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This is not another article about content marketing. It’s not intended to convince readers that content marketing can help differentiate them from their competitors, showcase thought leadership, drive traffic, or engage their customers. A quick Google search of the phrase “content marketing for small businesses” yields more than 200 million search results, meaning that there are already plenty of people out there talking about these things (and probably trying to sell small businesses something in the process).
So who is this article for? Anyone who’s convinced, but not sure how they can make it work for their business. It’s for anyone who’s ever wondered whether it’s possible to have a content marketing strategy without creating any content.
While the short answer to this is no, there is good news. The first is that the investment of time and money it takes to create great content doesn’t have to be a barrier to entry. Almost any small business that really wants to get into the game can do so by being smart about how they’re allocating their resources and maximizing the content they do have.
The second piece of good news is that the sheer amount of free content online makes activities like curation arguably more important than content creation itself.
That said, content creation still needs to play a role in your strategy. Original content--whether it’s in the form of a blog, case studies, videos, infographics, etc.-- will help you define the point of view you want to convey and should help set the tone for all of your content marketing efforts. The key is to maximize the ways in which you distribute and supplement it with other, lower touch tactics. Read on for five of the best....
This is one of the most common questions that brands ask. Data from a recent study conducted by Optimal indicates that Twitter delivers a smaller — but more active — audience than Facebook. But Twitter is less understood as a marketing channel, and many social media marketers are unsure about what to do when it comes to executing well-planned promotional strategies on the platform.
So what can you do to jumpstart a Twitter initiative using 140 characters or less? Social media marketing must include calls to action Calls to action (CTAs) are an essential part of inbound marketing. Their goal is to convert a user into a lead, and, later, into a customer. They are a way for you to entice your social media audience to focus on the action your want them to take....
Social media marketing is not just a trendy word, it is fast becoming and in some cases already is a viable acquisition channel for most businesses.
In fact, Hubspot reports that 70% of business-to-consumer marketers have acquired a customer through Facebook. If you are still having trouble convincing your boss that social media is worth the investment, here are 28 must see statistics for 2013 to make him/her jump on board....
In 2013, no company can expect to be taken seriously if it’s not on Facebook or Twitter. An endless stream (no pun intended) of advice from marketing consultants warns businesses that they need to “get” social or risk becoming like companies a century ago that didn’t think they needed telephones.
Despite the hype that inevitably clings to the newfangled, however, it’s relatively antique tech that appears to be far more important for selling stuff online. A new report from marketing data outfit Custora found that over the past four years, online retailers have quadrupled the rate of customers acquired through email to nearly 7 percent.
Facebook over that same period barely registers as a way to make a sale, and the tiny percentage of people who do connect and buy over Facebook has stayed flat. Twitter, meanwhile, doesn’t register at all. By far the most popular way to get customers was “organic search,” according to the report, followed by “cost per click” ads (in both cases, read: Google)...
As of May 2013, almost three quarters (72%) of online U.S. adults use social networking sites, up from 67% in late 2012. When we first started asking about social networking sites in February 2005, just 8% of online adults said they used social networking sites.In addition to asking about general usage of social networking sites in our current survey, we included a stand-alone question about Twitter and found that 18% of online adults are now Twitter users. This is roughly double the 8% of online adults who used Twitter in November 2010, the first time we asked about Twitter as a stand-alone platform.
Today, social networking site use is a major activity for internet users from a wide range of demographic groups. Younger adults are especially avid adopters, but social networking continues to grow in popularity for older adults as well. Six out of ten internet users ages 50-64 are social networking site users, as are 43% of those ages 65 and older....
Advertising executive Andrew Teman wrote a blog about why he's dropping out of the game because of Oreo's infamous Super Bowl blackout tweet...
....Real time marketing has become the "it" thing in advertising. Minutes after the royal baby's birth, a slew of marketers tweeted out pre-packaged images and messages "spontaneously" reacting (and capitalizing) on the moment.
Teman continues: "In bestowing this award on this piece of work, we’re actually exposing a really sad truth. That the advertising industry has become so top-heavy with cost and process and approvals and meetings and waste, that the idea of just making a simple image, and deploying it to a simple platform at an opportune moment, is considered at this point to be ground-breaking."...
Social media marketing is a critical piece in the online marketing puzzle for local businesses today. But it’s just one part of a successful online marketing system, and some days, there is so much to juggle that you just need a quick, easy way to fill your social media feed with interesting, engaging content. So, here are 10 ideas you can use to keep your social channels full of relevant, timely, and useful content – fast!...
