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).
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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Content marketing is often proclaimed to be one of the most valuable, effective marketing strategies available. But there’s a critical caveat to that description; people have to read your content for it to be valuable in any way. Of course, content comes in many forms—when I say “read” what I actually mean is “consume”. A person would need to read an article in the same way they would need to watch a video or listen to an interview—the point is, if a person isn’t engaging with your material, your material isn’t worth anything. So why people aren’t reading your content?
There are several potential reasons that could prevent someone from reading your material, and learning to prevent or mitigate those reasons can help you improve your readership (and therefore your entire content campaign). Pay special attention to these seven potential reasons, which I have found to be some of the most common and most devastating.
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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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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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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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When people talk of the “quality” of a piece of content, they’re generally referring to its value in terms of captivating an audience or attracting attention to the brand. They might be referring to the depth of research, the style of the writing, or the overall appeal of the topic, but if you boil down the value of a piece to its capacity to engage an audience, you end up with two major factors: its virality and its utility.
Virality is the potential for a piece of content to “go viral” or circulate amongst audience members and achieve more visibility. Viral pieces are important because they cause the piece to have a greater range of impact, and grant greater overall visibility for the brand. Utility is the overall usefulness of a piece of content for an individual reader. For example, a how-to article holds more utility for a reader than a piece about a company’s operational anniversary.
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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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Content marketing — the use of blogs, social media, whitepapers, and webinars to attract and convert leads — has essentially replaced all other forms of lead acquisition. Sharp marketing leaders know that becoming a trusted advisor is essential to…
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Lack of time came in as the #1 challenge for both B2B and B2C marketers in the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs 2014 Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends surveys.
If you’re not sure you’re using your time well enough, or if you’d like a checklist of content marketing areas to emphasize, the following list may be helpful. Each item of this list is a sign you’re wasting time on content marketing. Or – on the brighter side – an opportunity to boost your productivity.
“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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From aspiring developers struggling through their first Intro to CS class to industry pros implementing the latest refinements to Google search algorithms, all software engineers who are passionate about their craft have one thing in common: they spend significant amounts of time religiously reading software development blogs. While developers’ blogs of choice vary greatly according to level of expertise, niche of interest, sense of humor, and more, this common theme is no accident.
The software engineering industry evolves faster than any other industry, and its fixation on open sourcing new technologies has led to a near-daily flood of new technologies, libraries and updates. If you’ve encountered a tricky task, chances are someone else has already solved it, and has written an open sourced library to save you the time. For software engineers who need to improve their skills or stay on top of their game, it is critical to regularly stay abreast of the leading software engineering blogs, tech news aggregators, and columns. Whether you’re looking for high-level tutorials, news updates, tech lifestyle pieces, or something else, there is a blog out there to meet your needs.
Here are the top 10 software development blogs.
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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!
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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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.
