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As more companies move to embrace content strategies as part of their SEO efforts, we hear over and over again from all sources that the key to getting those content pieces found is about creating good content that users find engaging. Don’t worry about old school SEO tactics – write good content, and they will come. Not so easy, is it? Millions of items of content are generated online every day, and chances are not all of them serve the reader. And realistically, can we expect people to read blog content from every company they might purchase from? Would you, in your own personal time? Do you regularly read your own company’s blog?
In the absence of good strategy, content marketers sometimes end up using easy metrics to prove success, and those metrics don’t necessarily rely on the quality of the content. Using the wrong metrics to prove the value of content can result in false success reporting, and therefore masks the reality of wasted content efforts, and stops you from getting better....
Nonprofit marketers are using more content marketing tactics, social media platforms, and paid methods of content promotion than last year – and, generally speaking, they’re becoming more effective in many of these areas, and in particular, with how effectively they use tactics.
Yet, in terms of overall effectiveness, only 26% say they’re effective – a drop from last year when about one-third of marketers said they were effective. Our new report, Nonprofit Content Marketing 2016: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends – North America, produced in association with Blackbaud and sponsored by FusionSpark Media, reveals this insight and much more.
About 528 U.S. respondents participated in the study, which analyzed research and buying habits among consumers and B2B buyers, the number of channels used to make decisions, and the type of content that resonates best -- whether focusing on connecting with B2C or B2B buyers.
More than 70% of consumers use three channels or more when researching a purchase. Some 45% of consumers who make the purchase, and 46% of B2B customers, look to the data to help them make the correct decision. Many look at the headline of articles and content for hard facts such as dollars and percentages....
It’s that time of year again when we release the findings of our annual content marketing survey. Over the years, we’ve talked a lot about effectiveness. But this year, while our team was discussing new questions for the survey, we stepped back and wondered – how many companies even know what effectiveness looks like?
The answer may (or may not) surprise you. Get this: 55% of business-to-business (B2B) marketers said that it is unclear within their organization what an effective or successful content marketing program looks like.
Regardless, what’s great about the research is that we can examine how the most-effective marketers are going about their business so we can learn from them.
Let’s take a look at some of the key findings from the report, B2B Content Marketing 2016: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends – North America, produced by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, and sponsored by Brightcove....
The content active Belgian internet users value the most for their own personal consumption is content that provides useful information (valued by 37%), content that teaches them about the brand (valued by 29%) and which tells them something new and unexpected (valued by 27%).
On the other hand, the content which most Belgian respondents indicate as the kind they will be likely to share is content they find entertaining and fun (indicated by 31%), which relates to their passions and interests (indicated by 26%) or contains useful information which others don’t know (indicated by 25%).
Today’s consumers are increasingly aware of the value of their online identity. When we share something online, we are actually seeking recognition and want to add value to our online presence. Consequently, people are much more likely to share content that expresses their point of view or will be of value to their network. In other words, they share content that allows them to communicate something to others....
Although content has proven itself to be a critically important component of successful marketing in today’s online world, all too often companies are sacrificing the quality of their content for quantity. As we’ve seen, most of the 340 companies we reviewed as part of our initial look at global content quality are producing content that doesn’t measure up.
We believe those companies, and the countless others just like them, will be handicapped if they don’t start paying more attention to their content quality....
And then, late one night in January, my colleagues Kieran and Joe had a Twitter conversation with Rand Fishkin about the HubSpot Blog's editorial strategy. It got me thinking: With all these new tools and resources at our disposal, was the Marketing Blog's current high volume strategy still best for our readers, thus best for us?
Keeping our headcount and resources constant, what kind of posts should we be publishing -- and at what frequency -- to grow faster?
Funny enough, we weren't the only ones interested in finding out this answer. After Joe and Kieran chatted with Rand on Twitter, we reached out to Trevor Klein at Moz to see if he wanted to run a similar experiment with their audience. He did -- and you can head over to their blog to read their findings.
Six months after starting this experiment on the Marketing Blog, we've uncovered some compelling insights that will transform how our section operates. Here's what we did to figure out our optimal editorial strategy -- and what we're going to do about it. ...
Today I just wanted to write a quick blog piggybacking that story with some more titillating stats on how audiences use social to connect with brands, what they expect from companies, and how brands can improve their interactions with shoppers.
