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...Therein lies the fundamental difference between today’s SEO focused content and what content marketers offer. SEO is accountable to metrics like search visibility, organic search traffic and any measurable actions that lead to and result in conversions. The more content that can serve as a “hook in the water” of search results, the more the SEO can show an impact on the investment. As I’ve been saying lately, SEO anticipates demand through an understanding of keyword popularity and content marketing creates demand driven by producing content based on the customer journey. Optimization is an effort to improve search visibility of existing content and digital assets as well as the creation of new content according to a target list of keywords. Content Marketing is an approach that emphasizes the thoughtful creation of content for a particular audience designed to influence an action or outcome. Rather than keyword popularity driving content creation, an effort is made to understand the customer buying journey and to architect a content plan that provides the right kind of information and experiences along the buying cycle....
While content marketing quickly went from “what’s that” to “must have” in 2012, the biggest challenges marketers face are producing enough of the right type of content and having resources, both budget and staff, for creating content. Content curation supplements original content for both broadly and narrowly focused topics. Through the editorial process, it adds original content and provides an opportunity to showcase relevant gems. Content curation as part of content marketing strategy – 3 Facts Almost 60% of content marketers use some form of content curation according to Curata’s 2012 B2B Marketing Trends Report. Doing curation well can give you a competitive advantage because it’s a low cost way to expand your content marketing offering....
It’s a familiar refrain: technology is changing the way consumers find and absorb new information, brand news and interact with companies as well as each other. As a PR firm representing clients and trying to tell brand stories to engage with these consumers, we need to evaluate and understand the manner in which they discover, consume and react to news. In trying to understand the changing media landscape and consumer preferences, we need to take into consideration some key factors:... [Useful tips for content marketing success ~ Jeff]
Personalized content marketing is the next wave of the dynamic web. Find out how you can better incorporate personalization into your own strategies. Delivering the right message to the right person at the right time is tricky. But existing techniques and new technology are upping the ante in an emerging trend called content personalization. Your content marketing could benefit big time from it — especially if you cater to different audience segments. Content personalization (or customization — take your pick) is a strategy that relies on visitor data to deliver relevant content based on audience interests and motivations. It ranges from a highly targeted call to action to a revolving landing page based on geographic or industry-specific segments. It’s a user experience shortcut that connects your audience with the information it needs more quickly, enhancing the chance of converting the lead. For example, B2B marketers targeting professional service firms may use personalization to deliver unique content to attorneys and engineers, respectively. There are countless use case scenarios where the strategy comes in handy. As a content marketer, a thorough audience analysis will help you weigh the value of using the strategy. From placing cookies in a visitor’s browser to simply asking for visitor information, content marketers have a variety of options to help them get started with personalizing their content. But first, content marketers must understand what makes segmentation thrive.... [Good insight into content personalization strategies ~ Jeff]
Here are the Top 20 Best Brand Timelines on Facebook. Check out what YOUR brand should be doing. Facebook launched the Timeline for brands about two months ago and we have been watching closely to see who is doing it best. The brands below are great examples of what you should be doing on a Facebook timeline: interacting, informing, converting and entertaining. Being awesome is also recommended....
Social mediaprovides writers, including book authors, journalists, bloggers and others, with an opportunity to build a targeted audience for their content. With the increased use of content marketing, don’t underestimate the usefulness of these methods for connecting with prospects for business oriented lead generation and other forms of revenue....
In their rush to be measured like everyone else, content marketers are in danger of short-changing their full value. These four benefits of content marketing can bring immense value to your company and its internal communication goals. ...Let’s look at four hidden benefits of content marketing that will never show up on the CMO’s dashboard but can bring immense value to the company and its internal relationships....
Back in May, 2010 when Boeing embarked on a fledgling brand journalism program, I interviewed Todd Blecher, Communications Director, for a blog post I titled The Plane Truth: Brand journalism and the new Boeing site. Since then, I've been using Boeing as an example of an organization that is creating great content...
One way to provide value to your Facebook community is to write procedure posts. You can deliver needed information right to your users, right where they live, right when they want it. The format definitely lends itself to preparing instructions in a clear, brief manner – and allow commenting as well. I’ve been writing procedures in Facebook for a while. There are definite considerations to keep in mind. I have some lessons learned to share. The main points to consider are when to post, what to post, frequency, and what may elicit most comments and keep your page more visible in fan news feeds. Each is important in its own way....
Each member of the OpenView team has participated in our corporate blog since it was launched in September 2009. Since then, we increased our site traffic by over 300% on all of our sites. We use this traffic measure as an indicator of success for our business since we are not generating leads to close business on our blog. Increasing Traffic isn’t the Only Benefit Corporate blogging can offer significant benefits to your expansion stage software company. This form of content marketing can increase the number of visitors to your site and in turn, drive the number of new leads for your gated content development efforts and eventually, new leads for your sales team. Corporate blogging can also help to develop your brand as a thought leader in your space....
...Maybe it doesn’t appear that these people or companies are content related at face value. But in a world where every company is a media company, every business is content related. And that makes every passionate professional, marketer or otherwise, a content creator. A lot of people pushed back on this concept which we touched on in a previous post titled: if your team hates blogging, you need a new team. Like it or not, that’s the world we live in. Besides, how can anyone hate to create content in a category they are involved in and have commitment to?...
