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Q: What kind of content should a local business develop? A: The kind that converts! Okay, you could have hit on that answer yourself, but as this post aims to demonstrate: There are almost as many user paths to conversion as there are customers in your city, and Your long-term goal is to become the authority in your industry and geography that consumers and search engines turn to. Google’s widely publicized concept of micro-moments has been questioned by some local SEOs for its possible oversimplification of consumer behavior. Nevertheless, I think it serves as a good, basic model for understanding how a variety of human needs (I want to do, know, buy something, or go somewhere) leads people onto the web....
Perhaps most reflective of this has been the award-winning juggernaut of REI's #OptOutside campaign, which won the Titanium Grand Prix on Saturday. If for some reason you weren't one of its 6.7 billion media impressions, essentially the company closed its doors on Black Friday, encouraging its employees and everyone else to get out into the outdoors. Beyond the ad, starring REI chief exec Jerry Stritzke introducing the idea from a wide-open office, the brand also created a helpful online guide to hiking trails and other outdoor activities around the U.S.
By encouraging us to drop out of the annual shopping day, the outdoor retailer aims for more sales and brand loyalty. The company said the brand's social media impressions went up 7,000%, with 2.7 billion media impressions in 24 hours, while overall the campaign attracted 6.7 billion media impressions, 1.2 billion social impressions, and got more than 1.4 million people to spend the day outdoors. Meanwhile, more than 150 other companies joined REI to close their doors on Black Friday, and hundreds of state parks opened up for free.
If Cannes is the ad and marketing industry's Oscars, than this is arguably Best Picture. The Titanium category is meant to honor work that breaks new ground, crosses boundaries, and pushes the industry forward. The win adds to the campaign's Media and Promotions Grand Prix, picked up earlier in the week, and its run of wins at other industry awards like the D&ADs, and Best of Show at the One Show awards in May....
“How can we get more visitors to our website?”… You’re certainly not alone, as increasing traffic is often the number one problem faced by marketers today. The bad news? Saying “get more traffic” is easier said than done. You could write guest posts (Leo wrote 150 articles in 9 months when Buffer first launched), optimize for SEO traffic, or drive visitors through social media. The options are endless. This article focuses on the latter, though. In this post, I’ll share the seven most powerful lessons we learned at Hubspot from running social media experiments to increase our social media referral traffic by 241%....
As social media becomes less shiny, many of our clients are realizing that social media success relies on having a content marketing plan.
While we’ve been hired to come in and “do” social media, our constant gentle push about sharing stories through original content (read: the RIGHT content for our customers) is finally being felt.
Our biggest client came to us this month ready to tackle the reason social media exists in the first place: storytelling. More specifically, telling their story in such a way that the consumer aligns with, trusts, and recognizes the brand.
While putting together their agenda, I thought it may be helpful to share so everyone can get clear on their content marketing plan or agenda for 2016....
To say native content has grown since last year would be an understatement. In 2014, Pressboard combed through 1,500 pieces of content for our "best of" list -- this year it was closer to 7,000. To give you an idea of how far the space has come, we had to buy VR headsets just to review a couple of the entries.
2015 was the year that native content moved from experimental to fundamental and nearly every major publisher and brand discovered the power of stories, instead of ads. Here are some of the best from the last 12 months...
Campaign Monitor, a simple email marketing solution for businesses and professionals, has taken this bottom-up approach to building a social strategy. And we’re honored to share how they’ve done it.
Campaign Monitor is a fast-growing, industry-leading company with some really incredible ideas on growth and strategy. Their marketing team, which has grown to five times the size in just over eight months, has the awesome privilege of sharing the email marketing message with others via a big number of different channels, social media included, and has just undergone this very exercise of hitting the drawing board and coming up with a rockin’ new plan.
Here’s a bit more about how Campaign Monitor redefining their social media strategy in light of their new ambitions, and how social management tools like Buffer fit into their daily workflow....
Since last year, the distribution landscape has changed considerably. One company on the old list went out of business. A few have lost a lot of their relevance. And Facebook has gotten much stronger, continuing on its path to world domination, one suggested post at a time.
Clearly, not all distribution platforms are created equally. Social networks each have certain types of people drawn to their respective news feeds—think of lunchroom cliques from high school. For marketers, it’s crucial that precious ad dollars are spent wisely on the clique that’s most likely to respond to your work. There needs to be clear objects for any distribution initiative so marketers can pair smart content with the right platform, and as a result, the right audience.
As you think about how to make your content more effective, here’s our updated breakdown of the most important distribution platforms in 2015....
