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Marketers throw around reams of statistics, aiming to prove the monetary value of their content efforts. However, these stats often don't provide meaningful insights to higher-level decision makers...
...Many CEOs and business owners simply don’t understand the lingo and numerical values related to content marketing terminology and analytics.
So for those who don’t speak the language, we have to find a new way to communicate.
We need to stop solely talking about abstract monetary or numerical values and instead focus on two fundamental ways to clearly measure the value of a content marketing effort: 1) In terms of its ability to provide long-term monetary worth, or 2) In terms of its ability to provide long-term importance, relevance, and usefulness....
You might be wondering, what is a content audit? If you don't know what I'm talking about, your marketing team is likely not being as thorough as they could be in developing your brand's content strategy.
A content audit is the process of rereading all the content on your site to evaluate where you have gaps in your overall content strategy. Yes, it's as tedious as it sounds. However, it's a process that has extreme payoff.
Defining Strategy Ahead of Time can Save You A Lot of Time in the Future
Any solid startup strategy will include a plan for customer acquisition and systems which are built to scale. Success will make team growth inevitable, but it can be devastatingly difficult to rebuild a system that’s reached critical mass.
However, entrepreneur and venture capitalist David Skok has found that the success of your company relies on two factors, regardless of any external forces: - Finding a scalable way to acquire customers - Monetizing customers at a higher rate than your cost of customer acquisition.
A successful content marketing plan can seamlessly scale with other projects, but it will be much more difficult to gain traction online in the first place if you delay getting started....
When STOCK Restaurant opened in early 2012, they set up basic Facebook and Twitter profiles looking to establish a strong online presence. But with no clear social strategy or framework to analyze the success of their social efforts, STOCK’s social media presence had minimal activity and growth.
STOCK wanted to drive new customers through the doors of their brand new restaurant and recognized they needed help in building a strong and effective social presence. They turned to Tent Social for their expertise on social media and marketing....
Marketers can reach a greater audience than ever by combining the power of social media and storytelling. The game has changed. We no longer live in a broadcast era where marketers can simply buy people’s attention with a TV campaign. There are different rules now and we need to earn the attention of our audience. We have a connected consumer revolution. The consumer is now in control of what they view, what they share, and how they view (on what screen). So there has been a major shift in terms of the relationship between consumers and marketers. And there are bigger things at work as well. We saw it with the Arab Spring, and the critical role social media had in the way information was shared. We saw it with the Occupy Movement as well. Social media can have an impact on traditional power structures. From a marketer’s perspective, that means that we’re moving towards pull versus push approach, sometimes referred to as inbound marketing. We can no longer push our messages across, we need to pull customers in with engaging, useful content. All of these trends are turning the traditional media model on its head, and brands are evolving into media properties. One of the best examples of this is Red Bull. Red Bull is putting out such compelling content that traditional media properties like NBC are buying the rights to this content. They’ve completely flipped the model around as a brand, where the broadcasters are after them for their content. They’re a great example of a brand doing it well in social....
In Silicon Valley, “lean” is the key to startup strategy. Could it also describe a more effective content marketing approach? The approach is iterative — it consists of repeating a process and shaping it with feedback until you reach an intended goal. Lean marketers push campaigns live before they’re “perfect,” learn from the data that results, and use that knowledge to make improvements in their next campaign. Essentially, the model promotes learning as you go, saving time and resources in the process. Some marketers already practice lean content marketing — whether they know it or not. Fundamentally, it’s a more structured approach to shaping content through experimentation. Still, looking at effective content marketing through the lens of lean methodology is particularly intriguing. Everyone wants to cut the fat from their work flows. The good news is that applying lean methodology to your content marketing efforts is pretty easy to do....
