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Our goal is business results. Our content is not successful unless it is driving reader behavior towards positive business outcomes: leading people to sign up for newsletters, fill out a “Contact Us” form, or ultimately make a purchase, for example. Instead of writing headlines that attract as broad an audience as possible, we should be writing headlines that filter out everyone but our target audience before they click through to read the article. By dissuading non-interested people from arriving at our page in the first place, we’ll save on our media and distribution spend. And more importantly, our overall engagement and conversion metrics will go up – and those are key metrics we need to focus on to prove that our content is driving ROI. Here are three strategies to use to craft more effective headlines...
It’s no secret that visual content is powerful. Numerous studies show that our ability to recall information increases significantly when it’s presented as an image rather than plain text.
That’s why infographics, despite the fact that they are everywhere, are still effective when done well.
Infographics are still effective when done well says @sujanpatel. #contentmarketing CLICK TO TWEET
What that means, as summarized by Jeff Bullas, is that an infographic (and visual content as a whole) should:
- Blend seamlessly into the user experience
- Fit the platform used to share it
- Offer genuine value — never an aggressive attempt to sell
- Be bite-sized — quick and easy to consume
- Relate to the things your audience cares about
- Be consistent in style and tone
Many small business owners today think that owning a brick-and-mortar business excuses them from having to learn and master digital marketing.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, mastering SEO and local optimization for your locally run business will bring a higher ROI than just about any other marketing activity you use.
It’s one of the quickest ways to quickly and simply (notice I did not say easily) get your business in front of thousands of new eyes and earn customers for life. With a few simple steps, you can set yourself on the path to long term digital marketing success.
But how do you start marketing your brick-and-mortar business in the digital world? What steps do you need to take over the next 30, 60, or 90 days to successfully grow your online reach and increase sales like you have never seen before?
I’m glad you asked.
In this article, I’m going to give you a step-by-step and day-by-day plan for marketing your brick-and-mortar business....
Wondering how to use Snapchat for your business?
Want to create deeper connections with your followers?
Snapchat can help you build an engaged following, increase loyalty, and boost your brand visibility.
In this article, you’ll discover 10 ways to use Snapchat for business.
An attendee at the Curacao Social Media and Content Marketing Strategy Workshop raised a new (for me) and pertinent question: What are ideas to go live with brand impact? That’s a content marketing strategy topic I’ve been thinking about as more social platforms offer “go live” features, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, and Tumblr.His specific question was what to do to make it worthwhile for a brand, and how much to prepare so it doesn’t become embarrassing (or boring, or pointless) video content....
Are you ready to give content marketing the time, money and resources it deserves?
While your answer may be yes, it’s never easy to get up and running with a new marketing strategy. There are questions to answer, challenges to overcome and various tasks that need addressed.
With 88% of B2B marketers currently using content marketing as part of their overall strategy, neglecting to do so will put you in the minority.
As you get started, you’ll soon find a variety of ways to better research, plan, create and distribute content.
What I’ve created here is a list of content marketing tools that you’ll want by your side as you roll out your first campaign.
These tools cover the most important details you’ll need to address before you get started, as well as in the early days (and weeks) of running your campaign....
What’s the point of this story? First — as you know by now — that there is only value in content if it “moves.” If my article had not received any attention from my readers, it’s unlikely the reporter would have found it on search. There was no inherent SEO value in my original post — I had invented the term social scoring — so the web activity alone led the reporter to me. But there is a bigger lesson here. Would I have been found by the New York Times reporter if I had only posted my ideas about social scoring on Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? The answer is obvious – no. To have the opportunity for real authority on the web and vast reach, you need a certain type of content that has depth and breadth. Every organization active on the social web needs at least one source of “rich content....
A powerful picture is an incredibly efficient tool: The human brain can process an image in just a few milliseconds, so the right picture can spark someone's interest and convince a viewer it's worth exploring a new show in a single glance. Which is why, in 2014, Netflix began gathering consumer research specifically about the images on its service.
The research indicated that looking at images not only prompted users to watch content, but accounted for a whopping 82% of their time spent browsing (as opposed to, say, reading movie titles or descriptions). In other words, the images mattered almost four times more than the text describing the storyline. Members also spent only 1.8 seconds considering each title. "We know that if you don't capture a member's attention within 90 seconds, he or she will likely lose interest and move on to another activity," says Nick Nelson, Netflix's global manager for creative services. "Images become the most efficient and compelling way to help them discover the perfect title as quickly as possible."
Recently, Netflix—which is famously tight-lipped about its own data—has been doing experiments to better understand which images capture our attention and why, and shared some of its findings with Fast Company as well as in a post on its blog. The effort was both science and art: Data scientists analyzed user statistics, while creative teams considered the colors, emotions, and words that appear on pictures. The company tests several images for a single show or movie to try to discover what makes members click. Its first lesson was that images had to be high quality in order to draw viewers in. "We saw one clear thing," Nelson says. "Using better images to represent content significantly increased overall streaming hours and engagement."...
Not planning for your social media campaign can be a disaster for your business.
A social media campaign can deliver great results. It can also deliver really poor results and waste your money. What causes them to fail?
Not using cat videos… ha ha…
Ignoring cat videos, what really causes them to fail?
Planning....
This past year, we've seen the importance of visual content emphasized by the changes that occurred across almost every major social network, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. At the same time, both video and infographics have become powerful tools for brands looking to communicate more easily with their readers.
