 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
Done the right way, written content can turn a company from one of many competitors into an industry thought leader and help businesses flourish.
Why any company should strive to become a thought leader
Thought leadership is more than simply a marketing buzzword. If a company establishes itself as a thought leader in their respective field, it turns from a business into an experienced and competent expert and a trustworthy source of information and guidance. This doesn’t only increase a brand’s visibility and traffic – it also increases the likelihood that customers will feel like they can rely on the company when it comes to making a purchasing decision. But to become thought leaders, brands have to do more than simply produce regular content that shows their interest in their specific field. Rather, they have to provide the audience with a compelling, informed, and original point of view. Any potential customer will have plenty of questions on their mind. A good thought leader anticipates those questions and answers them expertly, even before they are raised.
Thought leadership can never be a marketing strategy in itself, but is merely the intended outcome of any resourceful and creative content strategy....
You’ve all seen the data and it’s not pretty — the amount of information on the web is certainly overwhelming. Content budgets are soaring, content output is exploding. There are more than 1,000 blog posts and 400 hours of YouTube video uploaded every minute in a never-ending war for attention. If you’re the first one to dominate a niche with your content, you’re one of the lucky ones. You’re probably keeping a stranglehold on your leading position by publishing relevant, helpful, and interesting content on a consistent basis. In essence, you are creating Content Shock for your competitors — dominating a content niche so that Google juice flows in your direction. But what if you’re on the losing end of the stick? What if you’re in a situation where your competitors have already loaded the web with content that dominates the search results? Personally, I am facing this problem all the time now when I consult with companies. If they’re late to the content marketing game, they may feel paralyzed because the competition has such as head start. So I need to find new ways for them to compete. I’ve thought this through, and I’ve come up with eight strategies to stand out for an organization that is late to the content game....
The phrase “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” is aptly suited to the user experience. In digital design, the user experience is the whole and content is one of its parts. Without the right content cues, your audience may not know how to navigate through your site or find answers. The user experience is more than content, but content is vital to the outcome. Connecting Content With the User Experience Consider this: You walk into a restaurant to meet a friend for lunch. The server is late arriving to your table, the place setting is basic, and the harsh light from the overhanging lamp is glaring in the midday brightness. However, you and your friend have a wonderful conversation about life and you barely notice the background details when the check arrives. That conversation completely changed your lunch experience—and that’s what great content can do for any existing user experience. By the same token, some environments are so distracting that they take away from the conversation. Maybe the restaurant was playing music so loud you couldn’t hear your friend or the waiter was late, the food was cold, and you were overcharged. Even if the conversation was amazing, you’ll walk away overwhelmed by the other bad experiences. To maintain a strong digital presence, you need the right balance between content and other UX factors (e.g. speed, learnability, and information architecture)....
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.
How many times have you hit that publish button, not 100% sure about your content and if it’s really worthwhile? A feeling that becomes more definite as weeks pass and you get fed up with waiting for your post to pick up traffic and results?
Whatever the case, there are things you should be doing before you hit the publish button to make sure you’re putting great content out there. Some of these to-do’s are for SEO purposes, others for readability, and yet others for the sake of organization.
That’s why you need a checklist.
I’ve seen too many publishers brain dump into their blog platform of choice and hit “Publish” with absolutely no strategy in mind. Then they don’t get traffic. No tweets. No comments. No results.
So you avoid the above no-results content scenarios, here’s my 15-point checklist to make sure you’re publishing great content. Ready? Let’s dive in!...
Are you trying to meet your content marketing goals with a one-size-fits-all formula? Take a close look at your next campaign’s purpose and follow these 3 steps to determine which distribution options are the right fit for your brand....
You were not given a content marketing budget in order to create content. You were given one to increase brand awareness and build your sales and marketing pipelines. Using the Content Marketing Pyramid helps you do just that. (For a deep dive, download Curata’s Content Marketing Pyramid eBook.) The Content Marketing Pyramid enables the development of content and related assets intended to reinforce common messages/themes through multiple content formats, distribution methods, and promotion channels across owned, earned, and paid media. The Pyramid assures optimal content consumption, reuse, reach and impact. It provides a common strategic process to align different parts of an organization around “content,” ensuring consistency across functional, geographic, and business unit boundaries....