You can use many methods to improve your conversion rate.
But very few can improve your conversion rate as much as case studies can.
Case studies have a few big benefits: - they resonate with prospects
- they show that your product or service can work
- the transparency increases the trust a reader has in you
All of these benefits are important, but the last one—in particular.
Trust is one of the most important factors in conversion rate optimization....
If our content never moves, if it simply sits on a website without any views, shares, and engagement, it has about the same value as the world’s greatest movie script locked from view in a cold, dark vault. The investment in our content is largely wasted.
In this post I will cover 12 “quick hit” structural actions you can take with your content to make it more “shareable.”
The basic idea is that we want to remove every possible obstacle in our control so there is simply no excuse not to share your content!
Here we go. Let’s ignite …
It’s not just marketing and advertising executives who’ve discovered the benefits of a content marketing campaign.
According to Insideview, B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads on a monthly basis than companies that don’t. And a whopping 80% of business decision makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles—and not via advertising.
If content marketing isn’t a part of your overall marketing strategy, you should reconsider....
However, like much of the content out there on the internet, most branded content is not exceptional. Some brands just don’t get their customer base, while others recycle articles, photos, and videos instead of producing original pieces and are too pushy trying to sell their products.
If you’re gearing up to start your own branded content website, and want to get the most content marketing ROI, you should research what the best-of-the-best brands are doing. We spoke to four of them — Casper, GE, Barneys, and Williams-Sonoma — about how they built their sites and consistently put out excellent content.
These content creators discuss about their content marketing strategies, their methodologies, and their goals when it comes to building a branded content site....
With only 21% of B2B marketers saying they are successful at tracking content marketing ROI, it’s inspiring to see success in an unexpected (even perceived as stodgy) environment: academic medical centers. We’re proud to share the story of Wake Forest Innovations, the commercialization arm for Wake Forest University and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. I was fortunate to speak with its Director of Marketing and Business Development, Vishal Khanna, who is a finalist for Content Marketer of the Year. (The award will be announced at Content Marketing World in September.)
Vishal was chosen as a finalist for his dedication to performance in content marketing. While you may not work for an entity in an academic medical center or a university, you will find insights and lessons to learn from Vishal’s story. He and his staff of one full-time-equivalent employee and two 30-hour-a-week contractors rock performance by executing a content marketing strategy that an agency helped them develop....
Businesses need to create new content at an unprecedented rate. Seventy percent of B2Bs are creating more content than they did just one year ago, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report.
With this growth in demand comes a unique set of problems. How do business owners continually create new, original content? How do they regularly come up with topics that haven’t already been covered a thousand times before? And perhaps most importantly, how do they find the time to create this content while still trying to run their business?
Fortunately, using content creation tools can help significantly. This post will look at some amazing tools to help you continually create unique, relevant content for your audience....
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In a platform world, publishers face tough decisions on where to place their resources. In August, The Economist faced this head on and axed its ailing Pinterest and Tumblr accounts while ramping up its commitment to LinkedIn.
The publisher had been experimenting on Pinterest for the past six months. But even with a social media team that had grown from two to 10 people, The Economist couldn’t make it click. “From day one, it was a struggle,” said Denise Law, community editor at The Economist. “We found it difficult to articulate what our raison d’être for Pinterest was. It’s not the place to share serious content; it’s more where people go to share ideas.”
For Pinterest, The Economist was posting pieces from 1843, its culture and lifestyle magazine, then called Intelligent Life. Articles from travel blog Gulliver’s Travels were also going there, as well as pieces from its archives and links to items from The Economist Store. But it was gaining no traction. When it cut the account, it had 5,000 followers. “Not enough to move the needle,” said Law, adding that its Tumblr account shared the same fate. Earlier this year, The Economist also culled a number of its Twitter accounts.here's
The Economist’s approach to social media is, according to the publisher, to promote quality over quantity. It’s taken that mission to LinkedIn, which it uses for brand awareness rather than to drive traffic. By tweaking its approach to publish a broader spectrum of content, The Economist saw its LinkedIn follower count grow from half a million last year to 2.4 million, and it continues to grow at a rate of 25,000 followers a week, according to Law....
Have you been thinking about turning your organization's communications into your version of a metropolitan newspaper newsroom? Here are some examples you should look at.
You want to be writing the right content, right?
I mean, if you're not getting anything out of your blog, why are you (or your content creators) spending hours researching, writing and formatting?
This article will break down the 10 most important pieces of content and how they can be used in combination to attract readers, generate leads, nurture those leads into signups and those signups into upgrades....
