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The concept of content marketing has been around for hundreds of years (see this example from 1672), and the discipline has gained incredible popularity since 2007, according to Google Trends. But, when we recently launched a new e-book that answers common content marketing questions, we learned that many of our readers are just getting started. As such, we want to make sure we continually cover the basics. Whether you are new to the practice, need a new way to look at what you’ve been doing, or need help explaining this to your relatives, this post is for you....
With the caveat in the section above–that we’re often doing a little of both–and some informal polling of many esteemed marketers I know, here is where I’ve landed on social marketing vs. content marketing. Social marketing is a channel where we find potential customers by listening to earned conversations and analyzing our owned accounts. We then interact with those people to move them through the customer journey. You can use various tactics to make that movement happen. Content marketing is a tactic. It’s a method of marketing that allows companies to add value for potential customers by creating and distributing (sometimes through social) collateral like blog posts, videos, and web pages. These pieces of collateral entertain and educate your target audience about topics related to your product. They’re intended to generate interest in your offering by reinforcing relevant problems, challenges, misconceptions, and, finally, solutions....
If there is one entrepreneur who knows the real value of building social relationships, and how they can extend into the world of social media, it’s health and fitness mogul Andy Frisella: founder of Supplement Superstores, Paradise Distribution, and the renowned fitness brand 1st Phorm International. These brands, among others, bring in more than $100 million a year.
How?
He has built a true community....
During November 2016, HubSpot launched a free Content Marketing Certification course. The course offers 10 classes covering the following topics:
- Understanding Content Marketing (class length – 14:41)
- The Power of Storytelling (class length – 24:55)
- Generating Content Ideas (class length – 15:29)
- Planning a Long-Term content Strategy (class length – 19:00)
- Building a Content Creation Framework (class length – 20:11)
- Becoming an Effective Writer (class length – 22:48)
- Extending the Value of Your Content Through Repurposing (class length – 24:47)
- How to Effectively Promote Content (class length – 22:07)
- Measuring and Analyzing Your Content (class length – 26:19)
- Developing a Growth Marketing Mentality (class length – 20:24)
The free certification course is designed to provide foundational principles needed to become an effective content marketer....
Visual content, done well, can be incredibly popular. Infographics, videos, data visualizations, and other forms of visual content can generate tons of engagement and attract links to your site.
More importantly, visuals help tell your story. Visual content can be an incredibly powerful marketing tool, one that helps your target audience remember you – better than a 1,000 word text article alone (no matter how great it is) ever could.
Here’s what’s trending in visual content marketing for 2017, according to a survey of 300 online marketers from Venngage, a platform that helps you create free infographics....
At the same time, Twitter is also one of the best platforms for getting in touch with celebrities, YouTube stars, marketing experts and of course, influencers within any industry. Twitter is usually my platform of choice for getting in touch with many big names in the online marketing space, while also grabbing their attention when promoting each of them through expert round up posts or online interviews. Not only does it grab their attention, it also makes the process of continued social sharing even easier.
Speaking of which… here are 15 of the most influential figures in the content marketing sphere that you should be following on Twitter, presented in no particular order....
My job as the Social Marketing Manager at Instapage is to be on the lookout for the latest trends then figure out how we can use them to promote our brand. We identify trends here two ways. The first is by testing. Every day we're trying new methods of reaching social users. Through time we're able to establish some new norms, and discover what others are doing to successfully move the social media marketing needle. Second, we listen to our users. By listening to their feedback, then taking it a step further and reading between the data points into what type of content they are engaging with over time, we come to understand what works and what doesn’t. Here are a few of the new best practices and emerging trends that are happening right now on social media....
Many small business owners today think that owning a brick-and-mortar business excuses them from having to learn and master digital marketing.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, mastering SEO and local optimization for your locally run business will bring a higher ROI than just about any other marketing activity you use.
It’s one of the quickest ways to quickly and simply (notice I did not say easily) get your business in front of thousands of new eyes and earn customers for life. With a few simple steps, you can set yourself on the path to long term digital marketing success.