Facebook’s efforts to simplify marketing and advertising on the social network took a giant leap forward with Thursday’s launch of the Facebook for Business page, a single destination for all of the information brands need to tap into Facebook’s...
...Data included in our new UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report 2013 shows that more than half of agencies (52%) now offer a ‘full range of digital marketing services’, and increase from 45% in 2012 and 42% in 2011.In comparison just 12% of agencies specialise in SEO while 7% focused exclusively on paid search. A further 10% of agencies carry out both SEO and paid search...-
The 70:20:10 ruleTo borrow another popular concept, I would suggest thinking 70:20:10 makes sense. 70% of your marketing is the planned ‘marketing as usual’ activity. 20% of your marketing should be programmatic.I described this in more depth in a previous article but it is marketing that is more rules-driven and automated in response to various stimuli; so it is not planned, but it is responsive, and, typically, machine-driven and executed.10% of your marketing is purely responsive Oreo-style. For this you typically need people resource available....
Even if you’ve spent countless hours and dedicated resources to developing a thorough social media marketing strategy, you may find that you have overlooked some small, yet critical elements that could end up handicapping your efforts. For this reason, it’s always a good idea to get a second set of eyes to look over your internet marketing strategy, particularly a social media agency (heck, even having a friend look over it may dig up some missing elements).Mashable recently shared some of the most common elements missing from a social media marketing strategy. Check out some of these oversights below to see if your strategy needs some tweaking:...
...We’ve all heard of them; the brands that have spotted a hashtag trending and, keen to cash in (quite literally!), have quickly thrown together a self-promotional tweet, attached said hashtag and excitedly pressed ‘tweet’ – only to find themselves in a bath-load of hot water. Or the brands that hurriedly created their own hashtag as part of their social strategy and failed to think twice before unleashing their creation to the social-stratosphere, only to be left red-faced and facing a very public social backlash.When hashtags go wrongHere are five of the best (or worst!) hashtag howlers we’ve come across at The Social Penguin...
Learn 10 principles for effective B2B content marketing, including creating content that solves pain points, and repurposing content to save time.
Content marketing does have its drawbacks. It cannot be relied upon to create a direct cause-and-effect; i.e. running a blog piece will usually not result in a direct sale. It is also very difficult to measure the results; content marketing is somewhat like public relations in this respect. However, it is not a “warm fuzzy,” either. Any marketing program should be using a variety of channels to reach customers so that its messages come from multiple different sources.
Content marketing is one of the many tools with which a company can deliver messages to its customers and prospects to “condition” them to purchase...
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You devour online marketing lessons. You feast on articles, reports, books, and eBooks.
....Perhaps it’s so important to you, you spend some of your precious time attending webinars and conferences and you can’t help but join the conversation on blogs and via social media.Good for you. There’s a ton of information to take in, the rules change daily, and if you’re going to succeed with online marketing, you must master a good many practices, techniques and tools.
The experts keep serving up specialized dishes: content marketing, social media marketing, search marketing, permission-based marketing, inbound marketing and any (fill-in-the-blank-here) marketing. The more these ingredients get heaped onto our plates, the more the meal calls for a bowl and spoon. It’s digital soup, my friend....
The young girl in T-shirt and shorts paces up and down her dorm room, occasionally stopping to vault herself on top of the bunk bed and then back down again.
For four days last month, Target live-streamed five YouTube personalities as they mused, joked, ate, slept and generally passed the time in makeshift dorm rooms outfitted with products sold by the Minneapolis-based retailer.
Not quite commercial, not quite reality, Target's digital experiment, dubbed Bullseye University, represents its most ambitious attempt to penetrate the digital universe of college students.
By scrolling over each room on BullseyeUniversity.com, viewers could also activate pop-up boxes that give information about the merchandise and links to purchasing them on Target.com.
Brian Kelly, a retail consultant and former top marketing executive at Sears, says live-streaming Millennials interacting with Target products gives Bullseye University an air of relevance "that's not as creepy" as other voyeuristic projects....
Case study: Virgin America is using its Twitter presence to handle everything from seat changes to cocktail requests—even at 35,000 feet.
Steve Jenkins was waiting for takeoff when he noticed it—his boarding pass for Virgin America Flight 753, bound for San Francisco, was missing his frequent flier number. He could have flagged a flight attendant. He could have called customer service. Instead, Jenkins, the CEO of a Seattle-based gaming company, decided to pick up his phone and tweet.