As a rule, I’m not one of those readers who flips ahead to the last few pages of an article or book before committing myself to reading it. I like a little mystery in my life. But that’s exactly what I found myself doing when I started to read Andrea Curtis’ “Small Mercies” after it first appeared in Toronto Life magazine in 2005. I was on a train crowded with commuters, heading home from a day of work, when I found myself in the unusual position of getting choked up after only a couple of pages.... [Great narrative and storytelling - JD]
Recently, we posted a great list of places to find content inspiration, and hopefully it helped you come up with a whole list of great new ideas. Creating new content can take a little time, so in the meantime, here are seven ways you can boost conversions for the content you already have....
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Excellent list of algorithm-based content aggregators, including hybrids with voting or editorial components. These are the best of the best tools for content marketing, curation and PR....
In search of content marketing inspiration, I found the SlideShare production: How to Tell Your Company's Story: 8 Questions to Get You Started by Ann Handley from Marketing Profs. Did the title remind me a little bit of the self-help book? A tad. Was I stoked about finding it? Absolutely. Did the slideshow prove to be helpful? Extremely. Leave it to Ann and the other geniuses at Marketing Profs to ask the most basic questions about your business in a way that gets you to rethink the reasons and motivation behind what you do.
Here is our story and the eight questions that helped us share it....
As it launches a new weekly tech magazine on iPad, publisher Future puts some numbers on impressive tablet magazine gains, but overall revenue is slightly down. Magazine publisher Future says its tablet magazines are earning it $1 million per month in gross revenue. It is now selling 239,000 tablet magazines per month, led by T3 in the UK (30,000) and MacLife in the States (65,000), plus dozens of other mostly replica editions amongst its more than 100 tablet titles. [Valuable insight into tablet-only magazine publisher ~ Jeff]
There are two colliding factors that are slowly killing your marketing strategy. Here is a plan to fight back. ...In the physical world, this is what happens when you try to push too much stuff though a finite pipeline — catastrophic failure. A flood. Wires bursting into flame. Server crashes. So this presents the fundamental dilemma for you and me. How do we get our marketing message to cut through the infinite information and make it through to a consumer brain — without going broke or having a catastrophic strategic failure? We’ve never faced this before
This is a relatively new problem. Even in the early days of mass broadcasting, getting your message through was easy. You simply bought advertisements on the most popular radio and television programs. Those days are coming to an end. Nielsen reported that in 2011, the number of hours that Americans viewed TV declined for the first time in the history of television. Newspaper advertising, adjusted for inflation, is down to 1950s levels. Even website visitors are down. In the past two years, 68% of the Fortune 500 companies had a drop in unique visitors to their company websites.
So we have no choice. Day by day, every single company in the world is realizing that it must join this social media battle for consumer mindshare. And that war is raging though web-based content.... [Valuable read from @MarkWSchaefer - JD]
If you expect to succeed in social media by going for the easiest route possible, chances are you’re going to fail. Just like the brands that try and emulate Apple by following just a couple of their examples of business or management, you will soon find out the truth. Doing things on the cheap will only get you so far and this applies to social media more than anything.
Because when social media was new and young all you had to do was pretty much be present in some way to get noticed. Now it’s changed. What we’re seeing now is brands having to go that bit further, to innovate from the inside out and be social-by-design as a business to really succeed. It’s not easy, but these brands are showing how it can be done.
[Sports Illustrated, IBM and Burberry's get content marketing and social media right - JD]
Written by analyst Rebecca Lieb and researched by Zak Kirchner and Jaimy Szymanski, this report helps shed some new light on content marketing and how emerging digital technologies, platforms, and channels can be used effectively to help a brand function as a media company and exploit it.... [Must-read for #contentmarketing pros - JD]
Curation, content marketing, storytelling, brand journalism and citizen journalism. What’s a poor PR 2.0 pro to do? Is this our new job description? But let’s start with a look at content marketing because it really covers most of these emerging – and merging – disciplines. Many of us are already deep into PR 2.0, content marketing, social marketing or whatever you want to call it. We’ve gathered 26 excellent articles on content marketing to get you grounded....
The following infographic by BlueGlass Interactive charts the rise of content marketing and provides examples of those doing it right - Coca Cola, Mint.com, American Express. Interestingly, the top tactic used by content marketers is the production of articles (79%); B2B marketers (figures no doubt US-skewed) invest 26% of their total marketing budget on content, while 62% are outsourcing their content marketing, up 7% from last year....
I love all kinds of sports, but now is NFL football time in the US and although my team isn’t in the running, I’m looking forward to watching the big game. While I was watching the playoff games and yelling at the screen, I realized something: championship football is just like content marketing. How? Content marketing is a lot like a championship sporting event – you still have competitors and need to find the right formula that gives you an edge over your opponent. Once that mix is in place, you have what you need to bring home the trophy and more fuel for your content fire....
As the web becomes more and more inundated with blogs, videos, tweets, status updates, news, articles, and countless other forms of content, information (30+ Cool Content Curation Tools for Personal & Professional Use
Via Carmen, G Social Media
Data journalism is arguably the next big thing in PR. Taking every-day data and turning it into something interesting and inspiring makes a great story and brings it to life. Data journalism uses the abundance of existing data, analyses them and presents the results in a graphical way. The Guardian and New York Times even have dedicated teams focused on data journalism....
The 7 slides that make for an awesome monthly marketing report. Here's a challenge for all you marketers who are on top of your game: How do you make sure your marketing team is taken seriously within your own company? One important step you should take is publishing a thorough, thoughtful, quantitative monthly report on your marketing team's impact....
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Valuable distinctions between SEO and content marketing...