To help you keep pace with these trends, let's take a look at some statistics that demonstrate the impact visual content has on reach, engagement, and sales....
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....
Do you remember anything at all when you watch ads -- or is the experience a hazy blur? The fact is, consumers rarely remember a product -- they remember stories, which may inspire the use of the product. That element is what online advertising is lacking. Two weeks ago I talked about the value of complementary storytelling vs. disruption. For advertising to be as effective as it can be, ad stories need to align with the content so that it, along with targeting, ensures relevance of the message in a way that elicits a response.
I also want to remind advertisers to spend the extra time to tell a story that inspires consumers, rather than simply telling them about your product. I don’t mean that all ads have to move you to tears. I’m referring to inspiration in the manner of a quiet...
Savvy retailers understand that content sells. It’s not enough to have a catalog — consumers spend a lot of time researching and learning about products long before they make an actual purchase.
Brands need to figure out how to integrate content into their e-commerce strategy. They need to create a voice for the brand and tell a story, strategically using content to drive purchases.
Unfortunately most e-commerce platforms do not provide the content management capabilities needed to manage content-driven commerce experiences. Content-based promotions, expert articles, media, community and other digital content play an important role in the modern commerce experience — but this requires alignment between your content management system and your e-commerce platform.
Let’s look at three ways integration of your web content management platform with your e-commerce system drives better digital commerce experiences....
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So what can you do to ensure that you make a positive impression and get the maximum percentage of visitors to hang around and check out your content? It starts by answering some basic questions and satiating the curiosity of your average visitor. At the end of the day, you want to make sure that you cover all of the bases and that you don’t make your visitors work too hard. With that being said, here are eight specific questions every visitor wants answered in 10 seconds....
A search on Google will now display relevant tweets from Twitter in addition to its other results, a move aimed at adding a real-time element to Google.
For businesses, though, it’s an opportunity to get content to show up organically in the search results, which can increase traffic from people who are SEARCHING for a solution to a problem your business solves.
Pretty cool, right?
There are a few simple things you can do to optimize your tweets and increase your chances of showing up in search (not to mention Twitter search) and have Twitter and Google working for you.
So we need to do some of the following despite the inner voice trying to keep us plugging away.
- Reading and researching
- Acting on the ideas that emerge
- Creating
- Publishing
- Building digital assets.
To help you find some inspiration I have been crawling through the most shared content marketing articles on BuzzSumo and come up with these 10 “must read” posts on content marketing.
So if you are a savvy digital marketer or an entrepreneur that understands the importance of building great online content, then these are worth a long glance....
Do you want more people to join your LinkedIn group?
Are you looking for tips to get more exposure for your group?
LinkedIn groups are a great way to generate leads and increase influence within an engaged community.
In this article, you’ll discover five ways to quickly build a larger membership for your LinkedIn grouP....
Four years ago, I shared that your content must resonate with your audience so they follow you where you want to take them.
I also asked what kind of content universally resonates with people. It’s content that: - We never get tired of
- We always have time for
- We don’t forget
- We want to share with others
This is the kind of content we must create if our goal is to influence, inspire, and move to action the unique group of people we have chosen to reach.
To help, I originally created a list of 21 types of content we all love to consume.
Hashtags are used on social media channels and are important in your business – you may be missing a trick if you’re not using them.
But…
…if you use the wrong ones, you need to get off that path you are driving down.
So let’s figure how how to identify popular hashtags…
First… let’s talk about what hashtags are and why you need them!
At Buffer, we love to see new stats and research about how to best share to social media and drive engagement. And as a brand on social media ourselves, we know just how challenging it can be to post engaging content across multiple channels.
To learn more about how brands are tackling social media in 2016, and importantly, to discover what’s working, we decided to study what types of posts brands were sharing the most of on social media.
We examined over 100,000 accounts, which consisted of over 14 million tweets and two million Facebook updates to figure out how brands have been sharing to social media over the past 12 months.
Here’s how it broke down…
You know how much hard work it is creating content, don’t you? Well… for all that hard work, you need to get some rewards for doing it! This is where a content conversion funnel comes in.
A content conversion funnel is where you share a piece of content that gets attention from your potential audience and then you lead them down a path to a potential sale.
This could be text, images, video, voice… whatever form your content takes.
In this article, we break down some examples of content conversion funnels and, of course, we take a look at the tech side to building the funnels....
In this post, we’re going to review 15 marketing guides that can speed up your success.
We’ll look at the finer details of each guide, ensuring that you have a clear understanding as to how you can use each one to your advantage.
By the end of this post, you’ll have a better idea of how each guide can push you down the path to reaching all of your content marketing related goals....
“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%....
I’m going to give you seven specific examples of sites with tons of traffic that you can potentially drive back to your site.
Then, I’m going to show you an easy way to find even more sites that are virtually untapped.
Sounds interesting? Read on…
The research findings would appear to suggest that viewing branded content on a mobile device can have a big impact on consumer purchase intent. This isn’t too surprising, given the fact that mobile devices are with us all the time and deliver personalized content on-demand. A lot of this content is branded and served up in native formats.
Impulse purchases, it would seem, are going to become fairly de rigueur -- that is, if the mobile checkout and payment process becomes easier and more seamless.
Well-produced branded content, at least in this survey, looks like it can deliver the goods, so to speak.....
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![31 Types of Content We Crave [Infographic] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/vfdXRAWq06YDq62E0Z1NeDl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
Are your headlines getting results? If not, here are three tips for more effective headlines.