I see many parallels between a startup as a whole and content marketing, and taking a lean approach to marketing could yield several benefits.
Most importantly, you’ll be able to get: - a better return on investment (ROI)
- more consistent results from your marketing
- less stress and frustration
In this post, I’m going to break down all the different ways that you can apply lean principles to your marketing—lean marketing....
There are a number of indicators that point to the fact that consumers are self-educating now more than ever. With the wealth of information available online, it has become easy for people to educate themselves on pretty much any topic, and purchase products and services that help improve their lives.
Blending Brand Loyalty
I recently made a decision to improve my diet. After doing some research online, I learned that adding nutritious smoothies to my morning routine could improve my health and increase my alertness throughout the day (selfishly helping me close more sales). The information I was reading was easy to find, and backed by several doctor’s recommendations.
It turns out the information I was consuming was published by a blender company. This piqued my interest. The blender was expensive, but it would play an instrumental role in helping me achieve my personal goals, so it was a no-brainer to execute the purchase. At no point in this process did I ever speak with a broker or direct sales person at the blender company. I went online (after doing some price comparisons) and purchased the blender on a popular e-commerce site....
For instance, take a look at how these two elements play out:
B2B – Within the confines of B2B, it appears that videos reign supreme in regards to marketing. Video is easy to watch, and has a way of exploring ideas, reviews, and more. This is telling, especially for those that are working within commercial grade sales. The instructional potential of videos also suit the common transaction of ideas and techniques between businesses.
B2C – As far as consumers are concerned, blog posts seem to be the content that works best here. Consumers consider blog data and reviews that take the format of personal experiences over video or other marketing elements. Essentially, customers prefer authentic and relatable content – testimonials from like-minded people, for example....
The sharing of content has become a breeding ground for brand plugging and promotional stuffing. The result is audiences are now starting to see some content shared by brands as being deceiving, missing out on the fact that when you strip away the advertising pitch many of these brands have powerful stories to share.
Content marketing is primarily about sharing great stories and as you earn the audiences trust you can begin selling your products. The hard sales pitch tends to turn off potential customers, so rather going straight into selling mode, start with building trust and credibility through informative content that adds value....
In 2015, digitally enabled brand and product experiences are now dominating the purchase journey, however the path to buying has largely been removed from the retailer and is now firmly in the hands of consumers. The Deloitte Digital study on Digital Influence reveals that “over the past 3 years, consumers have stated that digital interactions can affect multiple points along their shopping journey, and the steps in the process may not be directly attributable to the eventual purchase.” In other words, brand and marketer digital influence has some impact, but it has dwindled and become part of the process, not just the click to buy influence it once had.
Not only has the general purchase journey changed from one dominated by social media marketing, the path taken varies dramatically by product category, device used and more. In other words, how people are consuming digital content along their purchase journey is different depending on what product the consumer is considering AND which device they are using. Therefore marketers must invest in understanding the deeper consumer behavior at the category level, not just the retail or wholesale level. This is likely the most significant and complex change facing digital marketing to date!...
More than anything else, what you need is step-by-step guide for creating content that converts. Keep an open mind, and learn how I create content that converts at all times...
You might believe that it somehow gets easier — or requires less time — to market your business as your online presence grows. You’d be wrong.
Even if you stairstep the number of platforms, channels, and methods you use, there comes a point in which you just can’t keep up with it by yourself, let alone continue to grow into new areas.
The only options are to embrace the marketing ceiling or start delegating some of the marketing work....
Having not published original content on the blog for 30 days, we saw only a 4 percent dip in traffic compared to the previous month.
The extra time off allowed us to experiment with content in some amazing ways. Our most successful experiments were these:
- Create new email drip campaigns based on Buffer blog posts
- Update older blog posts with new information, graphics
- Create SlideShares
- Republish content to Medium
- Bundle tools posts into Product Hunt collections
I’m happy to explain fully how we went about this experiment and all of the 14 strategies that we tried. And happy to clarify anything in the comments!
Executives want to know a marketing strategy’s expected ROI before they commit money and resources to it. But content is a different animal than other marketing initiatives. It doesn’t produce impressive short-term results; it bolsters long-term profits. Once a content marketing strategy proves its worth, executives feel more confident investing in it. The challenge is convincing them to take the initial plunge.
Here are six selling points you can use to persuade your company leaders that content marketing will go the distance for your brand
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What's the best way to show local searchers that you're an authority in your niche? You guessed it — through your content. But that can be a pretty vague and overwhelming term; what are some actual ways to make a difference, conversions-wise? Miriam Ellis explains.