Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winning author of “Thinking Fast and Slow” uses the terms “system 1” and “system 2” to describe how we process and understand information. System 1 is intuitive, non-thinking. System 2 kicks in when the brain must work on the problem.If I ask you what is 2+2, your system 1 brain immediately answers 4.

Now, if I ask you what is 2,531 + 9,518? without using a calculator, then your system 2 brain kicks in. You focus, and your cognitive load increases as your brain works towards the answer; 12,049.And it is the same for language.

If a Web visitor arrives at a Web page with a complex message, they must spend mental energy working to understand. And since people scan web pages and spend 15 seconds on average on each page, they will most likely churn....

There will be more than one front-runner, but start with a single blog post, or a series of related posts, and brainstorm ways to transform that content into a fresh format that will attract a new segment of your audience.

Got that down?  Cool. Lather up your content archives, rinse, and repeat. To get your creative juices flowing, here are ten content ideas to consider:...

I can’t help but be grateful for the CMI community and all of the tips I’ve learned along the way this year. While I always glean so much from our community, I want to pay a special thanks to our Content Marketer of the Year finalists.

While all of these individuals offer a lot for us to learn, I’m definitely stealing these six ideas. (You can also get more stolen ideas in this post from 2015and this one from 2013.)...

One truth is self-evident to content marketers: Traditional ads aren’t enough these days. With more than half of digital ads going unseen and more than 200 million people employing ad-blocking software, standard display units face an increasingly uphill battle when it comes to reaching and influencing consumers.

With these statistics in mind, it’s no wonder that a look at Google Trends data over the past five years shows rising interest in both content marketing (blue) and native ads (red) as topics.

That said, therein lies the problem. Marketers continue to create more and more content, but the audience looking to consume such content isn’t growing. It’s a basic issue of supply and demand.

The 2016 Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs content marketing trends report found that 77% of B2C marketers planned to produce more content in 2016 than in 2015. But that added content is fighting for a limited chunk of consumer media attention.

The content landscape is cluttered and the situation is only being exacerbated. As marketers turn to content marketing to help overcome some of the challenges associated with traditional ad buys, they’re finding that even a solid content creation strategy isn’t enough....

After much anticipation, Google Posts is finally available to all small businesses. The content will appear in both Google search and maps results.

Google Posts is now rolling out to all small businesses that use the Google My Business (GMB) platform.

Google just announced the rollout late this afternoon. A couple of weeks ago, the company moved Google Posts into GMB, and that is where you can access it now — on both the desktop and the Google My Business Android and iOS apps.

Go to your GMB account and click on “Posts” on the left-side menu when you are in your Google business listing....