Content Marketing Strategies Archives

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8 Do’s and Don’ts of Creating Marketing Videos — with Video Creative Director AJ Muffett

November 1, 2021 No Comments

By Dan Haverty

Videos are powerful tools. They’re engaging, exciting and often make us want to do something. It’s no surprise then that they’re the main event for some of the best content marketing strategies out there.

You’d think that with so many videos circulating on the internet, we’d have a set of fool-proof ways to produce compelling content. But it turns out there’s a lot of misconceptions about what makes for a good video, and we could all use a refresher from the experts.

We got AJ Muffett, Brafton’s Video Creative Director, to give us his take on some of the most popular do’s and don’ts about videography.

1. Do Tell a Story

“Absolutely tell a story!” AJ says. “Why create a video if there’s no story to tell?” Telling a story is what brings the whole thing together. Without a story, videos don’t really have a point, they don’t draw in an audience and they don’t help you achieve your goals.

So how do you do it? “You want to tell a story that relates to your target audience. Don’t just tell a story that you think is interesting — tell a story that they will find interesting.” That might mean presenting a familiar problem right from the get-go, demonstrating potential work-throughs using some flashy graphics, and then topping it off with a way to solve that problem.

Don’t just tell a story that you think is interesting — tell a story that [your audience] will find interesting.

2. Do and Don’t Use a Script

This one can get a little complicated. For some videos you should definitely use a script. Others, not so much. “For animations or voiceover-driven pieces, it’s certainly important to have a script because you don’t want [your interviewees] winging it, and you want to have a clear goal to communicate.”

But if you’re putting together company “about us” videos, testimonials or even case studies, it makes more sense to let your interview subjects speak freely. This lets their passion come out. That’ll make the video feel more authentic, and your audience will relate to it much better.

3. Do Try To Create an Emotional Response

This one’s a no-brainer. “100% yes! Why would you create anything if you weren’t trying to get a response?” Video works best when viewers are engaged and walk away feeling something — that’s what’s going to get them to remember you and buy your product or service down the line.

Of course, not every emotional response is a good one, so you could be walking a fine line here. But as long as you’re evoking the appropriate response in the right way, making your viewers feel something when they watch your video is truly the mark of a successful video. “The worst thing you can have is for someone to watch a video and feel nothing,” AJ says.

4. Do and Don’t Use Stock Footage

There’s another fine line to walk when it comes to using stock footage. For lots of folks, there can be some negative connotations around stock footage. The term may evoke generic images of busy highway flyovers and businesspeople shaking hands.

But AJ tells us that stock footage is actually used in a lot more video content than we realize. “Well-placed, thoughtful stock footage is super useful and super important,” he says. “As long as it’s helping tell the narrative or move the story forward in a positive way, then stock footage is a good tool to add to your repertoire.”

5. Do Keep Your Videos Simple and Concise

You don’t want to make your videos so simple that they’re generic, but you also want to avoid overcomplicating the video and crowding out your message. “If you overcomplicate it by making your scenes too busy or trying to fit too much narration in a short period of time and you lose the actual goal of the video, then you’ve lost the whole point of the video.”

6. Don’t Make Your Videos Too Long

This one is right there alongside keeping your videos concise. Most of us have short attention spans. Very short. One widely cited Microsoft study found that the average attention span is just 8 seconds. Your videos should reflect that reality and get your point across as efficiently as possible.

Plus, it pays to leave some information for viewers to wonder about: “You should leave your audiences wanting more when they leave a video. Enough for them to start a conversation or engage with your website after the fact,” says AJ.

Video works best when viewers are engaged and walk away feeling something.

7. Do Include a Call to Action

Always always always encourage your viewers to do something in your video. At the end of the day, the whole purpose of your video is to get people to do something, whether that’s filling out a form, going to your website or buying your product or service. If you don’t direct them anywhere, then what’s the point of the video?

8. Don’t Expect Immediate Results

Sometimes people push out videos expecting to see tons of clicks and likes pour in right away. That rarely happens, but you definitely should expect something to come from your videos. “Just because you created a video you shouldn’t expect immediate results, but you shouldn’t have just created a video just to create a video. You should’ve created a video with a goal or a purpose in mind that should’ve been part of a larger strategy.”

