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14 Content Marketing Examples With Strategy Breakdowns

December 18, 2023 No Comments

There were a lot of changes in content marketing over the past year, and the companies winning the content game aren’t just using the basic best practices that were commonplace a few years ago.

Today, the best content marketing strategy leverages a combination of multiple marketing channels and produces a high volume of quality content.

Many of the best content marketers now leverage AI to scale their content while making it more personal than ever before by incorporating elements of personal branding and user generated content into their content strategy.

It’s also important to remember that you can’t build a brand around a single content marketing campaign or viral video. So below, we’ll show you not only some of the best content marketing examples from the past year, but also break down the content strategy behind each of these highly successful brands.

Let’s jump into it.

Ocho Wealth

Ocho Wealth is a platform that allows business owners, creators, and people with side hustles to manage their finances.

They launched in 2022 and grew to over $200,000 in ARR in the first year with just 10 team members.

However, what’s most interesting is that their founder refuses to invest anything into paid ads. Instead, they’re relying entirely on organic marketing efforts (largely content marketing).

You can read his full content marketing playbook here, though here’s a brief summary of how they’re investing in content marketing:

SEO: They’ve already published hundreds of blog posts related to finances for business owners and have scaled traffic to nearly 20,000 monthly searches:

Creator Collaborations: They’re building multiple courses on financial education, like angel investing, setting up retirement accounts, and more. These collaborations also allow them to tap into the creators’ audience.

Personal Branding: The founder, Ankur, has built a significant Twitter audience (currently over 60k followers) and stated that most of his initial customers come from Twitter followers.
Newsletter: They recently launched a newsletter that provides various tips on personal finances for business owners and regularly features creators in the personal finance space.

This strategy has helped the company achieve impressive growth with a very lean team of just ten people and zero dollars on paid ads.

Exploding Topics

Exploding Topics is an excellent example of a B2B SaaS company that has scaled to millions of dollars in ARR through organic content marketing.

Founded by SEO expert Brian Dean, it’s no surprise that they invest heavily in blog content.

However, rather than just writing generic content targeting high volume and low difficulty keywords, they create content that showcases the product’s capabilities.

Exploding Topics is a trend discovery tool, so they create hundreds of list posts for various industry trends, and each blog post features trends discovered by Exploding Topics.

When readers see that the trends recommended in these blog posts are unique, under-the-radar trends, they immediately understand the product’s value, and if they want more similar trends, it’s a no-brainer to sign up for the product.

As a result most of their current users came from SEO traffic.

As an added benefit, these blog posts generate a lot of traffic (they currently drive over 200,000 monthly visits), which has helped the website gain authority and helped Exploding Topics earn a lot of brand awareness.

To earn backlinks, he created blog posts to answer individual statistic-based questions. For example, some of the top linked-to pages on Exploding Topics are blog posts targeting terms like:

How many people own Bitcoin?
How many cryptocurrencies are there?
How many gamers are there?

However, he also invests heavily in email marketing. In fact, he stated in a recent video that this is the single most valuable marketing channel for his business.

The Exploding Topics newsletter sends subscribers a list of five trending products and five trending companies so that users receive regular helpful trend recommendations and are reminded of the product’s value.

Finally, the team also publishes content very consistently. So create a content calendar and then be sure to stick to it. While it may seem obvious, the key difference that sets the most successful marketing strategies apart from the rest is usually just a matter of consistent execution.

SEMrush

SEMrush has a highly successful content marketing strategy that leverages various marketing channels.

In addition to their blog content, they also have a thriving social media content strategy and regularly post memes, templates, and snippets of content repurposed from their blog and YouTube channel. A quick glance at their LinkedIn account should give you some inspiration for your social content strategy.

Speaking of their YouTube channel, SEMrush regularly collaborates with SEO and general marketing thought leaders to host webinars and then the team repurposes the recording as video content. These collaborations help SEMrush tap into the influencers’ audience and allows the brand to create more high-quality content at scale.

Similar to Ocho, they also take video content to the next level by collaborating with a handful of select influencers to create free courses for their audience.

SEMrush is also a large company with a substantial content marketing budget, so they often deploy that capital to simply acquire existing blogs that their target audience already reads and loves. In fact, they recently acquired the Backlinko blog for an estimated $15 million.

AIOSEO

AIOSEO is an SEO plugin for WordPress that makes optimizing your website for search engines easy.

This company is also operated by a relatively small team, and therefore has a lean, yet highly effective, content strategy.

Instead of trying to dominate every marketing channel, they doubled down on SEO content. Like

Exploding Topics, most of their blog content targets keywords that their product solves, and they showcase how the product solves it inside the blog post. For example, this blog post targets the pain point “How to Generate A Robots.txt File In WordPress.”

Then, they walk the user through how to do so with their tool:

This blog post answers the reader’s question and effectively demonstrates the product’s value, making it an outstanding content marketing example.

It’s also worth noting that AIOSEO is part of the Awesome Motive portfolio, a group of various WordPress plugins.

Therefore, other brands within the portfolio also create content about AIOSEO on other blogs.

For example, here’s a blog post on “Best WordPress SEO Plugins” on the WPBeginner blog (another member of the Awesome Motive portfolio), and you can see that AIOSEO is first on the list:

Best wordpress plugins blog post on WPBeginner

Finally, they also have a thriving affiliate program, which helps them further scale their content marketing strategy at minimal additional cost as their affiliates create content for them. The affiliate content also helps increase the brand’s general credibility.

