This infographic does a good job at describing 5 basic types of landing pages you might consider for your content strategy.
Why should you use landing pages for content marketing anyway?
Landing pages are a powerful way to generate leads because:
Read MoreSource: www.slideshare.net
Content Marketing is being adopted very quickly, especially by B2B Marketers. The Content Marketing Institute together with MarketingProfs published this great report that gives many enlightening facts about the key challenges they face and how they resolve them.
Among other great findings, here’s what I found particularly interesting:
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Over the past few years you may have noticed a change in the way you are consuming content. With more and more large companies looking to find ways to connect to their ideal consumer there has been a shift in the way content is being developed and shared.
Read MoreSource: www.youtube.com
Ever since we started working on content curation, we’ve had this question: is content curation adding value? Is it stealing? Is it repeating like a parrot?
And ever since we started, we’ve seen more and more examples of how the remix culture is becoming a massive trend.
Just like good DJ’s, good content curators are creating something new out of the existing by not only aggregating but giving new meaning to content.
This video made me speechless. Isn’t it amazing?
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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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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.
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!
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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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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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.
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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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.”
This intensive guide created by Vocus was inspired by Mark Schaefer’s infamous Content Shock theory of a few months back. He essentially states that soon, there will be too much content for anyone to stand out and that marketers need to start taking actions to combat this unfavorable outcome sooner than later.
I’d recommend content marketers to read this entire guide and note some of the tips inside, but here are a few of the key takeaways worth noting.
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“We all want content marketing results, but they can be hard to get without the right SEO tools. Here is a list containing 27 search optimization essentials.”
SEO changed over the past few years through the Google Search algorithm updates: from being a complex, tech process involving back links and labor – and to be fair not always very “white hat” – it became synonym for “regularly publish great content“.
This means that SEO tools have considerably changed and while analytics tools like Google’s or Moz are still very important, they help you measure but they don’t solve the main problem content marketers have: how to scale the content volume without sacrificing quality.
So we’re not surprised to see content-focused tools in…
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Last week, Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers presented her Internet Trends report for 2014 at the Code Conference in California. Each year since 2001, KPCB has partnered with some of the best data analysts in the country to create a comprehensive report of rising Internet trends across all industries. This year, the presentation resulted in a 164-slide deck that you can read in its entirety here. Since we’re fans of tl;dr analyses & content curation, though, here are some of the most important points from the first half of the report.
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Read MoreOne of my core beliefs of effective content marketing is to deliver content people actually want. Publish stories they actually will enjoy – to read and to share.
Where do you get your news? Some sources are too concerned about political correctness to give the news the treatment it deserves. The following are some news websites that (thankfully) don’t hold back.
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Working in the world of entrepreneurs and startups has given me a whole new appreciation for the phrase “fake it ’til you make it.” This isn’t to say that everyone who is just getting started in their companies or careers in general is completely faking it, but just that they are doing the right things to position themselves correctly before they might actually be a full-fledged expert.
In this post on Entrepreneur.com, the extremely smart Dorie Clark tackles a question that almost all of us have tried to figure out at one point or another: how do I make myself seem like I know what I’m doing when I’m just getting started?
Read MoreEvery one of your people can become an advocate for your organization and your brand – an employee advocate.
Excellent point made by Mike Bailey that reminds me of an argument also made by Marketo here. And exactly the trend we see happening with more and more of our enterprise clients at Scoop.it: while a lot of companies are still in a command-and-control mode with small marketing teams in charge of every aspect of outbound communication, we see a growing number of organizations realize they need to leverage their employees – and their employees social network – so that their communication becomes much more effective.
As the graph above explains, an employee sharing content to their networks has up to 20x more impact than when the brand does it (when you normalize their number of followers/friends).
Content curation plays a key role here: you not only need to create relevant and engaging content hubs for employees but they need to be easy for them to curate, share and publish from. As often, adoption is key and you need systems where employees can easily take ownership through a rewarding experience which seems to be what’s driving more and more demand to use Scoop.it internally within the enterprise.