So there you have it. Expert insight on creating impactful marketing videos from one of our experts. At the end of the day, any one of the above tips will help you pack the most punch with your videos, but incorporating several (or all) of them into your video content strategies might really transform them for the better.

By Dan Haverty

Dan Haverty is a content writer at Brafton. Currently based in Boston, he also spent time living in Ireland and Washington, DC. When he isn’t writing, Dan enjoys reading, cooking and hiking, and he recently became an avid yoga practitioner.

Sourced from Brafton

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Want More Traffic for Your Website? Try These Proven Content Marketing Strategies

November 9, 2020 No Comments

By Rooney Reeves.

In the highly-digitized world, we are living in, we often hear about content marketing. But what exactly is content marketing? Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach, focused on building and distributing relevant, consistent, and valuable content to draw and retain a clearly defined audience, and the ultimate goal is to drive profitable customer action.

Content is king, and website development today entails building websites and web apps with high-quality content. The most experienced successful brands and marketers already are vouching for that by developing powerful and unique content marketing campaigns. Unlike traditional marketing, content marketing costs 62 percent less and provides as many results when it comes to leads and traffic.

Business organizations seeking services of web developers, such for instance a PHP web development company that builds web solutions using PHP are doing so to boost their marketing strategies and to stay on the competitive edge. Unquestionably, content promotion strategies are popular and insanely effective in today’s marketplace. Whatever business vertical you are in, you could leverage content to develop a robust brand reputation, boost brand awareness, and boost ROI.

There are content marketing strategies that help drive more traffic to your website. What are these? Let’s find out.

Proven Content Marketing Strategies to Drive More Traffic

Build Astounding Content for a Very Distinct Audience

A content marketing campaign to be successful demands a lot of things. The most critical, however, is you have to take into account the concerns of your target audience. Put simply, you should recognize and understand the characteristics, behavior, needs, mindset, desires, issues, and habits of your audience.

If you’re to deliver value, then you must certainly know that your content would bring something new, something that your audience could hardly find somewhere else. The most essential element of SEO is keyword research. Look for the keyword and phrases that your audience uses in search engine queries.

Build content around these phrases and words to boost your rankings. When researching a keyword, look for long-tail phrases and keywords to bring in more relevant traffic. It would also be helpful to include keywords that are semantically related.

These are words and phrases that conceptually relate to one another. Some free keywords to help you include:

Keyword Tool Dominator
Google Search Console
Keywords Everywhere
Rank Tracker
Google Ads Keyword Planner

There are also other on-page and off-page factors, which impact your SEO aside from your content, such as:

backlinks
inbound links
site architecture

Networking and Guest Posting

Aside from engaging in a web development company, one of the most reliable ways of boosting awareness of your brand and blog traffic is guest posting. Guest posting first off enables connecting with niche authorities who possess an established database of customers and followers already. Effective guest posting secondly generates direct traffic.

You nonetheless have to target the right blogs, which target a similar audience, you should share content that amazes your audience, and you also have to link back to your website properly so that readers would feel enticed to click on your CTAs or call-to-action buttons. Guest posting provides an opportunity for you to connect with other same-minded people. All kinds of fruitful relationships could arise since you could share links, knowledge, and opportunities with your network group.

Segment the Audience and Build Various Landing Pages

Intelligent content marketing isn’t done randomly. Effective marketers segment their audiences following their various needs, including product needs, solution needs, and more. Segmentation is necessary simply because some of the visitors to your site are not customers, but some of them are.

Your content thus couldn’t be relevant to all your visitors since they have various needs and are at different stages of the sales process. Thus, as an example, the content you develop to boost brand awareness is wasted basically on people who have purchased one of your products already. The easiest way of segmenting the audience is through developing particular buyer personas.