You can’t escape having a content style guide for very long. While it’s easy to share standards between one or two content marketers, it’s very hard to scale without a system in place. If your organization is among the 45% of companies with plans to expand their budget for content marketing and inbound practices in 2013, there’s no better time than the present to start brainstorming a style guide for blogging: For hundreds of years, publishing organizations and media have used style guides to define standards in-house, and quickly get new writers up to speed. Don’t think of it as a tool to train your writers on how to use grammar and spelling, but instead as the experts of Intelligent Editing put it, “to provide [guidance] for instances when many possibilities exist.” Your company’s content marketing is your online voice, and a consistent tone will ensure you’re able to achieve memorable branding. Whether you’re planning to scale from one to two dedicated content creators, or you’re starting to utilize freelance copywriting services, a content style guide can help your whole inbound marketing team write in the same voice...
Inspired by a reader's question, CMI takes a closer look at challenges B2B marketers face at both small and enterprise businesses. Check out our 9 ideas for solving some of the biggest content challenges... ... Andy’s question inspired us to take a closer look at some of the content marketing challenges faced by North American B2B marketers who work at small businesses (companies with 10 – 99 employees), as compared to their peers at enterprise organizations (companies with more than 1,000 employees). We’ll also share some insights on ways content marketers can address these issues — regardless of the size of the organization they work for. In general, both groups are similarly challenged with producing the kind of content that engages — and it is the top challenge for enterprise companies. In a way, I think it’s encouraging to see this as a top challenge, as it shows that marketers are focusing on the value of quality over quantity. And, there is good reason why engaging content matters: Customers and prospects who engage with content are more likely to reach out or initiate a relationship with your organization....
A video from Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, today answers some of the questions about what webmasters and SEOs should expect in the near future in regards to SEO. The question Matt asked and answered was, “What should we expect in the next few months in terms of SEO for Google?” Matt addressed 10 points, all summarized at the end as helping improve the search results by awarding the good sites and hurting the spammers and black hats in the search results. Here are the 10 points Matt addressed in his video, followed by the video itself....
Great tips and case studies on how content can impact SEO and generate website traffic... ..coming up with great ideas that cut through the noise and stand out can be the hardest part of our jobs. As everyone else steps up their content marketing efforts, how do you come up with ideas that captivate the masses? If you’re going to invest large chunks of your budgets on creating share‐worthy content, then it’s natural to want to get the maximum mileage from each one. Here are three great broad categories to use for your next brainstorming session. Remember, think of the core idea first and then decide upon the medium. Would it work best as a video, an in‐depth report, an interactive piece, a blog post, an infographic or something else? Channeling the idea through the right medium that your target audience is most likely to consume the information in will help you set yourself up for maximum success....
There are several people asking the same question: “How Long Does It Take for Content Marketing to Work?” In today’s video, Arnie Kuenn answers the question in several ways... ...What’s it really going to take to get that payoff? Well, this slide here shows you that both business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies with 100 to 200 pages will generate 2.5 times as many leads compared to those who have 50 pages or fewer. It gives you an idea of where you are with your website. If you’re far exceeding that, you have thousands of pages, well then you’re in a different league. But basically for small businesses, this is the target you want to have. Companies that blog more than 15 times per month, we used to tell our clients that they really need to be looking at trying to blog or post new content on their website 3 to 4 times a week. This pretty much right there, 15 times a month for some new content. If you do that, you’re looking at generating five times as much traffic to your website compared to people who aren’t blogging or aren’t generating any kind of new content at all. That’s significant. That’s five times as much traffic....
Get inspiration for your own business from 5 examples of powerful content campaigns that brands are using to engage active, enthusiastic users as contributors.... ...The bonus for brands comes when consumers take their engagement a step further, by sharing their brand ambassador status with their peers on social media channels. In a world where people rely on recommendations from friends, this endorsement is invaluable, not to mention it helps brands continually release fresh, powerful content that boosts natural SEO rankings and reaches new audiences. All the big brands are doing it (Nike’s Fuelband is a classic example), and many of them are doing it so well that their efforts are driving stronger consumer relationships, increased fan endorsements — on social media channels and beyond — and increased returns on their content marketing investments. For inspiration, take a look at five examples of powerful content that brands are using to bring users into their marketing efforts...