These combined content marketing efforts have been incredibly effective as they have scaled traffic from 20,000 to nearly 60,000 monthly visitors in just a year.

Hampton

Hampton is a newer company founded by Sam Parr, and its success is mostly thanks to Sam Parr’s personal brand.

Sam built his personal brand on Twitter and through the popular business podcast he co-hosts, My First Million.

So, when he launched the company, it’s no surprise that he had an overwhelming response. It’s already doing over eight figures and the team is still relatively small.

Therefore, personal branding is proving to be a highly effective content marketing strategy – even for B2B brands.

However, Hampton also has an interesting strategy for their blog content. Rather than targeting SEO keywords, they write stories about the members of their community.

As the product the business is selling is essentially access to high-level entrepreneurs, these stories are actually very effective at selling the value of the business.

Hampton blog post featuring entrepreneurs

Source

Finally, they also leverage email marketing to capture and retarget interested top of funnel audiences.

AppSumo

AppSumo is an affiliate brand that partners with software companies offering tools to small business owners and freelancers.

The company generates over $85 million in revenue annually, and it relies heavily on content marketing.

First, AppSumo has a thriving SEO strategy that consists largely of listicle posts and guides targeting pain points solopreneurs and small business owners experience.

They’ve also stated that their email marketing strategy is arguably their most effective marketing strategy. Since their business model is selling limited-time deals, email marketing makes sense as customers will want to stay up-to-date with the latest offers.

In addition to traditional marketing strategies, they rely heavily on the founder, Noah Kagan’s, personal brand to attract customers. Noah has a podcast and a YouTube channel that covers topics relevant to solopreneurs, creators, and freelancers.

His YouTube channel tends to focus on topics that could potentially go viral. For example, he has plenty of videos of himself asking owners of fancy cars, homes, yachts, and even private jets how to make money:

While these videos are primarily designed to generate brand awareness, they still attract his ideal audience (people who have small businesses or want to start a business) and therefore contribute to AppSumo’s growth.

In addition, he created a $10 course on earning your first $1,000 and includes a link to it in the description of each video:

This course is part of their content marketing strategy as it allows them to retarget students who join with various affiliate products.

Noah also regularly interviews solopreneurs and other interesting entrepreneurs on his podcast. By interviewing other entrepreneurs, he can tap into their audience to generate more awareness. In addition, he includes ads for AppSumo inside the podcast rather than selling ad slots to other brands.

eWebinar

eWebinar is a webinar platform that serial entrepreneur Melissa Kwan founded.

Like several other companies on this list, eWebinar is more or less a solopreneur business with only a handful of contractors helping her run the company.

Therefore, she also has a very lean content team yet relies almost exclusively on content marketing to drive signups.

Her content marketing strategy consists mainly of bottom of the funnel SEO content, social media posts on her personal LinkedIn profile, and webinars.

Looking at the SEO strategy, you can see that most of the content is pain point focused content that their webinar platform solves. For example, this post targeting the keyword “how to make a pre-recorded webinar” clearly outlines how to create a pre-recorded webinar using the eWebinar platform:

You can also see that almost all of the CTAs across the website drive visitors to sign up for one of the pre-recorded webinars hosted on the eWebinar platform. This is a clever content marketing strategy as potential customers can experience the product the same way their users would experience it if they use eWebinar on their own website.

Finally, Melissa has built a substantial following on LinkedIn.

Therefore, she occasionally also uses her own personal brand to promote the product.

Her personal brand has also made her an attractive guest for podcasters, so she’s been able to further amplify her presence by appearing on podcasts like Traction.

SparkToro

SparkToro is a SaaS company that makes it easy for marketers to do audience research.

Founded by Rand Fishkin, who was previously regarded as an SEO expert, you might think they rely heavily on search engine traffic. However, he has openly stated that SEO content is not a priority for their brand.

Instead, they tend to rely heavily on social media content. He and CMO Amanda Natividad have substantial personal brands, and most of their audience comes from social media content.

However, like most brands on this list, he regularly creates content discussing specific pain points that the product solves. Here’s a great example of this:

Rand Fishkin product walkthrough social media post

In fact, he’s a master of video content marketing. At Moz, he popularized Whiteboard Fridays, quick video SEO tutorials with actionable information.

Now he’s using a similar strategy at SparkToro.

Here is just one of these outstanding video content marketing examples:

Seeing the founder’s face also builds trust with the audience more effectively than exclusively using text-based content.

Acquisition.com

Acquisition.com is a holding company that consists primarily of service-based businesses. Founder Alex Hormozi is the face of the brand and relies heavily on content marketing to generate leads for both their portfolio and talent acquisition.

He has grown the brand from zero to millions of followers in a few short years, and a key secret to his success is his content repurposing framework, which allows him to publish hundreds of high quality pieces of content each week.

He typically begins by recording a video or podcast interview. Then, his team takes the long-form content and cuts it into shorter clips they can repurpose across social media platforms.

For example, he recorded this video, and then his team repurposed it into social media and podcast content:

Alex Hormozi's content repurposing framework

This is an outstanding content marketing strategy as he only has to create the content once, yet he still reaps the same benefits as if he created multiple pieces of content for each platform.

The best part is that you can do this with a relatively lean content team. They currently have fewer than ten people on their content team per month, and as of October 2022, they were only spending approximately $100,000 per month on content.