Q&A Marketing and Forum Marketing

Q&A platforms and industry forums, such as Quora are goldmine content marketing channels. These sources, if properly leveraged, could drive plenty of traffic back to your website. Depending on your industry and the target audience, you have to identify the most relevant boards, which people use in discussing different topics.

There are different discussion forums, depending on the products and services you are selling. Study these forums and make certain that your ideal customers spend time there. The next thing to do is to build a branded profile that features the name and logo of your brand.

Forum marketing is all about interacting and providing effective solutions to people’s problems. Provide relevant advice, engage in relevant discussions, and use your signature in sharing important links back to your landing pages. The more helpful you are, the more leads and traffic you will generate over time.

Master One Social Network yet be Present on all the Others

Billions of people on earth today are active social media users. If you think about it, nearly half the population is using social media for different reasons. This tells you that social media isn’t a should anymore, but has become a must for every kind of business, enterprise, or blog.

Social media and content marketing are interconnected. One completes the other and vice versa. The perfect place for you to develop brand exposure, build meaningful relationships, and gather relevant leads is social media.

Whether you’re promoting content on social channels, you need to identify the most preferred social network by your target audience. Determine what communications channels they use, where they hang out, and how do they spend their time on social media. Quality over quantity is always the best, thus decide on the social channel you should focus more on.

Repurpose, Update, and Link to Old Content

Do not forget old content, especially if it’s evergreen and qualitative. Rather, you should update it, repurpose it and remind it throughout your newest blog posts. Simply, updating your content means adding new visual content, information, and new twists to make it more extensive.

Content update often could boost your search engine rankings, since crawlers revisit the pages and detect changes, which have been modified. Linking back to your past blogs is another effective way of boosting traffic and reputation to your brand. By adding internal links, which resolve various problems and needs, your target audience gets to spend more time on your blog, become familiar with your value proposition, style, and products.

Content repurposing involves modification to its media type. You could turn text into slides, audio, videos, infographics, and the other way around. As soon as you have numerous versions of the same value and information, share it via the various content channels.

For Better Results, Leverage Professionals

Content marketing is demanding. If you want to stay ahead of the competition and overshadow your competition, then the quality of your content should be great all the time. Keep in mind that a great entrepreneur, webmaster, or marketer is not a good writer or editor all the time.

In these instances, considering partnering with professionals. Aside from saving time and money, the quality of your article would be consistently written and preserved. There are several platforms where you can find talented freelancers.

Before contacting them, however, make certain that you build the profile of an ideal writer. Mention knowledge, experience, and skills requirements, and allow these services to find the perfect match.

Conclusion

Although technology and the internet continue to evolve, the main principle remains the same. Develop a content marketing strategy based on reliable data for a satisfactory and seamless customer journey.

By Rooney Reeves.

In News

How To Use Weird and Funny Ideas in Your Viral Content Marketing Strategies

March 13, 2018 No Comments

By Amanda Sparks

Going viral is every content marketer’s dream. When a piece goes viral, the brand is immediately catapulted into fame and becomes an internet sensation. The readership/viewership can bring huge numbers to a website, and, with that kind of traffic, revenue is not far behind.

What kinds of content go viral? They certainly are not the conventional blog posts that, while important and effective, offer nothing unusual, exciting, or fun. Content that goes viral has to be wildly humorous or even weird to result in the sharing that makes a piece go viral. And once a piece does go viral, it is often picked up by news media, providing even more publicity for the brand.

So how do you create this kind of content? You can learn much of the strategies by studying the content that has gone viral and trying to emulate the tactics that have been used. Let’s take a look at some content strategies that have gone viral and see what you can take away from them.

Pick a Key Feature of Your Product That Sets It Apart

If you have a unique product, focus on that and present it in a way that captures a reading or viewing audience. Of course, you may make it funny or strange, but you can also make it shocking. CamSoda is an adult website, and there are certainly thousands of them to attract visitors and customers. They decided that its challenge was to feature something unique (and a bit shocking) to spread its brand and get a competitive edge. While male registrants can use a normal password, they can also use pictures of their penises – the company calls it Dick-O-Metrics. The thing itself, of course, was not obligatory and even not active, and you still were able to log in with your normal info, but the concept went a bit viral, and the company was even featured on Mashable and Cnet.

