Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Just as traditional publishing advanced decades ago, digital marketing is following the same trajectory today. The only difference is the rate at which things are changing, and the fact that many digital brands forget to be human.

It doesn’t matter if you’re writing on stone or using augmented reality to get your message across: It must be interesting and relevant to motivate a reaction from the end-user.

Creating and distributing compelling content through social media is especially important from a branding perspective. The trick to the future of social media content marketing is using modern approaches at being human.

Here are five social media content marketing trends to watch heading into 2018...

Marketers have discovered that they need to approach the consumer differently. We can’t serve up the same old ads anymore and expect results similar to 30 or 40 years ago. Instead, we must add value to consumers’ lives to make them want to give us the time of day.

Hence, the fundamentals behind content marketing – relationship-building, focusing on the customer versus the brand – were born in response.

This approach – oh boy, does it work. For some excellent proof, let these nine statistics do the rest of the talking. They really do speak for themselves. Prepare to persuade....

A content marketing campaign is far more likely to be profitable when you have a solid plan and the right tools for the job.

But, what are the right tools? And, where do you find them?

Here’s a list of 82 content marketing tools that will make your life easier and more productive.

Do you want to connect with your audience via video?

Looking for tips to convey confidence and authority?

To explore how to improve your on-camera performance, I interview David H. Lawrence XVII.

While content marketing may be just one part of a larger marketing strategy, it is clear that those businesses with the strongest content strategy have a huge advantage over competitors. If you want to be among the content elite, you cannot just write a blog post here and there, hoping something will get noticed.

You need a well-developed strategy for content that effectively catches attention and meets the needs of your audience.

Maybe you have a new business and haven’t yet started producing content. Or, maybe you’re already turning out content, but it just isn’t getting the response you want. Either way, what you need is a targeted strategy for creating and disseminating great content.

To help you on the road to getting noticed for your content, here’s a list of strategy points that you can use and adapt to your specific needs....

Content marketing is at a critical inflection point. For it to serve as the fuel and infrastructure for modern marketing departments, some things need to change. Brands are not getting much of a return on that investment. We know this thanks to a survey of 252 marketing leaders at Fortune 500 conducted by BrightEdge (one of my clients).

Some key findings:

- 71% of marketers say that less than half of their content is being consumed

- Fewer than 9% of marketers report three-quarters or more of the content they produce is engaged with

- The B2C content consumption rate was slightly better than B2B.

With a professional twist, we asked the experts presenting at Content Marketing World what they see in the next five years as the biggest changes in content marketing. This isn’t a list of predicted tech advances or outlandish guesses – it’s practical and proactive. You could take one or all 25 and begin working on them today (if you’re not already) – to plan strategically for short- and long-term success.

We’ve segregated the answers based on the five emerging themes – personalization, formats, implementation, voice-activation, and data.

As you’ll see, the impact of artificial intelligence is a theme that runs through all the categories. Ironically, Michael Brenner points out, it is technology that will help us better connect with people. “We are in a quick march to deep content personalization, add machine learning and AI to help us predict what to create, for whom, where, and how often,” says the CEO of Marketing Insider Group....

With content marketing becoming more and more ingrained in companies of all sizes and types, it’s only natural that executives are starting to increase scrutiny of content marketing budgets and expenditures. Like social media, content marketing is by no means free. As Charlene Li once said, “It’s not inexpensive; it’s just different expensive.”

If you’re a content marketing practitioner, manager, or director in anything beyond a very small organization, at some point you’re going to be asked to justify all this content....

The British Library's content marketing strategy is built upon four pillars that enable them to rank highly in SEO, then convert users to make a purchase.

If judged in words and sentences, paragraphs and articles, the British Library might well be the biggest content marketing organisation in the world. With well over 150 million items within its collection, brought to life by a small, 30-strong marketing team, it has one of the biggest impacts, both for the million people who come to the library each the year, and the many more who engage with its sizable online presence. 

So how does such a content-rich organisation marshal its resources to deliver on its core missions of getting its assets utilised, not left un-accessed and unloved in a warehouse somewhere?

Graham MacFadyen, former Head of Digital and Marketing Operations at The British Library, explains how its content marketing program operates, sharing everything from objectives to search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy....

We’re calling it: The debate over quantity vs. quality is over.

Quality wins. But what does quality content really mean? How do marketers guarantee that they are creating something that is high quality?

We asked the experts presenting at Content Marketing World 2017 how they define and achieve quality content....