Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

We’ve been blogging at Econsultancy for the past six years and it has been great for our company. I have long held the view that all businesses should have a blog.

Our blog now accounts for two thirds of site traffic and has claimed lots of valuable search placements on Google, which we’d otherwise have to buy. It also provides our social media manager with a bunch of fresh content to feed into the likes of Twitter and Facebook.

Furthermore, it has helped to grow awareness and perceptions of our brand, while establishing a warmer tone of voice than might otherwise be expected of a ‘consultancy’ (we’re actually a learning-based business, as opposed to an outright consultancy!)....

I have adapted these 34 ideas to make them less Econsultancy-centric, so that you can use them. I hope they prove helpful, whether you’re a writer, editor or content strategist....

Blogs are an important component of an overall content development strategy and more companies are emphasizing content creation for its SEO and marketing benefits.

In 2013, B2B marketers will spend, on average, 33 percent of their budgets on content marketing (a 7 percent increase over last year) and 91 percent of respondents use content marketing of some type, according to the 2013 B2B Content Marketing Report. Another 54 percent plan to increase content marketing spending this year. Content is equally important among B2C marketers, 86 percent of whom are using content marketing while allocating 28 percent of their budgets to it, according to the Content Marketing Institute.

In short, if your company isn’t emphasizing content, your competitors are. And a blog is a good foundation for any content marketing strategy....

If you run a media company (and you do--you publish regularly on all sorts of social media, don't you?) then it's worth two minutes to consider some basic ground rules, listed here for you to embrace or reject: Establish your standards...

Calls-to-action (CTAs) are among the most neglected of content marketing components — in both curated and created content. Yet, they are also among the discipline’s most essential features in terms of providing brand value. These simple, yet targeted, phrases are directly responsible for encouraging your audience to take a next step toward becoming a loyal customer, such as downloading your white paper, following you on Twitter, registering for your webinar, or sharing your content with a friend or colleague.

Without a call-to-action, content marketing efforts amount to little more than writing exercises. It’s not enough to publish useful information; you want readers to engage with you and take an action that will provide value for your business. Here are a few examples:...