Of course, you probably do not have an adult website as your business, but can you find a unique feature to add that will capture attention. Get your team together and see what you can come up with.

Monitor Web Trends and Be Interactive to Gain Backlinks and Social Attention

Trending content is usually temporarily, but its lifetime is usually pretty enough to take advantage of it and spread the word about your product with its help.

Manual interactive features. American cartoon “Rick and Morty” was the sensation of 2017, and itself became a trend. The adult cartoons entertainment website Adult Swim has launched a Flash app Elastic Man, that features Morty Smith, the main protagonist of the cartoon.
Elastic Man in action
The concept is as simple as ABC: if you like Morty, just pull his face. This page earned 27 thousand social shares and impressive 3.7K backlinks, not to mention a huge increase in traffic to the website.
Quizzes. People love quizzes. That’s why Facebook is full of them. If you can offer a contest of sorts, where followers can “test” their knowledge or expertise, you will generate lots of engagement and even shares. SEMrush created a “test Keyword Kombat” that allowed users to test their skills in determining the most popular keywords. A simple, but creative concept made a great deal of interacting with the regular readers and target audience, which consists of professional marketers and SEOs.
Email Campaigns that touch and interact. No, email marketing is not dead. In fact, if done right, an email campaign can result in a major increase in opens, and, if sharing buttons are placed in those emails, recipients will share great content they receive. It is all in the subject lines and the promise of cool things to follow if those emails are opened. A Halloween-dedicated email campaign, launched by Essay Supply, took advantage of the hype around “Rick and Morty” most popular episode “I’m a Pickle Rick!” and the results went wild.Screenshot of the letter to the customers
According to the company’s data, it was targeted to the regular customers and was based on the received leads, and showed impressive stats: a 69.4% open rate and enormous 42.1% click rate on the pickle button.

Being a Little (or really) Weird is a Good Thing

This strategy will require that you really know and understand your target audience. The same weirdness that is appreciated by a senior citizen will not be equally appreciated by a millennial. Same rules apply for different ethnic and cultural groups. If you have your target audience clearly identified, you can get a bit weird with your marketing, have some fun yourself, and create some very engaging content.

Dollar Shave Club. A little throwback to the case from 2012, which is already five years old, but can be considered classics of video marketing, and is worth mentioning here. Dollar Shave Club, a company that was founded in 2011, is based on a concept: if men could have razor blades delivered directly to their mailboxes, through a subscription service, they would never again face a morning with only dirty old razors to use. Founders Dubin and Levine were young, and their sense of weirdness was evident in the explaining video “Our Blades Are F***ing Great”, they created for the landing page of their website and posted on YouTube.

The video, which cost only $2500, gained in general 25M views on YouTube and 98% of positive reactions, almost 50K of social mentions, and highlights at FastCompany, Entrepreneur, Mashable, and Inc.com. Finally, the incredible flow of traffic crashed their site for a while. Within the first 48 hours, there were 12,000 orders. Their weird approach was continued on their social media pages and in their blog, with continued success, and helped them grow their traffic from zero to 550K since 2012.

In 2016, the company was sold for $1 billion (!) to Unilever.
Wendy’s. This case differs a bit from the traditional SEO approach, and, besides the weirdness and uniqueness of the case, it shows the opportunities for social media usage and their integration in the marketing campaign.

As much as marketers are told to be respectful to customers even when they are complaining or hateful, an American fast food chain, and one of McDonald’s and Burger King major competitors, Wendy’s has a different take on this advice. The managers of Wendy’s Twitter account have developed a quite weird, sometimes aggressive, but still well-balanced and humorous way of interaction with both the competitors and the customers.

This approach and results regularly draw the attention of the masses, and, thanks to its viral style, reportedly gets the highlights at highly trafficked UGC websites, like BuzzFeed and Bored Panda, along with the respective sources, like Business Insider, Fortune, and Fox News. Wendy’s traffic? Almost 5 million, and it has increased twice since the beginning of 2017.