So rather than trying to create multiple different types of content, master just one channel and then hire someone to repurpose it across other platforms.

Beehiiv

The newsletter platform, Beehiiv, is one of the trendiest new startups, and they’ve grown mostly through organic marketing efforts.

First, they invest heavily in SEO content and regularly publish case studies and customer stories showcasing interesting newsletter growth strategies.

The customer stories and case studies are particularly excellent examples of content marketing as they tap into the personal story element that most SEO-style content lacks. These stories are also original content that hasn’t been published elsewhere, making Beehiiv an authority on the topic.

However, they also happen to be very savvy social media content marketers.

First, their employees are highly engaged brand advocates and consistently publish content around what they love about the brand, new product updates, and other news.

For example, this post helps communicate a key pain point that the product solves:

You can also tell from these posts by their business development leader that employees genuinely love and believe in the brand:

Beehiiv also has a thriving affiliate program and is one of the few B2B brands that has truly mastered user generated content.

When someone (often an affiliate, though occasionally a random customer) publishes a social media post mentioning Beehiiv, they always republish it to the branded account. Here’s a great example:

Resharing this content on the brand’s social media pages builds Beehiiv’s credibility and encourages more customers to share content around the brand as they know Beehiiv will reshare it with their audience.

Cafe Lola

There aren’t many donut shops with great content marketing strategies, but Cafe Lola is an exception.

Founder Alexandra Lordes grew the donut shop’s account to over 50,000 followers, but her personal account really carries the brand’s content strategy.

She personally has over a million TikTok followers, and rather than just posting about her life and kids, she also incorporates updates on the donut shop, like new flavours available and other updates. For example, in this video, she has her kids rate the new products:

So unlike many creators that have many followers but few conversions, this content strategy likely drives plenty of sales as it showcases the products themselves. In fact, people regularly make Cafe Lola a top destination on their list when visiting Las Vegas:

In fact, her viral videos have helped her earn orders from celebrities like Karol G, Maluma, and other stars.

So even if you just have a brick and mortar store, creating content about your daily life as the owner and building a personal brand can help you drive customers.

GoPro

GoPro is an outstanding example of a brand that has mastered user generated content. Rather than paying to create their own marketing content and then investing more to promote it across their social media channels, they just run contests and let customers create the content and promote it for them.

Here are just a few of the challenges they’re currently running:

Here’s just one example of the outstanding content their creators submit regularly:

GoPro user generated content post on Instagram

As a result, GoPro doesn’t have to spend any money creating content because they can simply repurpose the creators’ content.

In addition, GoPro is essentially getting free influencer marketing, as the creators must include the GoPro hashtags in their posts to enter the challenge. These creators often have thousands, if not millions, of followers, significantly boosting GoPro’s brand awareness.

For example, the creator that recently won a Photo of The Day challenge above has over 100,000 followers:

Epic Gardening

Epic Gardening is an ecommerce brand that sells gardening supplies.

Like many D2C brands on this list, it was built on the founder’s personal brand.

In fact, founder Kevin Espiritu started the brand as a blog that provided helpful gardening tips and advice and later turned it into a thriving YouTube channel.

Today, Kevin has the largest YouTube channel on gardening, though most importantly, he’s turned it into a business that generates over $59 million in revenue annually.

The content he creates is designed primarily for entertainment, and he is still largely the face of the brand:

He publishes roughly 3-5 times per week, and while he currently doesn’t have a robust content repurposing strategy, this might be on the roadmap as his marketing team grows.

Blogilates

Blogilates is another creator-first business that was founded by Pilates instructor turned entrepreneur, Cassy Ho.

She began posting Pilates workouts on YouTube over a decade ago and has since grown her channel to over nine million subscribers.

She has built an athleisure brand, POPFLEX, and she also has a partnership with Target, where she sells workout equipment, clothing, and even supplements.

Today, she doesn’t post many workout videos on YouTube, though she is still active on Instagram, YouTube shorts, and TikTok.

She’s also a great example of a content creator who prioritizes repurposing content rather than creating brand-new content across multiple channels.

For example, she reposted this same piece of content across multiple platforms:

The takeaway from this content marketing example is that consistency is key. If you consistently produce high quality content for over a decade on the same topic, you’ll probably be successful.

How To Use These Content Marketing Examples

Now that you’ve seen these content marketing examples, take action.

If you’re unsure where to start or if you don’t have time to create content yourself – let the digital marketing experts behind Copyblogger’s content strategy create it for you — Digital Commerce Partners.

They can design and execute a content marketing strategy that drives organic leads and establishes your brand as an industry authority. Reach out to them today to learn more.

By Tim Stoddart

Tim Stoddart is CEO of Copyblogger. In 2011, Tim founded Stodzy Internet Marketing. He currently lives in Nashville with his wife, his son, and their pitbull named Alice. Follow Tim on Twitter.

Sourced from copyblogger

In News

How to Build an Audience From Scratch In 2023

August 16, 2023 No Comments

By Tim Stoddart

If you’ve ever tried to build an audience, you might have experienced the painful scenario of posting a piece of content you’re particularly proud of and… crickets.

As the supply of content increases, accelerated by the introduction of AI content tools, it’s harder than ever to earn attention.

However, this also means that the value of attention is increasing, and those who succeed have more leverage than ever before. Famed investor Andrew Wilkinson sums this up well in the following tweet:

The good news is that building a new audience isn’t impossible.