The Northridge Group study features survey answers from more than 1,000 consumers in the United States. Through this report, “The State of Customer Service Experience in 2015,” analysts attempt to provide a roadmap for how companies can turn social media into the linchpin that holds the entire customer experience together. Below are some of the more poignant points from the survey....
Industry expert ShareThis – creator of the widget that allows for sharing on 120 social channels — released an eye-opening study that showed Facebook now makes up 84% of all internet sharing. Twitter is next at about 6%, with Blogger at 5% and Pinterest at 3%. Email makes up less than 1% of all sharing, even though many emails include buttons like ShareThis.
Despite Facebook’s domination of all sharing, the study found that it’s actually Pinterest that boasts the most sharing in a number of categories: food & drink, beauty & fitness, home & garden, and shopping. Twitter does best with sports (the games are perfect for live-tweeting) and even beats Facebook in the news category.
So if your organization is in any of the Pinterest-leaning fields, or if you have visual content like photos, cartoons, or infographics, you should post them on both Facebook and Pinterest for a one-two punch....
Content is one of the most significant investments a company can make. While web design and vibrant videos are appealing, they don’t hold the same weight as content. This is especially true in the electronics industry, where customers are seeking fresh, insightful information before making a purchase.
The Value of Quality ContentThere’s a reason 86 percent of B2C marketers use content marketing: it works. High quality content pleases search engines and satisfies consumer demand for useful information regarding products and services.
In the consumer electronics industry, quality content is even more important because a large percentage of consumer electronics purchases are what businesses refer to as “investment purchases.” In other words, consumers aren’t buying a pack of gum from the convenience store or a t-shirt from their favorite retailer. Many electronics cost hundreds of dollars, and high-end purchases can cost thousands....
Have you ever wondered when you should be sharing your content on the social web?
Your visitors and followers prefer using social media sites during specific hours. So if you start sharing your content when your users are on these social sites, you’ll not only gain more shares, but you’ll also notice an increase in traffic.
So, when should you be sharing your content? Well, just follow the times in the infographic below.
BuzzSumo is a research and monitoring tool. The functionality is broken down as follows: - Find content that is most shared on social media channels – you can enter your own domain, or another domain, and see what has been shared socially - Find influencers related to particular topics - Get alerts based on keywords, brand name, links, author name or domain - Track competitors and do an analysis based on their content.Here are some practical examples of how you can use BuzzSumo effectively....
Each year we publish a series of core research reports that highlights the state of content marketing: - B2B marketers in North America
- B2C marketers in North America
- Nonprofit marketers in North America
- For-profit marketers in Australia
- For-profit marketers in the United Kingdom
While you can read the individual findings at the links above, it’s useful to look at the trends and differences across each of these markets....
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You can learn a lot from your competitors.
If you’ve ever wondered why your competitors are outranking you, or getting more social love, this article is for you. With the tools mentioned below, you can learn a lot about your competitors.
Here are 12 tools that will help you get more traffic....
Marketers have a lot of issues to deal with moving forward, but there are still plenty of reasons to be optimistic. Even though, as Dillon points out, intrusive advertising is in a state of crisis, content and experiential marketing is starting to truly live up to the hype that’s been building over the past few years.
So if Dillon is the devil over the shoulder, allow me to take the perspective of the angel....
These are interesting findings in light of other research that has found a higher degree of trust in branded content that appears on TV and in print than on social channels, with Facebook being the notable exception.
A key theme to emerge from Adobe’s study is the greater degree of trust in information from those considered more likely to be peers. For example: - 68% consider breaking news to be more trustworthy when coming from an eyewitness than from a news anchor; - 84% consider a product endorsement to be more trustworthy from an ordinary user than a celebrity; and - 73% would trust a music recommendation from a close friend over one from a music service based on past preferences....
The value of good quality content marketing is important in all industries but in the technology industry brands risk more than a third of their customers (34%) switching to a competitor if the content they produce falls in quality.
As well as risking customer migration to competitors such brands would also face brand harm, according to a new study by content marketing platform NewsCred. The study showed that low quality or infrequently published content would prompt more than a quarter (27%) of consumers to believe that the brand was out of touch or not up to date with customer habits.
18% of consumers meanwhile said that they would feel that customer engagement wasn’t important to such brands. Such negativity could also feed through to perception of product quality too with 16% saying that they would expect a technology brand that produced poor quality content to also sell poor quality products....