With only 5% (which is the share of Twitter traffic), it is 250K, not to mention the constant news here and there about the tweets of Wendy’s and successful roasts of the competitors, that hugely increase brand awareness.

Next actions?

So here is your challenge — how can you take these five concepts and examples, get creative with the products and/or services you are marketing, and get a little funny or weird yourself. It is difficult to know just what will go viral, but even if your content is still able to generate a big increase in traffic, you have winning content.

By Amanda Sparks

Digital marketer, psychologist, former writer at Huffington Post, content manager at Essay Supply. AI fan and bullying researcher. Analogue at birth, digital by design.

Sourced from SEMRUSH

In News

6 Underused Content Marketing Strategies That Get Results

May 12, 2017 No Comments

By Sam Thomas Davies

You’re probably aware that content marketing is an integral part of SEO today.

With it, you can improve your brand’s online visibility and generate 3 times as many leads as traditional advertising (and at a fraction of the cost).

But not everyone is profiting from it…

According to a recent survey, only 30% of B2B marketers say their organizations are effective at content marketing.

Plus, 55% say they are unclear on what content marketing success or effectiveness looks like.

If you’re part of that statistic or have been struggling with your content marketing efforts, recently, I’ve got your back.

In this article, I’m going to show you six under-utilized content marketing strategies that will help you generate more organic traffic, improve your conversions and introduce your brand to new audiences.

Let’s get started.

1. Perform a content audit

In today’s content-driven world, many business owners are cranking out more content in a bid to outrank their competitors.

But in doing so, they’re overlooking an important fact:

Not all content serves your website.

If it isn’t high-quality or optimized correctly (on-site or otherwise) your content might be hurting your domain authority (or worse, affecting your rankings).

The solution, then, is to perform a content audit.

According to Neil Patel…

A content audit is a careful look at your website’s existing content in order to make sure that it’s doing what you want it to do – driving the right kind of traffic, containing the right kind of keywords, and improving conversions.

While auditing your site’s content might not fill you with enthusiasm, the results that come from it might…

In an interview with Pat Flynn, writer Todd Tresidder revealed deleting a third of his content tripled his traffic.

And he’s not the only one.

When Nick Loper deleted and consolidated 650 articles on his site, he boosted his organic traffic by 65%:

To perform a content audit of your own, login to Google Analytics, go to “Behavior > Site Content > All Pages”, and do an 80/20 analysis of your content.

Ask yourself, “What is the 20% of content that is producing 80% of the traffic?”

Optimize that 20% by adding additional keywords or a content upgrade (more on that in a moment) and improve or remove the 80% that isn’t producing any return.

To learn more about how to conduct your own content audit, read Everett Sizemore’s thorough article on the subject.

2. Relaunch old content

We’ve all been there:

You write an epic blog post, hit ‘Publish’ and…

Crickets.

No comments. No backlinks. And no influx of organic traffic.

If that’s ever happened to you then you might consider doing what Brian Dean calls a “content relaunch.”

Inspired by a HubSpot post, Dean revisited a blog post that dropped in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and improved it by updating its images, restructuring its copy and adding a case study.

The results were remarkable:

He got 260.7% more organic traffic in 14 days.

Experiences like Brian’s reveal an important fact:

It’s not always necessary to create new content; often, you just need to improve what existing content you have.

Here’s how to do that:

Go back into your Google Analytics and view your lowest-performing content.

Ask yourself,

Is any of it re-launchable?
Could I rewrite, update or improve any of it?
If so, how? Could I update its images or stats, or add a case study?

Often, it’s the marginal improvements that yield the maximum results.

3. Repurpose your most-popular content

It’s a common trap many business owners fall into…

They write a blog post, hit ‘Publish’ and then move onto another without considering how they could maximize the reach of their content.

That’s where content repurposing comes in.

As the name suggests, content repurposing involves taking existing content and adapting it for other platforms to reach new audiences and create further link-building opportunities.

As Arnie Kuenn writes,

With so much content being published every day, people are bound to miss a blog post or video once in awhile. However, through repurposing, your audience may come across your content after it has been altered, through a different channel.