Most inbound marketers spend a lot of time creating content, and it can be a struggle to constantly come up with fresh content ideas. However, the key to creating effective inbound content is to know what you have already in your content inventory. Creating an inventory of effective content means mapping your content to the appropriate stage in The Buyer’s Journey. Once you know what content you already have, you can analyze the entire library to identify opportunities and holes, and then create a new content offer that fills out the gaps in your content library. For those of you up to the task of doing a content mapping yourself, read on! This blog post will cover a three-step process to help you create the content you need to align with The Buyer’s Journey. Let’s get started!...
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....
It's no surprise to see a decline in search volume when it comes to link building and a continuing growth for content marketing.
Content marketing is becoming more and more popular to build relationships with your audience, and if you don’t take action now and build a solid content marketing strategy your competition will get ahead.
To stay ahead of the curve, it is essential to keep up to date with the latest content marketing trends. To make it easier for you, here are top 7 content marketing trends that will rule 2016....
- Industry: IT Security
- Content: Blogs, infographics, whitepapers, video animation, social media
- Highlights: 172% increase in blog traffic
Demonstrating value and building brand authority online isn’t always about selling – it’s also about your willingness (and ability) to share your expertise with those who are simply browsing. One of the most common problems faced by our IT clients – among others – is the difficulty of conveying the complex value of their offerings. This is a challenge that’s well served by educational content.
When potential buyers at the top of the funnel move further in the buying process, will they remember your company as an educational resource? If yes, they’ll work their way from blog pages over to product and services landing pages (which are critical to lead generation in B2B tech.)
An educational approach is exactly the strategy our client in the IT security space took. Here’s their story...
It was 6 months into a 12 month digital marketing plan that had started well. They had created a content marketing strategy that had driven a lot of traffic to the website, there had been a lot of sharing on social media and the readers and viewers had been highly engaged with the great content.
The brand awareness had gone up and the corporate credibility had been improved.
But it was a short conversation.
The boss gave an ultimatum. “This content marketing looks like it is a waste of time and money. Where are the sales? If you want to keep your job I need more than just web traffic, social sharing and engagement. I need more leads“.
Sound familiar?...
Seventy-six percent of B2C marketers report using content marketing, yet only 37% say their strategy is actually effective. Blindly pursuing content marketing and hoping it works isn’t a useful strategy. In the early days of social media, a single tweet could be heard around the world. Brands just had to show up and chat, post a few coupons, engage with whatever audience happened to be hanging around, and their content would practically share itself.
Today’s consumers are savvier and more discerning about what they pay attention to. Content fatigue overwhelms the masses, and it’s tough to attract the attention of your audience, let alone convert customers.It’s not a revolutionary concept that you need a content strategy to succeed in marketing. But what does that actually look like?
With rapid shifts in marketing trends, and the availability of new technology to track engagement and automate communication, it’s more important than ever to figure out how your content marketing plan works. Here’s how to get started....
|
Joe Pulizzi, Founder of the Content Marketing Institute, put it in CMW’s opening keynote: “Mediocre content will hurt your brand more than doing nothing at all.”
Currently, only 20% of content marketers said they were committed to a full content marketing approach: Hitting a defined audience with one message, finding compelling angles from which to tell your story, staying consistent over time, and building value outside of the products and services you offer, according to Pulizzi.
The other 80%? They’re creating a lot of content, but not building a loyal audience or telling a new story.
Here’s what some of our favorite speakers had to say about how their companies are creating great content and staying ahead of the pack in the content marketing space....
I joined LinkedIn in the very early days, but then went years without getting a single piece of business from the social network. Fortunately, this changed when I started publishing articles, and now I have written over 500 posts. Almost overnight, LinkedIn became an important source of new clients. Selling morphed from an annoying necessity to an easy and enjoyable process: I just answer my email. Using social media to attract new clients can be a highly efficient and effective strategy, but only if your mindset is to help people first, and to sell a distant second. This notion – win customers by selling less – is counter-intuitive. Let me explain….
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....
On Monday, Gucci will release its latest fashion film, a Gia Coppola-directed spin on the tragic Greek love story of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in present-day New York City and starring Lou Doillon, Marcel Castenmiller, Laura Love, Rocco Di Gregorio, among others. Coppola and stylist Arianne Phillips worked in tandem with Alessandro Michele to capture the dreamy feel of the hot-shot creative director’s Pre-Fall 2016 collection, which the film — shot across five locations and broken into four episodes — was created to promote. Michele even designed a custom pink 10-foot long wedding veil for Doillon’s character.