This summer BuzzSumo teamed up with Moz to analyze the shares and links of over 1m articles. We wanted to look at the correlation of shares and links, to understand the content that gets both shares and links, and to identify the formats that get relatively more shares or links.
What we found is that the majority of content published on the internet is simply ignored when it comes to shares and links. The data suggests most content is simply not worthy of sharing or linking, and also that people are very poor at amplifying content. It may sound harsh but it seems most people are wasting their time either producing poor content or failing to amplify it.
On a more positive note we also found some great examples of content that people love to both share and link to. It was not a surprise to find content gets far more shares than links. Shares are much easier to acquire. Everyone can share content easily and it is almost frictionless in some cases. Content has to work much harder to acquire links. Our research uncovered....
Consumers say Facebook is the channel in which they are most likely to trust content created by a brand/company, according to a recent report from The Acquity Group.
The report was based on data from a survey of more than 2,000 consumers in the United States.Respondents gave Facebook an average score of 4 as a trusted content source from brands (1=most trusted; 10=least trusted). Magazines and newspapers ranked second (4.4 average score), followed by email and television (5.3 average score each).
Younger generations are more likely to trust social channels than their older counterparts are: Some 29% of consumers age 18-22 and 32% of consumers age 23-30 rank Facebook as the most trusted content channel, whereas only 16% of consumers age 52-68 do so. Older consumers are more likely to trust traditional media, such as print (27%)....
As content marketing becomes more and more mainstream, brands are increasingly realizing that they can’t simply “do content marketing” and call it a day. No, they have to do it right, and they have to know that their content is actually working. But what does it actually mean to have content that works? And is it driving brand favorability?
That’s a huge question that brands are struggling with, as recent data shows that 78 percent of marketers struggle to measure the ROI of their content marketing. With bigger and bigger budgets being thrown into the brand journalism space, it’s important that companies have a real statistic they can rely on to prove that their storytelling is worth the investment....
Our 2015 State of Social Marketing Report recently dropped. It’s a whopper, consisting of 47 pages, two surveys, and our own research of seven major social networks that brands commonly use for marketing.
I’m not trying to dissuade you from downloading this gem, but if you want a quick overview, check out this slide deck and get your social knowledge on in less than 2 minutes....
Over the past few years, content marketing has evolved from being just another trend, to becoming a necessary component of digital marketing. Businesses of all types and sizes are adopting content marketing tactics to meet their marketing needs, which explains why content marketing has become one of the most competitive online marketing tactics to date.
However, there are still tons of businesses and companies not utilizing content marketing in their digital marketing strategies, and if that includes you, then check out these cold, hard facts from the latest content marketing benchmark reports:
If you want your prospects and customers to find the information that will truly help them (and in turn make them consider you to be a valuable resource), you need to be deliberate with how you structure and tag your content. Applying intelligent content principles will help us get there.
As Ann explains:It’s not just about the format. If we’re to truly make our content accessible to customers, it has to be discoverable. When you have unstructured, untagged, unintelligent content, the information you or your customer are looking for is very hard to find....
A much-ballyhooed Gallup study uncovered some ugly “truths” about social media, including a reputed inability to influence purchasing decisions. According to the study, 62 percent of Americans say Facebook, Twitter and their ilk have no influence on whether they purchase a product.
Although asking consumers to accurately recount the advertising methods that ultimately drove them to purchase is likely a fool’s errand, many marketers who have attempted to correlate standard social metrics to sales and other conversions have struggled to make a connection.
As a result, in many marketing shops the number of likes, shares and retweets a brand receives daily is lessening in importance. But that doesn’t mean social media offers nothing of value — advanced marketers are leveraging social data for reasons beyond direct marketing tactics....
If you track the social activity created by your content, then you might be missing the source of the majority of online shares according to a recent report. So called “dark sharing,” invisible to traditional tracking methods, now accounts for some 69 percent of social sharing globally, even outpacing Facebook and all the other public sharing channels combined according to the study.
Dark Social isn’t as sinister as the name might suggest. The term, first coined by Alexis C Madrigal, tech editor at Atlantic.com in 2012, describes web traffic that comes from sources traditional web analytics are unable to track. Just think how often you copy a link to an email, or instant message into a forum and you will get an idea of what it is and how powerful it can be in disseminating information....
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Learn more about the measure of success in your content marketing from Christine Bellefontaine.