It just requires a different strategy than before. So in this post, we’ll discuss a step-by-step strategy you can use to build an audience from scratch in 2023.

Step 1: Select a Topic, Medium, and Angle

If someone consumes a piece of content you created and then follows you, it’s probably because they liked it and want to see more similar content. So if you change the topic and style of your content, you might lose those subscribers because they might not like the new topic or style of content.

As a result, you’ll find that your subscribers frequently churn, and you’ll struggle to build a loyal following.

This was a key mistake Eric Siu mentioned he made when building his YouTube channel. He discussed marketing in some of his YouTube videos, while in others, he discussed NFTs and cryptocurrency. His audience began unsubscribing as the audience interested in marketing didn’t care about his NFT videos, and the NFT audience didn’t care about his marketing videos.

So the key to building a sticky, loyal audience is selecting a topic, angle, and medium. Here’s how I define each of these:

Topic: This is what you’ll talk about. Examples of topics include marketing, finance, food, travel, etc. Choose a topic you have unique knowledge about and are genuinely interested in. Content is a long game, and you’re much more likely to be successful if you have a genuine interest in the topic, as there will be a period of time when you won’t receive any reward for your efforts.

Medium: This is how you communicate your content. Examples of mediums include video, text, or audio content. The key to choosing the best medium is to select one you enjoy and can produce consistently. Publishing consistency is key to long-term growth, so if you don’t think you can produce that medium of content weekly, choose a different medium. For example, if you don’t think you can produce video content each week, you might want to choose text-based content.

Angle: This is how your content will provide a different perspective from other existing content. Similar to product-market fit, your angle is the differentiator that helps you achieve “content-market” fit. For example, if you’re starting a Japan travel vlog, how will it differ from existing Japan travel vlogs? Maybe you’ll interview local Japanese chefs and film them making a meal. The key to selecting a successful angle is to make it both unique and repeatable. For example, interviewing Japanese chefs and filming them making a meal is a repeatable format.

Select the topic, medium, and angle of your content

To help you choose your topic, medium, and angle, here are a few examples for inspiration.

Example #1: Justin Rowe

Topic: LinkedIn Advertising
Medium: Text (LinkedIn)
Angle: He shares tactical breakdowns and case studies of of how to improve your LinkedIn ad performance.

Example #2: Sam Parr and Shaan Puri

Topic: Entrepreneurship
Medium: Podcast
Angle: Casual business conversation between two seven/eight entrepreneurial friends.

Example #3: Caleb Simpson

Topic: Rent
Medium: TikTok
Angle: Asks people on the street how much they pay for rent and then tours their apartments.

If you look through each of these individuals’ content, they cover roughly the same topic in a repeatable format.

Note: You’ll notice that they all have audiences across multiple different platforms (Twitter, YouTube, etc.). Below, we’ll discuss how you can take an omnichannel approach, but when you’re first starting out, it’s best to focus on just one medium on one platform.

Step 2: Create Content and Publish Regularly

The main cause of content failure is the creator quitting too soon.

Your first pieces of content probably won’t hit, and that’s okay. In the early days, the most important thing to do is to get the reps in and hone your abilities as a content creator.

So select a specific content topic, medium, and angle and commit to publishing consistently for the next three months.

Here are a few tips to help you publish consistently:

Set a reasonable content publishing frequency. If you plan to publish every day, you’ll probably burn out quickly and give up. As consistency and a long-term vision are essential for content success, create just one piece of content, see how long it took you to produce, and then select a realistic publishing schedule you can realistically commit to for at least six months.

Batch your content in advance. Many creators find it easier to produce several pieces of content in one sitting once they’re in the flow state rather than setting aside several content creation sessions throughout the week/month. Batching content also ensures you publish on time.

Outsource and automate non-creative work. Plenty of minor tasks are involved with content creation, from editing videos to scheduling social media posts, but these small tasks can quickly add up to hours each week. So use software tools to automate tasks or hire a virtual assistant on a platform like Upwork to help you. By offloading low-value tasks, you’ll have more time to dedicate to content creation, decreasing your chances of burnout.

Once you publish some content, you can ask for feedback from mentors and peer groups.

For example, platforms like Intro.co and Clarity.fm allow you to schedule mentorship calls with world-class experts.

Alternatively, you can join a community like the Copyblogger Academy, where you can ask me (Tim) questions and receive feedback from other peers. We also do Q&A sessions with top content creators.

If you want to learn more about how to level up your content creation skills, here are a few additional resources you can check out:

How to improve your copywriting skills
How to improve your video content
How to improve your podcast content
How to improve your social media content

Another excellent method to improve your content is to study your competitors’ content and determine which content receives the most engagement or positive comments.

For example, if you produce video content on YouTube, you can filter by the most popular videos and then look for patterns and popular influencers to incorporate into your content:

Step 3: Partner with Existing Creators

There’s a misconception that as long as your content is high quality, it will naturally earn engagement.

Unfortunately, most algorithms (social media, search engines, etc.) give more visibility to content that earns a lot of traction and engagement within the first few hours.

When you’re starting, you probably only have a handful of followers, so your content won’t receive much engagement within the first few hours of publishing. Unfortunately, this means your content probably won’t receive much organic reach from the algorithms – even if the content quality is next-level.

This creates a vicious cycle that makes it hard to earn a following and receive more engagement.

