Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The first step to getting a leg up on the competition is to have a solid, smart content marketing plan in place. If you're having trouble planning for the upcoming year or need some fresh ideas to include in your plan, read on.

In this post, we'll dive into why your business needs a content marketing plan and the exact steps you will need to take to create one....

All over the world, brands are united by the same goal: to generate unique content that their customers can relate to, and thus, help them earn better business outcomes. They spend infinite time, money and resources on this objective, and develop complex buyer personas to help them achieve optimal results.

However, intangible questions remain, including what are the basic pillars of content marketing? How do brands create compelling content that can be used to attract customers and ultimately boost sales? What is the secret to a truly successful content marketing strategy?

These questions may be intangible but they are still ones that every content marketer today should ask and strive to find answers to.

Strap yourself in to learn my 12 simple rules for successful content marketing.

You already know that having and documenting your strategy is important because you’ve probably read the same reports and case studies that my team and I have read. But there’s a pretty big difference between knowing you should do something and knowing how to do it -- which might explain why 89 percent of B2B marketers use content, yet only 37 percent have documented strategies.

The marketing team at Influence & Co. spent the last couple months of 2016 carefully researching, planning, and creating a content marketing strategy for this year. What follows is an exploration of exactly which elements our team determined a successful plan must include to drive results, empowering you to create your own documented content strategy....

Let’s further evolve your view of social media as follows: When you view social media as another channel to help you achieve the same business objectives you have for your content marketing, you begin to discover the massive potential it has for your business. On the other hand, because social media represents the convergence of information and communication, businesses need content in order to engage in social media.

In other words, as I am fond of saying, “Content is the currency of social media,” but knowing on what social networks you will publish which content for whom is sometimes an afterthought for content marketers. With this in mind, every content marketer needs to create a unique content marketing strategy for social media. Here’s how.

Note: There are a handful of other very important steps that should also be included in your content marketing strategy. Those listed below are those that are specifically related to the “social” aspect of the strategy. For a broader list, please see my post on content marketing strategy best practices.

The key steps your content marketing strategy for social media should include...

Love the fresh start you get after the holidays, but dread coming back to the office knowing just how much pressure you’ll be under to make up for all that lost time? The CMI editorial team feels your pain, so we put together a little seasonal present to help you hit the ground running – without undoing the stress-busting benefits of taking some well-deserved time off.

We’ve collected some of our most popular strategy, planning, and measurement templates to help make your content marketing efforts easier to manage throughout the year. You can also access additional templates for creating, distributing and sharing content that we published earlier this week....

After evaluating hundreds of B2B brands, we narrowed it down to the best of the best.

The 2016 Kapost 50 are top-notch marketing teams, learning to integrate strategies, create full-funnel content, and value quality over quantity—all to thrive in the digital age. Dive in to read their stories of world-class marketing.

Companies that use marketing automation have 53% higher conversion rates than companies that do not, according to the Aberdeen Group.

Though some marketers insist content marketing automation takes away the relationship between the brand and customer, automation can actually enhance that relationship.

Content marketing automation can be as simple as scheduled social media posts and as complicated as list segmentation and lead scoring. Depending on a brand's marketing and sales strategy, content marketing automation can dramatically improve conversion rates.

However, marketers really need to take automation seriously if they want to prove the success of a campaign....

“Content needs to be highly entertaining or informative to break through the clutter in today’s media environment,” says Stacy Taffet, Senior Brand Director at PepsiCo.

That’s why the old View-Master toy now has 360-degree imagery and virtual reality capabilities. Automaker Lincoln put itself back on the map with stylish ads featuring an alluring new identity with Matthew McConaughey. And they’re not the only ones. The following old-school brands have recently made comebacks through clever, creative, and strategic content marketing....

Content marketing sounds very simple on its surface but I can tell you from lots of experience that it can be tough to do it right. Even if you have innate writing ability, this may not translate well into results-producing writing if you don’t do your homework and understand what you are selling and who you are selling it to. Plus, prospects are inundated with content from your competitors, many of whom take the creation of content very seriously.

Like Dana Brookes, author of Content Marketing Revolution: Seize Control of Your Market in Five Key Steps, who stated,“Think of every contact a customer has with your brand as the most important encounter of your life.”

Businesses that need to increase their brand awareness, credibility, and preference with their target audiences are turning to content marketing in greater numbers as a proven, pull-marketing strategy that aligns with business metrics.

Whether your goals are to increase market awareness, drive website traffic, build lead generation or improve sales funnel conversion, understanding how to create copy that delivers results is fundamental to achieving success.

From strategy to execution, you need content that is consistent and on-target. To leverage your brand’s core promise, quality content turns differentiators into a narrative that systematically engages your critical audiences.

Tailored content for every stage of the process compels prospects to take action. In a Lead-2-Revenue Machine, we are not creating content for content’s sake, but rather to drive specific business objectives....

What if goals aren’t even sales-oriented? For example, perhaps the need is to demonstrate thought leadership in the industry, to create brand favorability.

Then there are all those “content marketing” how-tos that are channel-, rather than strategy-oriented. Lately, these have been Snapchat-heavy, due to the company’s recent IPO. But just because Snapchat is attracting attention this week doesn’t mean it’s for everyone. (Moreover, Snapchat is more of a channel and a tactic than a strategy.)

These types of prescriptive, formulaic, devoid-of-strategic-oversight articles are what give content marketing a bad name. We’ve entered the eye-rolling phase of content, when noise overwhelms signal.

And we’ve seen it all before. Ten years ago, this happened to social media. The carpetbaggers moved in, and suddenly marketers branding themselves as social media experts were crawling out of the woodwork....

When it comes to writing for social media, the toughest part is creating content that’s engaging enough to make people want to click, read and share. All of the components have got to be there – a great headline, quality content and valuable information that readers will want to pass along to others.

Give your blog a boost with the help of some of these essential tools. They’ll increase the effectiveness of your content, making it more engaging for readers....