Four minutes later, Virgin America responded:Jenkins messaged @VirginAmerica with his ticket details. He was all set before the plane left the tarmac."It would have taken me longer to call, go through the whole phone tree, find someone, and authenticate myself," he said. "And if I hadn't done it when I thought about it, I might have forgotten about it."...
It seems like common sense that an increase in tweets can drive an increase in live TV viewership, but until now there's been scant proof of such correlation. A study released by Nielsen has found just such a relationship. In fact, Nielsen went so far as to use the other c-word: causation.
Relying on live TV ratings and tweets for 221 primetime broadcast episodes that were studied using SocialGuide -- a venture between Nielsen and McKinsey & Co. that captures Twitter activity for all U.S. TV programming -- the study found correlations between tweet and tune-in surges.Not surprisingly, a lift in ratings often yields more tweets. According to the findings, a rise in live TV ratings drove up the number of tweets about the programming among 48% of the episodes sampled. But more interestingly, on the flip side, an increase in the volume of tweets drove up live TV ratings in 29% of the episodes included in the study....
"Brand" will always be a nebulous term. Arguments rage about its true value, especially on social media...
Although recent research shows that it can be responsible for nearly 15% of your total worth (Or much, much more, if you’re J.K.Rowling), it’s still seen by many as the ultimate wooly metric. There’s no doubt that being a household name will improve your chances of success in social, but just how far will it take you?
I’ve taken a look at the world’s top ten brands, and matched up their profiles across the biggest social media platforms.Let’s see what’s in a name...
As digital communication continues to explode more organizations are recognizing its importance within the marketing mix. In order to develop strategy and allocate resources business leaders need to understand the effectiveness of their existing digital initiatives. A great way to do this is to conduct a digital audit – a study of your brand’s digital presence (on its own and in relation to your competitor set) across six key areas: Reach, Architecture, Content, Conversion, Integration and Measurement.
Before launching the digital audit it’s important to establish basic criteria with respect to rating status, structure and performance. To help guide next steps set up a simple decision filter that will aid in prioritizing your findings. One simple way to do this is to assign a color coding systems as follows...
As someone who spends most of his time talking to brands and agencies about content, I see far too many of them keeping content in a silo, rather than using it as part of a holistic marketing plan. Here are a few best practices for using content to supercharge your marketing spend....
Strategic marketing: When should you offer a product or service discount?Some of you will say never to discount price. Getting your pricing right is an important element of marketing. And to get the extra sales boost you may want to consider price promotions. One of these is offer a price discount that can be an effective tactic to get more customers. This article is not about reducing your price to get a one off sales and hope extra business will someday follow. It is about using discounting in a smart and simple way to get your business new customers and increased sales in short term....
How are you integrating social media at your workplace? If you are not spending time integrating, you may be headed in the wrong direction....After working with social media platforms, I have really found the key to success is “Integration”.
Integration of social media into other forms of marketing media and business processes is the key to success. At some point, I think the term social media will go away and people will once again refer more to the internet as a whole rather than social media.Here are some great ways to integrate social media into your current marketing media and your business processes...
Andrew Spence discusses meme marketing or memevertising and how using this can build your brand, get more traffic and make more sales.... Effective memes associated with a product or service, generate images, words and feelings in the brain that create a desire, meet a need or inspire action. Marketing is all about creating thoughts in people and memes have the capacity to do that most effectively.Look at this Nike meme: This meme is hard to forget and leaves a lasting impression – that’s what memes are meant to do.
61% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase decision, and they are now essential for e-commerce sites. User reviews are proven sales drivers, and something the majority of customers will want to see before deciding to make a purchase. Here are some compelling stats on user reviews, why they are great for SEO, why bad reviews are valuable, and how to use reviews in navigation and on product pages...
To be successful in reaching Millennials, businesses need to give themselves the freedom to re-think their entire marketing strategy. To achieve their business objectives businesses need to communicate effectively with the values of consumers. Brands that are becoming more socially conscious today will positively affect their bottom-line, their communities, and the world of tomorrow.
In a telephone interview with David Burstein, author of "Fast Future: How the Millennial Generation is Shaping Our World," he said Millennials are highly connected to and are extremely conscious of their values. They "see the world from a values perspective," he continued, "Reaching Millennials requires a real investment [from brands and organizations] in social responsibility."...
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Great tips on how to get better results from content marketing using curation and several other simple strategies.