 Your new post is loading...
As crappy content keeps adding to the clutter, the business blogging world will change for the better. If you haven't yet flipped through Velocity Partners' SlideShare deck, "Crap. The Content Marketing Deluge," it's definitely worth a look (we've embedded it below). It's no wonder the 2013 State of Inbound Marketing report revealed that 18% of marketers are making quality content their top priority this year. The good news is, while it's becoming harder and harder to get eyeballs on your content, the future is bright for marketers committed to quality. And because business blogging is one of the most effective ways for marketers to consistently deliver content to their audiences -- and because it's right in my wheelhouse as HubSpot's blog manager -- I thought I'd share with you what I think the future of business blogging holds....
Without curators, the internet is quicksand. I have huge confidence in the future of curation. That's because we have so much information coming at us in this digital era. The more “stuff” the internet and all the shiny new social media channels throw at us, the more we need brilliant curators. Without curators, we run the risk of information overload.
...Over the past few months I’ve spoken to two authors who’d signed with the same, well-reputed PR firm for a book launch campaign, paid a considerable amount of money and then…nothing. Barely a review or author interview to show for the firm’s initial promises and excitement. Needless to say, this makes my blood boil. It’s deeply unfair to the authors who placed their trust in this firm, it’s disrespectful of authors in general – taking advantage of their earnest hope and vulnerability – and it’s an insult to all the devoted, hard-working publicists out there who go above and beyond to generate results. It also brings to light something that absolutely has to change: Many – possibly most? – authors simply have no idea what they should look for when hiring a PR firm. Nor do they know what’s “normal” or what they should expect from this relationship. So here’s my laundry list of must-haves in determining whether the firm you hire to publicize your book is up to par, and in understanding whether it’s doing (or will do) what it should for you...
Social media can be one of the most successful channels for B2B lead generation, but many companies still jump into a social network to have a presence for presence sake. If your company is on a social network, there must be a purpose behind being there. For B2B marketers, that purpose is most likely creating demand that will drive leads and sales. Depending on your marketplace, a focus on social demand generation could require being on just a few or a number of social media sites. Either way, you’ll have to go in with a plan to make sure each of those networks produces results. Here are six important ways your company can build a social media machine that generates leads while having some fun...
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...
By understanding the customer journey across media, devices and platforms, marketers can better optimize search and social marketing performance.... On the one hand, there’s a temptation to spend a lot of time and resources developing “the perfect” strategy. On the other hand, you could also just start cranking out content and see what sticks. Neither of those approaches really work well in a practical way. What does work? There’s one thing that can help answer many of the concerns marketers have about content and that also helps you cut to the chase for practical implementation: Understanding the customer journey. Google Think Insights has a great post with tools to help marketers better understand how different content and channels affects customers during the buying cycle or customer journey to online purchase. Check it out and then come back....
Semantic search is changing everything. From the way traditional marketing is done to the way social media connections are now forged, the web is forcing us to create more transparent, honest connections than ever before. In the digital marketing world the words “game changer” rank right alongside “awesome” in terms of overuse. Yet, when it comes to semantic search nothing less can adequately prepare the marketer for the seismic change that’s coming. The reason for this lies more in the way digital marketing has operated to date and less on how search works. Interestingly it is the practices of the former that are forcing changes in the latter. Put a bit more simply, if your online digital marketing strategy is based upon the creation of content that is keyword stuffed, contained tightly within a website and relying solely upon the usual link spamming to help search engines discover it, you are setting yourself up to fail. The reason lies in the way search now grades websites. In the semantic web the content contained in a website, regardless of uniqueness, quality or ‘cleverness’ will fail to do much in search if it does not also engage its intended online audience. In Google’s semantic world ‘sentiment mining’ (what is being said about you), engagement (how your content is received), citation (where your website and brand are mentioned) and interaction (how your website is linked to) form the four pillars upon which your new marketing needs to be based on. The good news is that gaming search and creating ‘shortcuts’ in marketing is now so effort-intensive that it makes no real economic search any more, so you may as well do the right thing and create a digital presence that delivers real value to the online visitor, is completely engaging and works hard to clarify the character and identity of your business. ...
Marketing podcast with Mitch Joel: I've been sensing a change these days. Actually, like most change, it happens in a way that is imperceptible, until you step back and look at something like a six month window.... The change we are undergoing right now will dwarf what we’ve seen over the past five years. Every bit of data and information we share and consume is headed towards a single source or, as Joel calls it, a single pipe. We are moving beyond customer service and marketing messages to a era where businesses must be built to interface directly with the customer at every level. The customer and the direct relationship with the customer is an organization’s greatest asset and greatest risk. An organization’s ability to respond directly and in real time will determine success and failure. Proactively leveraging opportunities in real time is the new landscape. One of my favorite lines from the book sums this up – “Instead of asking people to like us Facebook – why not trying liking them first.”-...