A good example of a marketer repurposing content is Eugene Cheng.

After repurposing his existing content on Slideshare, Eugene was able to get over 2 million views for his presentations:

And that’s not all…

Cheng was able to rank an additional page for the long-tail keyword, “presentation design Singapore”:

Whether you repurpose your content into a Slideshare presentation, an infographic, a video, or any other medium, content repurposing expands the life cycle of your content even further, making it evergreen for years to come.

4. Syndicate your content

Have you ever read a popular blog post only to later notice it everywhere?

If you have, that’s because of content syndication.

The idea is simple:

When an article performs well on one platform (driving a ton of traffic and backlinks in the process) it’s pitched to other platforms (often major media outlets) in the hopes of achieving similar results.

The thing is…

You don’t have to wait for other outlets to accept your work.

Take Benjamin Hardy, for example.

By copying and pasting all of his blog posts onto Medium, he was able to get 20,000 subscribers in 6-months:

Image Source: Goins Writer

But growing your email list isn’t the only benefit that comes from syndicating your content; it increases your brand’s reach too.

James Clear illustrates this perfectly.

By syndicating his content on multiple outlets, he’s able to increase his reach and expose himself to new audiences he wouldn’t have otherwise:

Guess what I’m going to ask you to do?

Go into Google Analytics and identify your highest-performing content. Then, pitch it to domain authorities in your niche with audiences similar to yours.

If you can provide screenshots of statistics such as social shares, traffic, and more, you’ve got a good chance of getting it syndicated and improving your brand’s visibility in the SERPs.

5. Add content upgrades to your content (Hint: Not how you think)

You’re probably familiar with content upgrades.

And for good reason:

They’re super effective for increasing conversions.

When done right, it’s possible to boost conversions by as much as 785% (no, that’s not a typo).

But there’s a problem…

Everybody’s using them.

In fact, it’s hard not to visit a site now without noticing the yellow call-out box that’s become a standard feature of the content upgrade:

So, how do you get noticed in a busy online marketplace?

You use content upgrades on other mediums.

Check out this recent YouTube upload from Jack Canfield:

Instead of including content upgrades in his blog posts (something everybody’s doing already) he includes them in the meta-descriptions of his videos:

While it’s impossible to know his conversion rate, it’s safe to assume they’re high with the number of subscribers he has, likes his videos receive, and the fact that so few people are following this strategy.

Add content upgrades to your content, of course, but try thinking beyond blog posts.

How could you use them in ways others haven’t considered?

6. Write case studies

When we think of content, we tend to think of epic blog posts.

After all, long-form content ranks higher in Google.

But long-form content isn’t everything.

If you’re looking for content that converts prospects into customers, you can’t go wrong with having case studies.

In its 2014 B2B Technology Content Survey Report, Eccolo Media found that case studies rank as the third most influential content type in the purchase process for both small businesses and large enterprises:

We utilize case studies at Sleeknote for this very reason.

In fact, we have an entire category on our site dedicated to companies we’ve helped improve their conversions:

Be warned:

Crafting a compelling case study requires a little experimentation on your part. No two companies are alike. Different readers respond to different copy.

Take word length, for instance.

When Neil Patel shortened his case study from 2,286 words to 615 words, he increased the number of leads he generated by 39%.

Case studies aren’t just an under-utilized type of content; they’re an integral part of helping your prospects move through the buyer’s journey, too.

If you have case studies at the bottom of your funnel (BoFu), you’re more likely to nudge prospects into becoming customers and produce measurable returns on your content marketing.

Conclusion

Content marketing is – and will continue to be – an essential part of SEO in 2017 and beyond.

And with more business owners competing for the coveted front page every day, getting noticed is more than an advantage – it’s a necessity.

I’ve given you six proven ways to help you cut through the noise and rise above the fray.

The question is…

Which will you choose?

By Sam Thomas Davies

Sam Thomas Davies is the content marketing manager at Sleeknote: a company that helps ecommerce business owners capture and convert more leads without hurting the user experience.