Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

What if goals aren’t even sales-oriented? For example, perhaps the need is to demonstrate thought leadership in the industry, to create brand favorability.

Then there are all those “content marketing” how-tos that are channel-, rather than strategy-oriented. Lately, these have been Snapchat-heavy, due to the company’s recent IPO. But just because Snapchat is attracting attention this week doesn’t mean it’s for everyone. (Moreover, Snapchat is more of a channel and a tactic than a strategy.)

These types of prescriptive, formulaic, devoid-of-strategic-oversight articles are what give content marketing a bad name. We’ve entered the eye-rolling phase of content, when noise overwhelms signal.

And we’ve seen it all before. Ten years ago, this happened to social media. The carpetbaggers moved in, and suddenly marketers branding themselves as social media experts were crawling out of the woodwork....

You were not given a content marketing budget in order to create content. You were given one to increase brand awareness and build your sales and marketing pipelines. Using the Content Marketing Pyramid helps you do just that. (For a deep dive, download Curata’s Content Marketing Pyramid eBook.)

The Content Marketing Pyramid enables the development of content and related assets intended to reinforce common messages/themes through multiple content formats, distribution methods, and promotion channels across owned, earned, and paid media.

The Pyramid assures optimal content consumption, reuse, reach and impact. It provides a common strategic process to align different parts of an organization around “content,” ensuring consistency across functional, geographic, and business unit boundaries....

Why are you on social media? If your answer is that you have to be, and you don’t have a predefined intent or goals, it is time to step back and reevaluate your social media presence. 

Content is at the core of any successful social strategy, and is usually intertwined with the goals that you wish to achieve on social networks. Here are four critical social media content strategy questions that can help you connect with goals and succeed at social.

If you are creating content for your website without a strategy or have clients who haven’t tracked any of their on-site content creation, it’s probably time for a content marketing audit.

An on-site content marketing audit allows you to gather insight from work that has been done, determine work that needs to be done, and decide how to direct your future strategy.

Go through the following steps to identify the best-performing content on your website from social media, link generation, user feedback, and keyword relevancy perspective and create a content audit template. Through this process, you will collect, review, and analyze data to produce actionable takeaways and build a strategic on-site content marketing plan for the future....

If you sink enough money into most marketing tactics, you’ll see nearly immediate results. Since content marketing is often an exception to this rule, many marketers mistakenly think their content strategy is ineffective if results don’t come quickly.

Content marketing is not a quick fix. If you’re just beginning to execute on a content marketing plan or launching a new strategy, you need to be patient and know when to expect certain results. You will probably see an initial spike in traffic and social shares after publishing, but you likely will not see the biggest perks of content marketing occur until long after you’ve hit publish.

Sustained, strategic content marketing efforts can bring significant SEO benefits. This is where many businesses will likely see the greatest return from content marketing, yet SEO improvements can take months to materialize.

The good news is that once you do start seeing SEO benefits from content marketing, you’re likely to see a compounding return. In other words, your initial efforts will keep bringing value long after you’ve put the work in....

Convincing your CMO to give you budget for content marketing isn’t easy. When it comes down to it, you need to prove ROI before you even get started.

So what makes it so hard? Content marketing is not a short term game — it’s a long term strategy with long term results. Investing in content requires an entirely different mindset than what traditional marketers are used to. It requires CMOs to move away from the crutch of traditional digital advertising, and instead move towards a more customer-centric, value-led approach to marketing. Convincing your team to challenge the status quo means that YOU need to become the change agent in your organization.

In order to get the budget and support you need, it’s your job to prove that content marketing actually works and will drive real business impact. I’m talking about the things your CMO actually cares about: brand loyalty, revenue, operational efficiencies, and cost savings. 

At NewsCred, we want to make this conversation easy for you. Below, you’ll find the strongest proof points, grouped into business themes, that will give you the ammunition necessary to build your next presentation, present to your exec team and boss, and get the budget you need....

So now your question is: how do you make your blog content valuable to your readers?

And there’s the rub. While it is simple enough to understand, and no one in his right mind will ever argue against the fact that your blog must offer something of value, creating value itself is the tricky part. I’ve tried to distill the entire process and break it down into what I think are the base elements that makes a blog post valuable. Here are my ideas....

It’s the age of “content strategy” and “content marketing.” Wherever you turn, more and more often, that’s something you’ll hear. ... Engaging in a good content strategy for websites is hard enough; After all, it takes many resources to create content editorial for a simple blog. Why would anyone want to spend time (and probably money) for content to go onto social media? Aren’t we just going to share links and pictures? A large part of your social media campaign should indeed consist of sharing interesting and relevant content, posting statuses or tweets that help users, engaging readers/followers, etc. Content for this is predominantly “sourced,” but how and when you present it also matters. There’s a fair amount of strategy involved; and apart from mere strategy, there’s “content strategy” even for social media.