But how do you start marketing your brick-and-mortar business in the digital world? What steps do you need to take over the next 30, 60, or 90 days to successfully grow your online reach and increase sales like you have never seen before?
I’m glad you asked.
In this article, I’m going to give you a step-by-step and day-by-day plan for marketing your brick-and-mortar business....
Four years ago, I shared that your content must resonate with your audience so they follow you where you want to take them.
I also asked what kind of content universally resonates with people. It’s content that: - We never get tired of
- We always have time for
- We don’t forget
- We want to share with others
This is the kind of content we must create if our goal is to influence, inspire, and move to action the unique group of people we have chosen to reach.
To help, I originally created a list of 21 types of content we all love to consume.
In the era of Facebook and YouTube, brand building has become a vexing challenge. This is not how things were supposed to turn out. A decade ago most companies were heralding the arrival of a new golden age of branding. They hired creative agencies and armies of technologists to insert brands throughout the digital universe. Viral, buzz, memes, stickiness, and form factor became the lingua franca of branding. But despite all the hoopla, such efforts have had very little payoff.
As a central feature of their digital strategy, companies made huge bets on what is often called branded content. The thinking went like this: Social media would allow your company to leapfrog traditional media and forge relationships directly with customers. If you told them great stories and connected with them in real time, your brand would become a hub for a community of consumers. Businesses have invested billions pursuing this vision. Yet few brands have generated meaningful consumer interest online. In fact, social media seems to have made brands less significant. What has gone wrong?
To solve this puzzle, we need to remember that brands succeed when they break through in culture. And branding is a set of techniques designed to generate cultural relevance. Digital technologies have not only created potent new social networks but also dramatically altered how culture works. Digital crowds now serve as very effective and prolific innovators of culture—a phenomenon I call crowdculture. Crowdculture changes the rules of branding—which techniques work and which do not. If we understand crowdculture, then, we can figure out why branded-content strategies have fallen flat—and what alternative branding methods are empowered by social media....
You know how much hard work it is creating content, don’t you? Well… for all that hard work, you need to get some rewards for doing it! This is where a content conversion funnel comes in.
A content conversion funnel is where you share a piece of content that gets attention from your potential audience and then you lead them down a path to a potential sale.
This could be text, images, video, voice… whatever form your content takes.
In this article, we break down some examples of content conversion funnels and, of course, we take a look at the tech side to building the funnels....
In this post, we’re going to review 15 marketing guides that can speed up your success.
We’ll look at the finer details of each guide, ensuring that you have a clear understanding as to how you can use each one to your advantage.
By the end of this post, you’ll have a better idea of how each guide can push you down the path to reaching all of your content marketing related goals....
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....
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Social media is crucial to the success of any company's digital marketing strategy. Despite this, brands of all kinds and sizes are not using this tool to its full potential. Although the number of "follows", "likes" and "shares" is still important, the credibility of a brand is distinguished by far more than just this. Today, social media requires a unique set of skills whereby brands need to fully understand the needs of their audience. To help you out, I've put together 10 social media strategies you need to implement this year, whether you are a young entrepreneur or a well-established brand....
If there's something that the early days of social media--circa 1990's and early 2000's with AOL and MySpace followed by the rise of Facebook--taught me, it's that people control the medium while brands merely ride the wave until the next new channel comes along. Successful brands and influencers find that by building communities of advocates on the platforms where their audiences live, they're able to maintain such relevancy provided that they also evolve with their audience and platforms. However, social media can be a waste of time for you and your business if you're not strategically positioning your marketing efforts around industry trends. Below are five reasons brand engagement is declining online, and what you can do about it....
So the question shouldn’t be how can I create content on the cheap, but rather, how can I do more with less?
The answer: create masterful content that is worth more.
Content that generates traffic. Content that inspires shares. Content that gets written and talked about. Content that earns conversions. Content that wins trust. Content that positions you as an authority. Content that wins business, retains customers, and invokes referrals....
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) get almost 24 calls a month from marketing providers looking to sell them advertising or marketing products and services. Competition is fierce, and SMBs often have a difficult time choosing a provider.