There is a growing market out there for content marketing. Not the old fashioned kind where magazine companies would create custom magazines for brands, marketers, and retailers. I am talking about the Internet version in which brands, marketers, retailers and other businesses create blogs, twitter accounts, facebook pages, and the like and then spend money filling those pages with content. Many brands have full time employees creating this content. Others use third parties and even freelancers to do it. In many ways I see this as the future of online marketing. Instead of paying tens of millions of dollars a year (or more) creating banner ads and paying to run them on pages filled with someone else's content, marketers can create their own web and mobile presences and use the most efficient form of advertising, pay per click advertising, to drive traffic to these pages and then engage in a conversation with their customers and potential customers. I like to think of this as moving the message from a banner to your brand and changing the engagement from a view to a conversation. It also helps that this approach works better on mobile where we are spending more and more of our time every day....
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It’s human, it’s simple, it’s visual and it’s curated. When it comes to social marketing, organizations are more focused on curated content.
Curated content provides grist for the social marketing mill, according to Gartner’s Jake SorofmanIt’s human, it’s simple, it’s visual and it’s curated.
When it comes to social marketing, organizations are more focused on curated content rather than big data, according to Jake Sorofman, research director for analyst firm Gartner Inc. “OK, don’t forget about big data – it’s a big deal,” Sorofman wrote in a recent blog. “But, these, days content may be giving data a run for it money...
In a world of second screen and streaming, lean forward/back just doesn’t tell the story anymore. Here’s a better framework for gauging media consumption habits.
The media business is long overdue to replace the prevailing framework we use to describe consumer interaction with content with one that better reflects current devices and activities.
The current lean-forward, lean-back paradigm, conceived by Jakob Nielsen, was popularized around 2008 and yet (amazingly) it’s already showing its age. Consider that it predates the widespread use of touchscreen smartphones, the current dominance of tablets — the entire second screen phenomena — and even the widespread adoption of on-demand streaming media services like Netflix and Spotify. The world has turned in the past 5 years, and yet this framework remains a popular if not standard convention for analyzing data consumption in the media business.
It’s time advertisers, marketers and content creators had a more accurate, more nuanced and granular system to describe how consumers interact with their digital content. The result would offer better opportunities for everything from UX design to monetization and marketing.Following is a two-fold system that, unlike the lean forward/back shorthand, breaks apart the physical and mental attributes involved when we consume content....
How does one measure if their content marketing efforts are paying off?
According to this infographic from Brandpoint, there are three major areas one can use to measure content marketing success.
These are: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion....
Each month the Marketing Technology Blog would generate a great handful of leads for sponsorships, advertising and consulting opportunities. As the site continues to grow in popularity, though, we weren’t seeing a subsequent increase in leads.
I had finally had it – I analyzed the site and reviewed where our calls-to-actions were throughout. It’s something we pay a lot of attention on with our clients but I had failed to review our own strategies for well-placed call-to-actions.There are 3 typical placements for your calls-to-action on any given page within your site...
Year after year, survey after survey, the greatest challenge facing marketers interested in content marketing is producing sufficient quality content. Last year, the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs ran a joint survey showing that the producing content was the greatest challenge facing marketers (64% of respondents). Similarly, last year, at Curata, we ran a B2B Marketing Trends Survey and found that the single greatest challenge was creating sufficient original content at 69%. Even anecdotally, if you have attempted content marketing, you have likely faced this challenge yourself. Most organizations are quick to start a new blog, and create an introductory post, followed by a few other introductory thought leadership posts, before letting it languish. Though we all know content marketing works when it’s done right, few of us, are able to pull it off. The Only 6 Ways to Build a Sustainable Content Marketing Organization But some organizations are able to reliably produce sufficient content on a regular basis and feed the content beast. There’s only four possible ways to do this. Here’s an overview along with the tools to use and the pitfalls to avoid....
