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…
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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.
When people think about art, their minds tend to circle around things like painting, drawing, sculpting, or photography. But writing is just as much a creative art form. And as a content writer, you have to make sure your creative juices are constantly flowing.
Is Creativity Really That Elusive?
As a content writer, your livelihood depends on your ability to capture creativity and turn it into well-crafted sentences that satisfy your clients and motivate your readers to action. And with all of the pressure to constantly produce content, creativity can seem rather elusive at times. But is this just a figment of our imaginations?
These days, it seems like you can find anything on the Internet. It’s true and there’s even a statistic that around 30% of all content on the web is duplicate.
Content repurposing is not something new to marketers, but they constantly look for different ways how to introduce existing content from a fresh perspective.
Why Repurpose Content?
Content is the modern currency. The more value it brings, the more you can benefit from it. Repurposing content can help your business grow without having to rack your brains over creating fresh content every day.
If you own your business for several years, you may have tons of content already that you can re-purpose, expand or turn it into a new form of content, thus attracting new audiences.
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Everything you do online to market your business boils down to a simple end goal: attracting qualified traffic that you can successfully convert into clients and customers. Many strategies and channels will help you do…
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Content curation is the engine behind every successful brand. Regardless of your specialization, your projects and ideas can grow in size and complexity thanks to a constant influx of content.
For getting new content, social media is the undisputed best source. Unlimited time and space for conversation create content that is later a viable part in a campaign.
Almost every big brand gets at least a part of their content from social media. Therefore, we can say it’s surely effective in both content curation and content marketing.
In this article, we’ve decided to dive into the details of social media as a platform for new content creation.
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If you’re like most content marketers, you’re dealing with consistent pressures and demands of the industry. If you fail to keep up, you can’t see results. Because…
An estimated 50% of all content is going completely unused. Evergreen, high-quality content has never been more paramount to the content strategy success, and you can’t afford any time to waste on content that won’t bring you ROI.
Ranking in search to get in front of your target audience takes time. Only 22% of pages that rank in the top 10 results were created in the last year.
The need to have an omni-channel strategy is at its peak. Even though it requires more time and planning than single-channel content, businesses who adopt it achieve 91% greater year-over-year customer retention rates.
Remember: people aren’t searching for content. No one wakes up and wants to watch a webinar or read a whitepaper. Instead, they are searching for solutions and answers. If you’re the one providing answers, you can win them over and turn them into loyal, returning readers and visitors.
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Accordingly to the 2013 Content Marketing Benchmarks, Trends and Budgets, 68% of marketers were using content curation as a content marketing tactic. Some years have passed, but many marketers will agree that content curation is just as important today.
Content curation is like coupons. According to Couponbuffer, over 300 billion coupons are distributed, but only 0.7% are redeemed. Similarly, millions of content in different formats are created daily, but very little ever gets to an end user.
Just as coupon redemption is important for customers and marketers alike, content curation is vital for both marketers and their audience. But how? Here are some ways content curation compliments your content marketing efforts.
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It’s often a challenge to dive into content marketing head first.
It costs you money and time. You can’t see results quickly. And on top of that, if you’re going in the wrong direction, it might take you months until you realize it.
To make content marketing work for the organization—meaning, to make it sell and bring positive return on investment—companies fall into the trap of only talking about themselves.
While this works later on in the funnel when potential customers are ready to buy, there is a key element that needs to happen beforehand: their trust in your capability to solve the challenge they’re facing. In other words, they have to rely on you first.
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Copywriting is the craft and sometimes art of writing words to achieve a specific purpose, usually to sell something. SEO copywriting is writing content for the specific purpose of better ranking the content, or the page that contains it, in search engine query results. As the search engine in question is usually Google, it’s easy to say that SEO copywriting is mostly writing content that Google likes. But is it, really?
One update after the other, Google has been trying to get its search algorithms closer to understanding how and why people search for what they search. The tech giant keeps surprising us with new interesting things it can do to better understand what people want when they search and what they get from content when they see it as a search result.
SEO copywriting is also about people. They are the ones you aim to please, after all, and it’s not like Google isn’t in the business of doing exactly that. It all comes down to giving people what they need because they are your audience, they are the people for whom you’re writing the content. But because it is the way your content gets to the audience, you have to keep Google happy as well.
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You put a lot of time and money into content marketing for your business, but how can you know if the investment is paying off? If you’re not tracking these important metrics, you could be missing critical information necessary for making decisions about which campaigns are the most profitable and which should be shelved.
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