Last month, I covered how the trend of fake online content leads to a general distrust of digital and online media. But the local digital marketing industry, especially in the area of SEO, suffers from its own share of issues that lead to a lack of trust by SMBs.
LSA (Local Search Association) conducted a survey to examine what challenges SMBs face when shopping for a digital marketing provider and what areas they feel are most important for marketers to address when trying to gain their business.
Below I discuss the results of the survey, data regarding client churn in the industry and ways in which marketers need to respond....
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....
If you’re trying to increase the number of leads that your business gets from online channels such as SEO, PPC advertising or Social Media Marketing, you need to consider how well you’re attracting prospects who are top of the funnel. These are people who are part of your target market, but who may not be ready to purchase a product or service at this time. Draw these people in with top of funnel content.
I think it helps to visualize the entire buying process in the shape of a funnel. People at the top of the funnel (often shortened to “TOFU”) are doing general online research related to your industry. Continuing down the funnel, we describe people who are further along in the buying process as being in the middle of the funnel (MOFU) or at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU)....
It’s no secret that we as consumers are exposed to a plethora of promotions and ads every single day. In fact, according to some we are exposed to somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 ads per day, a staggering number that is only increasing. So how can we as marketers cut through the noise and reach consumers where they are? The answer may lie in the intersection between personalized content and mobile technology. According to an infographic by Microsoft and VMob, utilizing real-time data can lead to hyper-personalized content creation. For example, a retailer who aligned seasonal marketing and promotional messages with localized weather trends saw sales increase by 18%.
Take a look at the infographic below to find out how you can use targeted metrics to create personalized content....
So we need to do some of the following despite the inner voice trying to keep us plugging away.
- Reading and researching
- Acting on the ideas that emerge
- Creating
- Publishing
- Building digital assets.
To help you find some inspiration I have been crawling through the most shared content marketing articles on BuzzSumo and come up with these 10 “must read” posts on content marketing.
So if you are a savvy digital marketer or an entrepreneur that understands the importance of building great online content, then these are worth a long glance....
This spring, we discovered that U.S. moms check Instagram as often as six times per day. But Dads áre just as active on social as Moms - the same study revealed that almost half of dads on Instagram follow businesses, and of those fathers, 69% take action from the content they see.
A new infographic from Social Media Link provides further insights and context surrounding how dads use social. The full infographic is below but here a few quick highlights. - 91% of fathers use Facebook weekly; 60% use Twitter weekly; 49% use Instagram weekly.
- When fathers do use social, they’re frequently posting about their kids - 70% of fathers share about their children at least a couple times a month.
- 61% at least somewhat agree that they use social media more now than they did before having children....
Are you ready to give content marketing the time, money and resources it deserves?
While your answer may be yes, it’s never easy to get up and running with a new marketing strategy. There are questions to answer, challenges to overcome and various tasks that need addressed.
With 88% of B2B marketers currently using content marketing as part of their overall strategy, neglecting to do so will put you in the minority.
As you get started, you’ll soon find a variety of ways to better research, plan, create and distribute content.
What I’ve created here is a list of content marketing tools that you’ll want by your side as you roll out your first campaign.
These tools cover the most important details you’ll need to address before you get started, as well as in the early days (and weeks) of running your campaign....
Not planning for your social media campaign can be a disaster for your business.
A social media campaign can deliver great results. It can also deliver really poor results and waste your money. What causes them to fail?
Not using cat videos… ha ha…
Ignoring cat videos, what really causes them to fail?
Planning....
This past year, we've seen the importance of visual content emphasized by the changes that occurred across almost every major social network, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. At the same time, both video and infographics have become powerful tools for brands looking to communicate more easily with their readers.
To help you keep pace with these trends, let's take a look at some statistics that demonstrate the impact visual content has on reach, engagement, and sales....
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![31 Types of Content We Crave [Infographic] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/vfdXRAWq06YDq62E0Z1NeDl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
![Men Use Social More After Becoming Dads [Infographic] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/qj5sCqocZWnvj1q7TIJg7jl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
How to explain content marketing to yourself, your boss, or your relatives from the Content Marketing Institute.