To break out of this cycle and help your content receive more organic reach, consider collaborating with an influencer that already has the attention of your target audience.

When they promote your brand to their audience, your content will naturally receive more impressions, which will help it receive more engagement and ultimately help you earn more followers.

The tricky part is getting an influencer with a larger audience to agree to do a content collaboration with a smaller brand with a small audience.

As a rule of thumb, partnerships are most successful when incentives are aligned.

So before you ask an influencer to collaborate with you, ask yourself how this partnership will benefit them.

Some influencers agree to interview smaller brands if they can repurpose the content on their own social media accounts. As most influencers are already setting aside time to create their own content, many will agree to an interview with a smaller brand if they can use that content for their personal brand.

Alex Hormozi is a great example of this in action. He often repurposes all of the interviews he does as social media content, like this clip that he swiped from an interview he did on Impact Theory:

Many influencers also share the content when it goes live and give your brand a shout-out. Here’s a great example:

Brett Adcock promoting a podcast episode on Twitter

Not all influencers will agree to an interview, especially if you have a smaller audience. To increase your chances of receiving a “yes,” look for influencers that have recently done interviews with competitors that have a similar audience size.

You can also look for influencers launching a book, as they tend to be more open to interviews.

Note: Even if you’re just writing text-based content (like Twitter or LinkedIn threads), you can still interview someone and then write out the key points from the conversation and post that on your social media channels.

If you’re struggling to get an influencer to collaborate with you, consider paying for an interview. For example, you can use a platform like Intro.co or Clarity.fm to pay for calls with world-class experts.

You can also pay an influencer directly to promote your content. However, collaborations tend to be more effective as influencers are often more vested in the partnership when their own thought leadership is involved.

If you’re producing audio or video content, you can also offer written guest posts to blogs with similar audiences and simply ask that they insert the video or podcast link somewhere inside the guest post. For example, popular car YouTuber Doug DeMuro got his first several thousand YouTube subscribers by writing for the car blog, Jalopnik, and then inserted his videos into the written content.

Finally, you can also pay to promote your content on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

Step 4: Adopt an Omni Channel Approach

Once you’ve established a solid publishing schedule for your main channel, the best method to increase your output and reach with minimal additional effort is to adopt an omnichannel approach.

For example, if you’re already creating video or podcast content, you can chop that video up into multiple shorter clips and post it across social media platforms like LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram.

This allows you to scale reach and engagement exponentially, as your single long-form video is now ten or twenty pieces of content.

Eric Siu and Neil Patel do a great job of repurposing the content for Marketing School. You can see an example here:

To help you automate this process, you can use a tool like Repurpose.io. Or, if you’d prefer to outsource the entire process, you can hire an agency like Shortzy to do it for you.

For example, you can also put the video script into an AI content writer tool and ask it to write a blog post or social media content based on the script.

The key to succeeding with an omnichannel approach is optimizing each piece of content for the platform on which you intend to publish it. For example, if you’re repurposing a piece of content on TikTok, optimize it with subtitles and edit it in the fast-paced style of content that TikTok users like to consume.

If you feel overwhelmed at the prospect of repurposing your content across multiple additional platforms at once, choose just one additional platform and then add more as you become comfortable repurposing.

Step 5: Double Down On What’s Working

The content marketing landscape is always changing, and the marketing campaigns that work today might not work as well a year from now. So as you grow your audience, consistently collect audience feedback to learn what content resonates best and then produce more of that content.

The same methodology applies to your general audience growth strategy.

Look at your growth metrics and double down on the partnerships and marketing strategies that drive the most audience growth.

Many entrepreneurs become distracted by new trendy marketing tactics, but the key to long-term success is focusing on what works and doubling down on those marketing strategies.

While experimentation is a great way to discover more effective strategies, limit new marketing campaigns to just one or two per month. Other than that, focus all your efforts on the top two or three marketing campaigns currently driving the most growth.

For example, if email marketing promotions currently drive 50% of your growth, double down on doing more email campaigns.

Bonus: Consider Different Monetization Strategies

The purpose of building a following is to eventually convert them into paying customers, but when and how you monetize will significantly impact the long-term revenue you receive.

First, monetizing too early can cause your audience to lose trust in your brand, and many will either unfollow you or ignore your offer.

You can think of the trust you build like a bank account – the more value you provide and the longer you wait to withdraw, the more you can ask for when you pitch an offer.

So how do you know when you’ve built enough trust that you can make an ask?

There isn’t a hard and fast subscriber count or engagement rate, but a great test is to make a small non-monetary ask and see how many people respond. For example, you can ask your audience to respond to a specific question in the comments or on social media.

You can also use a sentiment analysis tool like Awario or Brandwatch to gauge your audience’s general sentiment and identify specific audience complaints.

Responding and engaging with your audience is also a general audience-building best practice, so you’ll probably be able to estimate your audience’s loyalty based on the comments you read daily.

Once you feel that you’ve built a loyal following and have reached a stage in the business where it makes sense to monetize it, there are several different monetization strategies. Here are a few you might consider:

Start a business: This strategy is probably the most work, but it’s also the most profitable long-term monetization method. Ryan Reynolds’ business, Mint Mobile, is an excellent example of a billion-dollar business created mainly on the back of a single influencer’s audience.

Offer a course: This is one of the most popular audience monetization methods, and Ramit Sethi and Pay Flynn are excellent examples of content creators that have built multi-million dollar course businesses off of their audience.

