prove the ROI of your content with the new analytics.
We will host a webinar on May 20th to show you how you can leverage Scoop.it Content Director to improve your Content Marketing strategy and ROI. You can register here.
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When it comes to writing content, a question that often comes is: how much should I create? You can hear all sorts of advice ranging from quantitative analysis on the optimized size of a blog post to bloggers recommendations on the merits of 800-word SEO-optimized posts vs long form epic content.
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To calculate content curation ROI, all you need to do is to tally up what it took to do the marketing, and then what you got out of it. The first part of that is to figure out how long it took you to do your work.
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There are so many content marketing formats that it can be hard to decide which to focus on. White papers, ebooks, slideshares, blogs, infographics, curated content, videos, etc. They all have their merits but don’t…
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Most of us who practice content marketing rely on at least some kind of content marketing software. We’re software people by nature, so it’s only natural we’ve got a thing for digital tools. Of course, it is possible to stay on top of your content marketing work with just Excel and Google calendar. But at a certain point you’ll want to graduate to something more robust.
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With so many advances in smart technology these days, marketing professionals, content creators, and their teams need to keep up with the availability of tools that help reduce their workload and maximize their output.
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“According to the experts, a blog will solve all your Internet woes. Blogging will increase your traffic, expand your audience, improve your engagement, position you as an authority, and allow you to shape the message in your space. So should you blog?”
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Content Marketing is the new SEO. To fully understand how SEO evolved and how content impacts it, here are 4 of the best pieces of content I’ve read on this topic (+ one from me):…
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Creating content, especially in a lean marketing team, is an all-hands-on-deck endeavor. Having a dream team in place to create not only the social posts, blog pieces, and video snippets, but the strategy, big picture campaigns and creative long-term vision should be a top priority for marketers in 2015.
Source: www.b2bmarketinginsider.com
Michael Brenner makes an interesting list of all the various creative talents you would need in an ideal Content Marketing team. But while there’s no denying that this would be a dream team, it’s anything but lean.
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Repurposing is a key strategy of the lean content marketing methodology. Megan Marrs has 11 interesting best practices and ideas on how to repurpose content efficiently in this great post which made me want to elaborate on this topic.
So here’s the take of several other content marketing experts on the value of repurposing content, a cheat sheet that summarizes key ideas to repurpose content (Megan’s 11 plus 4 others I added) as well as the ROI analysis of two of our own experiment with content repurposing.
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