See on socialmediatoday.com
Read MoreIs content marketing worth it? Can your company achieve a positive ROI by investing in blogging, social media, and marketing automation?
A great compilation of studies on the ROI of content marketing from Eloqua and Hubspot. There are lots of interesting numbers which show how valuable content marketing can be in the long run: unlike advertising which costs increase with success, content marketing scales up by delivering economies of scale with lower and lower costs per lead or visitor.
Now, the caveat is that these studies focus on sizeable organizations who can afford the following investments: “According to Eloqua’s findings, a mid-sized organization should expect to spend approximately $12,000 a month and a larger-sized company could expect about $33,000 a month.”
This raises the question of the accessibility of content marketing to small and mid-size businesses. To really be the new advertising, Content Marketing needs to become accessible to all – hence the growing interest for leancontent solutions and tools.
See on www.business2community.com
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Visual Marketing Over/Under or How I Use Scoop.it
Friends like Phil Buckley and Mark Traphagen are curious about how and why I use Scoop.it. This G+ post shares a detailed analysis of how Scoop.it helps reduce #contentmarketing risks, provides fast feedback to influence social media marketing and creates a safe envrionment to test assumptions, create validated learning and learn fast.
Read MoreAhh, Influencers. A key component to your social media and inbound marketing success. Not only do we need them to propel our marketing efforts to the next level, but they also play a large part of your relationship marketing strategy. An Influencer campaign should be a part of your social media engagement strategy.
From the New Yorker: “When Jonah Berger was a graduate student at Stanford, in the early aughts, he would make a habit of reading page A2 of the Wall Street Journal, which included a list of the five most-read and the five most-shared articles of the day. “I’d go down to the library and surreptitiously cut out that page,” he recalls. “I noticed that what was read and what was shared was often different, and I wondered why that would be.” What was it about a piece of content—an article, a picture, a video—that took it from simply interesting to interesting and shareable? What pushes someone not only to read a story but to pass it on?”
This piece that Gregg Morris initially scooped on how some people have been putting a lot of analysis to understand how and why stories go viral: after all – as this great article points out – this was already something Aristotle was intrigued by.
The findings are interesting and I encourage you to read them as it can inform your content strategy. Keep in mind the conclusion however – which I think is great and wise: the more we understand viral content collectively, the less we understand it.
Why?
Because whenever humans are involved, martingales don’t exist for long.
It reminds me of financial markets: whenever stock information is perfectly distributed and statistical models are the same for everybody, no one really has an edge.
For content, the same that applies: when everybody’s trying to do an Upworthy-like headline, they become much less effective than they used to be.
See on www.newyorker.com
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Last week, Scoop.it announced its integration with Google+ Pages and Google Authorship. As CEO Guillaume Decugis explained, “we actually believe curation is a form of creation. So just as Google introduced Google Authorship as a way for publishers to be more visible in search results and benefit from a natural SEO method, we felt it was also important to add Google+ to the platform. So from now on, you will be able to link your Google+ profile to Scoop.it and not only be recognized in search results for your curated content but derive higher traffic from Google Search through the improved visibility authored results enjoy.”
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Most people curate for the benefit of themselves or their organisations. What if we considered content curation from a user centered design perspective? What would audience centered curation look like?
An interesting look at curation from the user experience side.
For Content Curation to generate goodwill – in whichever form you can see it: thought leadership, brand awareness, lead generation, etc… – it needs to be first and foremost valuable to your reader.
How can you make curated content not only more useful and interesting to your audience, but ensure that they are having an enjoyable and successful experience consuming this content?
Great tips from Sam Burrough.
See on weelearning.co.uk
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As the volume of content published on the Internet continues to grow, consumers can help shield themselves from the noise that doesn’t matter to them by curating only the content that matters on interest graph platforms
Content curation and the Interest Graph are two different things but are deeply connected. While some content curators like Maria Popova are great at being eclectic, a lot of value to readers come from being able to discover and read from publishers who address the specific niches they’re interested in.
Chad Politt from Digital Relevance clearly establishes that connexion in this contribution to the Huff Post and I would draw the following conclusions for content strategists and content curators:
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