Affiliate sales: There are always plenty of product businesses that need promotion, so you can partner with other brands and offer their products and services to your audience. When your audience purchases those products, you receive a commission. This is a great way to quickly generate revenue, but it isn’t as profitable or long-term focused as the previous two options. The Influencer Marketing Hub is an excellent example of a website that built its audience through SEO and monetizes primarily through affiliate sales.

Sponsored posts: This option is similar to affiliate sales, as you’ll be promoting other products or services to your audience, but instead of receiving a commission based on sales you generate, you’ll be paid a flat fee.

There isn’t a single best monetization strategy for everyone, and you can run multiple monetization strategies simultaneously.

The key to successfully monetizing your audience is taking a long-term approach and balancing the ratio of value to asks. You’ll lose credibility if you’re constantly promoting products and services, and your audience will eventually stop following you.

Start Building Your Personal Brand Today

As attention becomes more difficult to capture due to the increasing volume of content online, the value of attention will also continue to increase.

The good news is that as the volume of content increases (aided largely by the introduction of AI tools), the percentage of authentic content continues to decrease, so you can still stand out if you have a genuine, authentic message to share.

Your first few pieces of content probably won’t hit, but if you seek feedback, consistently hone your skills as a content creator and deliver an authentic message, you’ll eventually build a loyal following.
If you want to accelerate your skills as a content creator, consider joining a peer/mentorship group like the Copyblogger Academy. You can ask me (Tim) questions directly, and we also do regular collaborations with other top content creators like Amanda Natividad, Brian Clark, and Steph Smith. You’ll also have access to a group of supportive peers that you can lean on for advice, feedback, and inspiration.

By Tim Stoddart

Tim Stoddart is CEO of Copyblogger. In 2011, Tim founded Stodzy Internet Marketing. He currently lives in Nashville with his wife, his son, and their pitbull named Alice. Follow Tim on Twitter.

Sourced from copyblogger

In News

7 great content marketing examples to help inspire your team

September 5, 2022 No Comments

Why do so many companies fail? One big reason has to do with an unsuccessful content marketing strategy. Without a good one, the likelihood of failure goes way up.

Twenty percent of businesses—including small businesses, restaurants, and storefronts—fail within their first two years. Sixty-five percent fail within their first ten years. Why do so many companies fail? One big reason has to do with an unsuccessful content marketing strategy. Without a good one, the likelihood of failure goes way up.

Fortunately, we can look to various companies, brands, and organizations that have used excellent content marketing to move forward toward success. By studying what they’ve done and implementing their strategies in your own way, your company can also benefit from the power of a great content marketing strategy.

NEIL PATEL’S BLOG

If you’ve ever searched Google for marketing advice, then you’ve likely seen Neil Patel’s blogs pop up in the search results. But why do his blogs stand out as some of the best?

Patel’s blogs about marketing go further than just words and usually include charts, graphs, statistics, and personal stories. Recently, Patel has begun incorporating videography—the latest marketing trend—into his blog posts. Combining numbers and personal anecdotes is a very effective way to get through to people, while incorporating more videos on his blog helps him reach a wider audience. Additionally, Patel habitually replies to comments from people who visit his site. The reputation he has built keeps his readers coming back.

So, what does this mean for your team? Staying engaged with your community is essential, especially when building a reputation for your brand.

DUOLINGO’S TIKTOK ACCOUNT

With more than a billion people on TikTok, leaving this social media app out of your digital marketing strategy means ignoring a seventh of the entire world! It seems silly to do, and Duolingo knows it.

Instead of continuously posting serious content about their language-learning products, Duolingo posts content that works for their target audience—it makes people laugh, it makes it personal, and it gets people interested. Although not all content may be about what Duolingo sells, once their audience is interested, they could become potential customers.

ZIPRECRUITER’S PODCAST

If your business has been thinking about starting a podcast, it’s a great time to do so. Podcasts represent one of the newest forms of digital marketing, and brands are really starting to gravitate toward them.

Compared to creating and editing a video post, podcasts can be put together relatively quickly. Of course, a podcast should be about more than just you and your business; guests and other speakers should be featured on the podcast to keep people engaged and interested.

ZipRecruiter’s excellent podcast provides motivation and inspiration, and regularly features discussions with prominent guests related to ZipRecruiter’s niche of hiring and job searching.

If you decide a podcast would benefit your business and brand, the first step is to follow ZipRecruiter’s lead and determine your niche.

STARBUCKS’ INSTAGRAM

Whatever type of digital marketing you plan to do, you simply cannot leave out Instagram’s 2 billion monthly users.

Brands like Starbucks have long been using the popular social media platform to generate leads—however, they aren’t just posting pics of coffee and bakery items. One of Starbucks’ most recent campaigns was #ExtraShotOfPride, featuring baristas and other employees going through their personal LGBTQ+ journeys. This inclusivity and unique content marketing technique quickly caught people’s attention—and increased attention means increased business.

Taking the time to come up with exciting ideas and campaigns is a great way to stand out on social media, especially if you are willing to dip into the realm of politics and social issues.

DOVE’S USER-GENERATED CONTENT

One of marketing’s biggest current trends is user-generated content submitted through Instagram. Mastered by Dove, user-generated content is photos and video stories individuals using your product or service submit via a specific hashtag for a chance to be featured on your company’s account.