In preparing a presentation for last week’s Interactivity Digital conference in Miami, I was struck by a realization: I’ve been working with landing pages for seven years now.... Seven years ago, my company launched its first prototype of a landing page management platform. At the time, landing pages were extremely nascent, only used by a handful of pioneering digital marketers. So many times I had to answer the question, “What’s a landing page?” Now, they’re nearly ubiquitous. The disciplines of conversion rate optimization and post-click marketing have matured into a rich subfield within digital marketing. It’s been inspiring to see how much what-happens-after-the-click has improved in this time. So, on this occasion of my seventh anniversary of “converting” to this line of work, I thought I would step back and share the seven biggest lessons that I’ve learned over the years....
Online marketing has grown in leaps and bounds. Today, there is a vast number of tools and resources that can help you jumpstart your online marketing campaign. I would wish to cover each and every useful tool and technique. But for the sake of time, I will delve straight into some powerful internet marketing tactics that you can use to grow your business in 2013.
I spend a lot of time teaching job seekers how to make new connections on LinkedIn. Constantly meeting new people and growing your professional network is crucial to uncovering job leads and building a successful and lasting career. But today we’re going to talk about another important piece of networking that is often neglected: maintaining your connections once you have them. As the old song says, “Make new friends, but keep the old….” You can’t build up a new network every time you look for a job or have a career need; think of your longer-term connections as a deep bench of teammates that – as long as you stay connected – will be your supporters for years to come....
How many times in the past six months have you read or heard someone reference the phrase “paid, owned, and earned”? I’d venture to say that the answer is more than you can count on your hands (and maybe even your feet as well!). In this post, I’ll explore the evolution of social media marketing that eventually led us to the paid, owned, earned trifecta, and I’ll dive into a few brands that have found success employing it. As brands first began experimenting with social media, they were focused on the acquisition of fans, followers, and advocates. Number of “likes”, hashtag use/trends, and fan increase, these metrics of social success were easy to track and quantify. Soon after, as social media platforms designed solutions for brands, companies began formulating social and digital teams who understood and realized the value and speed of online word of mouth. Through industry and analyst research, they learned that consumers are more likely to engage and transact business with brands that integrate social media, and so they began cultivating content that inspired engagement. From this new interaction, they began seeing actual, authentic expressions – opinions, stories, photos, Tweets – earned out of engagement with their consumers. Wanting more and more of this valuable direct contact, brands began finding ways to generate this compelling content and drive people to sites that contained other authentic content. In doing this, converged media was born.....
Content curation services, which had been one of the choice tools of marketing experts for some time now. Content curation is evolving from not being only a professional tool but a tool that saves web surfers time as personal service. It is important to note that the actual popularity of the phrase “content curation” has not decreased. On the contrary, GoogleTrends clearly show that the popularity of the keyword query and its various forms is growing. What does this mean? It means that more and more people are interested in content curation; it is no longer just for marketing professionals.. Why is this happening? Everybody knows that the amount of information exchanged through social networks and feeds is growing exponentially, following the well-known Moore‘sLaw. According to LikeHack’s research based on 3 million user accounts, people spend approximately one hour every day looking through unnecessary information. There are several services available today which solve this problem, and they are growing in popularity: Likehack, Storify, Pearltrees, Getprismatic and others....
|
Heart-warming. The moment a little girl saw her father after 18 months apart.
If you could only had one social media option to support your business goals which one would you choose? Chances are you said Facebook without a second thought. As the 800 pound gorilla of social media, it should be a no-brainer but is it really the best for your business? Roughly half of the respondents named Facebook as the most important social media platform in Social Media Examiner’s 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, which surveyed a cross section of businesses using social media in their marketing mix. As Syncapse research revealed, Facebook drives revenues. Besides, there’s something to be said for a large audience of engaged users. Actionable Marketing Advice: Create a Facebook presence and be active there. What’s interesting about Social Media Examiner’s data is how the other social media venues measure up....
Less than a year ago links were everything to the SEO industry. Whether it was guest blogging or content marketing, the sole aim of many agencies revolved purely around sourcing and acquiring links. The answer is simple. By combining knowledge on entities, associations, co-occurrence and authorship, you can build a strategy that actually solves a problem or satisfies a need for your target audience. By doing this you will increase traffic and naturally generate links. Like Hannah Smith mentioned at this year’s LinkLove conference, if you do stuff that gets links, rather than doing it for links, you are much more likely to succeed. And to save you the hassle of pooling all this together, I’ve done it for you. You’re welcome....
Nowadays, many businesses are using Twitter as a tool for connecting with their customers, building traffic to their sites and expanding their businesses. Here are some tips which will help you succeed in your Twitter marketing plan....