But while shorts like these are nothing new, the genesis of the film was fairly unorthodox. Instead of tapping its internal marketing team or a traditional agency, Gucci worked with 23 Stories, the branded-content studio launched in January 2015 by publishing giant Condé Nast. Beyond Gucci’s own marketing channels, the film will be distributed through six Condé Nast (US) properties — Vogue, GQ, the New Yorker, W, Vanity Fair and Pitchfork — which, together, attracted a total of about 32 million unique visitors in April 2016, according to Comscore. Beyond their URLs, those six publications boast a cumulative social media following of nearly 67 million. The film will also be promoted via Vogue China and Vogue Japan. Gucci and Condé Nast suggest the project is bigger and more ambitious than anything else either party has previously done in the branded-content space, both in terms of the level of talent recruited and also the scale of the production.
To be sure, the Kering-owned Italian luxury house has the resources and capacity to create video content like this on its own. But Gucci is after Condé Nast’s larger, and presumably more diverse, audience. For instance, Gucci has 8.8 million followers on Instagram while these six titles combined have about 18.5 million. In this deal, Pitchfork’s millennial male followers — an important demographic for Gucci under Michele — are as crucial to the equation as W’s affluent luxury consumer....
Drowning in the sea of content? You're not alone.
Site quality is factored heavily in search ranking, and one of the most important aspects used by Google to determine site quality is content. After the Panda update, a large number of websites with low-quality content (e.g., content farms), duplicate content and otherwise bounce-worthy material (e.g., keyword-stuffed content) took a huge hit.
Over the years, there has been a big shift in the amount of quality content on the Internet, especially in tech where every provider has a blog, whitepapers and other material for lead-generation efforts or in fashion, where every retailer has lists, videos and creative uses of user-generated content (UGC). Content farms are fewer and many websites are focusing on user experience (rather than just ranking) when creating content....
Anyone can create content online with a small budget, or even no budget at all - whether that content's any good is another issue. An average piece of content can become superhero content when combined with an outstanding marketing strategy, while at the same time, an awesome piece of content might never get read or shared if the associated promotion activities are weak. Digital marketers understand the value proposition of content marketing and its potential to bring in leads at a fraction of traditional marketing costs. In fact, content marketing costs 62% less in comparison to its traditional counterparts and generates up to 3x more leads. The infographic outlines 40 tips on promoting and creating content to help you maximize both reach and return from your efforts....
Repurposing is a common best practice among the most effective content creators: you can be much more efficient and prolific if you take a single idea and turn it 15 different ways rather than trying to come up with 15 brand new ideas. Ideas are super hard to come by, and when you get a great one you have to grab on with both hands and squeeze as much value out of it as you can. If you’re not sure what I mean by “repurposing,” think of it as taking a great idea and building off it to create something completely new. Kind of like IKEA Hacking, but for marketers. Repurposing comes in three different flavors: - atomization, which is breaking a single asset up into smaller pieces; - aggregation, which is pulling smaller pieces together into larger long-form assets; and - amplification, which is using the themes & messages of your core content to create related pieces that build the strength of your brand’s connection to the idea/topic overall. We’ll dive into each option separately so you can think about which method or methods makes sense for your content mix and marketing team....
“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....
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....
It may seem odd at first to liken companies known for energy drinks or dishwashers to legacy media giants like Comcast, Condé Nast, and Viacom. But brands have started to get more sophisticated with their content efforts, building out cohesive strategies that combine creative talent, distribution, and content and marketing technology into a seamless process.
Constantly making those pieces fit together remains a challenge for any company, no matter its size or budget. Nonetheless, in 2015, the content marketing industry truly started to mature. You could say brands today are like angsty teenagers: Everyone desperately wants to be popular, some are comfortable conforming to the latest trends, and the ones with the best reputations aren’t afraid to take risks and stand out.
As we looked ahead to 2016, Contently asked today’s content marketers about their biggest issues, hurdles, and goals. How are they dealing with compliance and workflows to publish content quicker? What paid distribution platforms are most effective? What metrics are most important for measuring success? How does marketing technology influence an organization’s content output?
Here are a few of the key findings....
Do you know where the content marketing industry is moving or why? Because if you don’t, you won’t know how to adjust your marketing strategy in order to grow.
Sure, you may have a gut feeling, but nothing beats having concrete evidence. So, to make things easier on you, here’s 38 stats that will help guide your content marketing endeavors. Here we go….
|
Thought leadership cannot be a goal in itself but rather an outcome of a number of strategies that include content marketing.