Besides being completely free, user-generated content has one significant benefit: it’s genuine. The overly curated photos we see on websites, clothing brands, TV, and every other digital outlet have become too much. We know it isn’t portraying reality. As a company, showing real people who are genuinely pleased with your product or service sends a powerful message.

WAYFAIR’S #WAYFAIRATHOME CAMPAIGN

Much like Dove’s user-generated content, Wayfair’s campaign of #WayfairAtHome uses photos that users post of their homes featuring products they purchased on Wayfair. By participating in #WayfairAtHome, Wayfair customers promote Wayfair’s products to all their followers and potential customers—at no cost to Wayfair! As people see real-life examples of the products, they are more likely to buy them.

LINKEDIN’S VISUAL MARKETING

Imagine if everything you saw on a website was text. You’d likely navigate away from that page pretty quickly. That’s why visual marketing has recently shot to the forefront of content marketing.

LinkedIn is just one company using visual marketing to promote their site on social media platforms like Twitter. But instead of using just one type of visual, they incorporate multiple visuals to attract attention. From featured images on blogs to illustrations and infographics, LinkedIn uses visuals on almost every post. The fact that LinkedIn’s posts are so interesting to look at helps to explain why the company has a respectable 1.5 million Twitter followers and counting.

If you plan to use visuals in your content marketing techniques, mix it up a bit on each post!

Whether you focus on video marketing like LinkedIn, a podcast like ZipRecruiter, or an interactive hashtag like Wayfair, a quality and thought-provoking content media strategy is sure to pay off.

Feature Image Credit: [onephoto/AdobeStock]

By Jason Hall

Sourced from Fast Company

In News

How To Build Your Content Marketing Strategy for the Future

August 8, 2022 No Comments

By Connor Cohen

The conversation around content creation and strategizing is trending, with many companies debating whether they need a content marketing strategy or whether it’s a waste of time, money, and resources. However, it is a relatively new concept, and older professionals in the marketing industry are still not convinced that it is just as vital as the other traditional forms of marketing.

If you don’t have a digital content marketing strategy in this day and age, you might be left behind. Whether your company is just starting or is already firmly established in the market, it needs a quality, consistent and relevant digital presence.

Why? Because now more than ever, people are using their phones and other devices as a tool to find information, solutions, and service providers. According to a February 2021 research study, nearly half of the respondents said they spent five to six hours per day on their phone, not including work-related cell phone use. Another 22% of respondents said they spent three to four hours per day on their phones on average.

The marketing transition

In the past, when people needed work done, they relied on referrals and yellow pages. However, today’s service bidders rely on referrals and word of mouth less frequently than recent years. In fact, referrals fell by over 16% in the last five years. It appears that, the holy grail of corporate development for aeons, is losing its clout as the business world unfolds.

Now that we know how critical your digital presence is, let us look at what a digital content strategy is and what it means for businesses.

What is a digital content strategy?

A content strategy is a framework that assists businesses in curating, managing, distributing, and promoting valuable digital content. It’s a way to ensure that the organization’s digital content is consistent with its overall goals and strategy.

People’s perception of an online presence usually starts and ends with a company website, but it is much more than that. Your digital presence includes a company website, social media platforms, eBooks, video interviews, podcasts, case studies and success stories, infographics, blog posts, webinars, emails, presentations, and whitepapers.

The digital content creation mistake

Some companies shy away from creating a digital content strategy because they don’t know where to begin or what it entails. That’s why they make the mistake of only sharing content when it’s available, for example, when they have a new product, service or upgrade available. The truth is, you are not harnessing your company’s true potential.

With competition increasing, you have to ensure that you stay on the radar of your potential buyers. How? By providing information and solutions outside of the services and products you provide. Your goal is to be the first brand that comes to mind when a business or consumer needs a service or product.

Before you sit down to create a strategy, you need to consider the following questions to grasp a rough idea of the direction you want your digital content to take.

Why am I designing this content strategy?

What are you trying to achieve by putting together a digital content strategy? You don’t need to have one hundred reasons before starting – two to five will do. For example, are you trying to increase brand awareness and generate leads or sales?

Who is my target audience?

It would help if you had a clear idea of whom you are curating this content for. Understanding who your target audience is can help with decision making and allows you to narrow down your choices. For example, knowing your target audience or buyer persona will determine the type of content you put out, the tone of your content, and what channels you use to distribute content.

What kind of content are they interested in?

As we mentioned earlier, there are different types of content available that you can use in your digital strategies, like blog posts, podcasts, videos, among others. Find out which type of content is most popular with your target audience and focus on that through market research. Keep in mind that you need more than one type. Even if you have one or two sure choices, try to have a mix.

If, for instance, you are a clothing brand targeting 16–25-year-olds, short videos and pictures are a great way to grab their audience. You can also write short blog posts about quick ways to style their outfits or color block.

Where do they usually search for this kind of content?

You might develop unique and valuable content, but if it’s on platforms your customers do not frequent, it is as good as useless. Carry out surveys and polls and let your customers fill out questionnaires ranking their most addictive and popular apps and platforms so you know where you should publish your content.

How often should I publish this content?

It is essential to strike a balance between being persuasive and not being irritating. You want your potential customers to always have your brand in mind, but you do not want them to find you annoying and too persistent.