The Customer Journey to Online Purchase: an interactive infographic that explores typical customer behavior to improve marketing programs. These days, the customer journey has grown more complex. Before making an online purchase decision, a customer may engage with your brand through many different media channels over several days. This tool helps you explore and understand the customer journey to improve your marketing programs....
SEO used to be about tuning a website for optimal consumption by spiders. Today’s SEO is about earning recognition, social spread, and backlinks. Here are practical activities that need to be done every month to achieve real SEO results. Google has just rolled out Penguin 2.0, a large algorithmic update promising to go “deeper” than the 2012 Penguin release, which put a hurting on websites with number of manipulative links in their profile. This prospect creates fear for many small businesses who depend on search engine optimization (SEO) for their livelihoods. But there is also a sense of confusion as the line often shifts and the message from Google contradictory. Here's how to sort out Panda, Penguin, and Manual Actions...
In response to my post defining social selling, I realized that I needed to take a step back and define “What is a social business?” There is a lot of talk about the social business and too often it involves a discussion of social tools and channels. In this article I’ll offer my own definition as well as plenty of links to other resources you can check out for more ideas on how to help your organization transform into a social business. A social business is not a business that sends a lot of Tweets or has a ton of Facebook FB -2.01% likes. A social business is one that realizes that it operates in a more transparent and social world. And so it makes customers and employees equally as important as its shareholders and profits. tools and channels....
Computer scientist and author Jaron Lanier has turned his back on the “information wants to free” meme to which he once subscribed, and he thinks advertising as a business model for media is doomed. It’s not just that Craigslist and other Internet businesses have snatched ads away from traditional media, he reckons; it’s that in this digital era, when Google and Facebook increasingly own most of the inventory, not to mention the ad servers and distribution channels, relying on advertising to prop up your media company just doesn’t make sense. youLanier, the guy credited with coming up with the term “virtual reality,” outlines this thesis in his new book “Who Owns the Future?” which examines the effects network technologies have had on our economy. In an interview with Nieman Journalism Lab, Lanier builds on that case, stating flatly that advertising isn’t a viable business plan for media businesses in the long term. He tells the publication...
The buzz around startup culture lately is all about “minimum viable product.” It’s the idea of creating a product as quickly as possible — in its most minimum viable form — so you can then make it better by adapting it to what your customers really... What if we could pinpoint the metrics that provide the biggest bang for our buck in terms of telling us whether our efforts are paying off while taking the least amount of time to measure? Focusing only on what matters (and nothing more) could satisfy the ROI demons, keep bosses and clients happy, and give social media marketers more time to do what we’re supposed to be doing: engaging and connecting with our communities. So, whether you’re still struggling to measure social media effectiveness or simply want to declutter your measurement efforts, Here’s your minimalist guide to social media metrics....
Your digital footprint is huge. Okay, well, truthfully, I don’t know what size it is. But here’s what I do know: your digital footprint has a huge effect on your online marketing. But seriously ladies and gentlemen, we have one humdinger of a topic, which in my biased opinion, has yet to inspire a truly helpful online article. So, here and now, I set out to offer you the ultimate list of easy and effective ways to enlarge your digital footprint, increase your findability factor (otherwise known as search results), and drive traffic to your website. We begin with the easy ones. The following four ideas—and the ideas within the ideas—are absolute musts....
Twitter’s latest ad product provides a call to action right inside a tweet — showing the company is finally creating marketing tools closer to the “bottom of the funnel.” Even as Twitter has grown into a media and marketing giant, not everyone is persuaded that the social media site is useful for selling things. As one marketer recently lamented to me, the platform’s effectiveness is hard to measure — and justify to clients — because “no one’s going to buy a car off Twitter.” [Update: Twitter says "au contraire" and sent this research] The perception, then, is that Twitter is useful for what the ad types call “top of the funnel” marketing — building brand awareness and so on — but that it has yet to deliver paying customers in the way that GoogleAdwords can. Today, though, it appears Twitter has responded with a new ad product that will make it easier for brands to assess what they get for their marketing bucks. The product, called a “Lead Generation Card,” lets marketers post expanded tweets that invite users to sign up for stuff right inside Twitter. The company showed what this might look in a blog post describing the product...
No longer marketing’s shiny new object, social media has become an indispensable tool to achieve key business goals since prospects and customers spend at least one out of five online minutes using these platforms. This makes social media too big to ignore. The challenge is leveraging the power of social media to achieve your organization’s key objectives in a measurable way. “Whether you work for a big business or small one, one thing is clear from this research. Social media marketing is here to stay.” – Mike Stelzner, Founder and CEO of Social Media Examiner Social Media Examiner’s 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, a survey of a cross section of businesses using social media as part of their marketing mix, highlights nine benefits of social media marketing....
|