If the success of your content marketing strategy is in any way dependent on your search engine optimization and search engine rankings, explore these 8 tools and tactics for tracking your keywords... It would be easy to shrug our shoulders and dismiss them as annoying gremlins that mysteriously move from one spot to the next. But the reality is that rankings are based on sophisticated — and often proprietary technologies — and will therefore vary among the search engine results pages (SERPs) of different search tools. Geography (influenced by IP addresses) and personalization (including anonymous cookies that track browsing history) will also continue to make an impact. Take heart: If the success of your content marketing strategy is in any way dependent on your search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine rankings, there are plenty of tools and tactics available that might merit your time and effort to explore. Here are eight ways I check keyword rankings as a part of an overall SEO-focused content marketing strategy:
This is not a blog post about writing. This is a blog post about creation. Creating content that actually matters. If you’re writing to increase conversion rates, then, yes, SEO matters. Proper grammar matters. Page layout matters. Verbal flourish might matter. But those are all details – aspects of content writing that come only after you’ve answered the more fundamental questions. Whether you’re developing a content strategy for the first time or you’ve been writing to increase those conversion rates for years, it’s time to touch on some fundamentals. Before whipping up that next blog post, ask yourself these seven questions, and start creating content that actually impacts your audience!...
Business blogging: learn how businesses with top marketing blogs generate leads with social media and content marketing.... Does your business have a blog? Would you like your blog to bring in more leads for your business? You already know you need to create awesome blog content, but there’s more to business blogging than just that. You also need to include a few tactics to help you bring in the leads you want. Here are some useful tactics to entice and capture leads used by top marketing business blogs!...
... Marcus Sheridan’s pool company was hit hard by the recession in 2008. He and his business partners discovered that in order to save their business, they had to get creative — fast. They decided to try blogging, and they started writing content for their site by simply answering their customers’ questions through their blog posts. ] Today, his pool company website gets more traffic than any other pool company site in the world. River Pools is thriving, and Marcus has now expanded his business to include providing social media coaching for other businesses....
We're going back to the basics. Expert content marketers with defined and working strategies can skip this article. For the other 90 percent of you, use these 3 building blocks to start developing one... I average about three speeches a week revolving around the topic of content marketing. At every one of those events I ask, “How many of you have a documented content marketing strategy?” That answer has never been more than 20 percent, and usually just a few hands are raised. Think about that for a minute. Content creation and distribution is booming. We’ve never seen brands more active in developing content to attract and retain customers. Our latest research tells us that more than one in every four marketing dollars is spent on a content marketing initiative. Yet, almost no one has a concrete strategy for the deployment of those content assets. (I’m virtually shaking my head.)...
Don't blog in the dark. If your business has a blog, these simple steps help you set conversion goals and measure and track them with Google Analytics. First understand that blogging is an awareness channel, positioned at the top of the conversion funnel. Conversions assigned to the blog should be things that create another connection between you and the audience, like a newsletter sign-up or Facebook like. The goal of the blog is to have people actively choose to connect with you elsewhere, a position that will put you at the customer’s top of mind when a need for your product or service surfaces. A 2011 State of the Blogosphere report from Technorati Media surveyed bloggers, and the results of the question, “How do you measure the success of your blog?” saw a variety of responses....
One question we’re interested in is how content evolves along the different paths it takes on different social networks. Because users behave differently depending on the social media platform they’re using, news travels in different pulses depending on what the news is and where it is traveling. This is a quick look at how content is diffused via different social media publishers. Expected vs Unexpected Events Let’s take a look at expected versus unexpected events, which each have very different pulses in the form and speed information travels around these events....
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This post identifies four key values to communicate when you're talking about content marketing ROI to senior executives:
1. content is lasting and permanent
2. content serves customers and search engines
3. content gains trust; trust gains customers
4. content speaks to skeptical Millennials better than advertising.
Bonus value: platforms will change but content will always remain.