For example, if you choose to connect to your clients through email marketing, do not send them emails every single day. Even if your content is valuable, they may unsubscribe from it as it could become a bit of a nuisance. So instead, let your clients consume your information in doses.

Who will be curating this content?

This is a critical decision because it will determine the type of content you put out. Just because you know everything there is to know about starting an eCommerce store, it does not automatically mean you have the skill to write blog posts or eBooks about it. But, if you do, that’s perfect.

If you do not know how to use this knowledge to produce insightful and valuable content, you can outsource it to different content creators like writers, influencers, and videographers. In addition, you can hand over this task if you have an in-house content creation team.

Why is good content important?

It asserts your company as a thought leader

If you googled ‘how to lose ten pounds in a month’ and found a simple program that worked, and then ‘how to grow your glutes’ a few weeks later, and it also worked, chances are, you will start to rely on that source for your fitness needs.

By putting out informative and valuable content, you show your target audience that you know what you are talking about. Good content makes it easy for you to stand out from the hundreds of companies providing the same product or service.

It is an SEO tool

If you are in the digital content creation business, you know a thing or two about SEO. Search engine optimization is a tool that boosts a website or web pages chances of showing up at the top of search engine results.

The more you publish your content and strategically place keywords that your audience usually searches for, the higher the chances that your brand will be noticed, hence creating new leads.

One way to do this is through publishing evergreen content, both written and video. Why? Because it’s timeless and is relevant all-year round.

Evergreen content examples

How To…
Tips & Tricks
Product reviews
Guides / Recipes
Top ten…
FAQ’s

It attracts new leads

Good content is a promotional tactic on its own. If you consistently put out quality content, you attract serious clients interested in your services or solutions. Your content will walk into recruitment meetings before you even go in for a pitch.

It increases brand awareness

Unless you build rockets or are Lewis Hamilton, chances are there are hundreds or thousands of people who can provide the services or products you do. So, if your goal is to be a class apart from the competition, you must publish well-thought-out content. The more you create helpful content and publish it across multiple platforms, the higher your chances are of growing a more prominent and broader following.

High-quality content has the potential to influence purchasing behavior

If you believe that advertisements influence buyers more than article content on the internet, you are mistaken.

In fact, 7 out of 10 buyers prefer to learn about a business or brand through articles rather than advertisements. This fact demonstrates that article-type content delivered via a company blog or other content marketing mediums is the preferred approach for customers to learn about products and services. Why? It allows you to have more of a voice, style or flair, and story than typical ‘professional’ web pages.

Why is good content distribution essential?

Content distribution is a tactical approach to delivering content to your target audience through various channels. It entails publishing, sharing, and promoting high-quality content in strategic locations where people can actively and successfully engage with it. There are three main distribution channels: owned, earned and paid.

Owned

These are the networks your business owns and has total control over, like your website, blog, email or newsletter, and social media accounts.

Earned

Earned channels encompass third parties who share or promote your content at no cost—for instance, social media mentions, reposts, shares, guest blogs, and product reviews.

Paid

Some channels are not freely accessible. You have to pay to distribute your content to a highly targeted and specific audience. For example, pay-per-click ads, sponsored content and paid influencer content or ads on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, and Instagram.

In marketing, content is king and distribution is queen – they are part and parcel of any digital content creation strategy and need to be handled tactically. We’ve seen a rapid influx of content met with shrinking demand in recent years. We can only consume so much information with almost 4.5 million blog posts published every day. As a result of this content shock, your distribution plan should be strategic and well-thought-out if it’s to be effective.

The beauty of a digital content and distribution strategy is flexibility. You can adjust it as you go depending on the metrics and results. If you try one channel and it fails, try another one or a mix until it is just right.

Companies that tweak their distribution strategy until it’s perfect enjoy perks like increased brand awareness, recognition, lead generation, increased sales, and revenue. The starting point is to get people to talk about your brand, trust it and rely on it as an authority figure. Then, you can start leveraging these benefits to boost revenue and sales.

Social media content strategy

Social media is the perfect marketing tool right now. With new and popular apps popping up every other day, brands have an excellent opportunity to capitalize on the frenzy to grow their businesses and brand awareness. For example, Instagram and TikTok have emerged as two of the most addictive content creation and sharing apps, with YouTube retaining its power and influence.

Video content should form at least part of your content distribution strategy because it is one of the best ways to truly show potential customers your core values, purpose, goals and objectives. In addition, videos are an excellent way to tell your story and inspire an emotional and psychological connection with your customers.

Furthermore, you can combine your YouTube content strategy with a case study to accurately depict your business solutions and services.

YouTube is the most profitable video sharing and viewing platform, with 2.3 billion people accessing it each month. If you can invest in a good videographer and content development team, you can leverage your social media platforms to boost the subscription and viewership for your YouTube channel.

By Connor Cohen

Sourced from The Drum

In News

How to Build an Effective B2B Content Marketing Strategy

September 16, 2021 No Comments

By Chelsey Church

B2B brands have the opportunity to leverage content marketing as a way of reaching their target audience and gaining new customers. But it’s not as simple as writing a few blog posts, posting them on your website and hoping for the best. A content marketing strategy is essential to generating those leads that turn into loyal consumers, educating your audience, building brand awareness and building credibility.

So do you have a content marketing strategy? If not, don’t worry—you’re not alone. According to the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs, only 41% of survey respondents currently have a documented content marketing strategy in place.

If you’re interested in building an effective B2B content marketing strategy but you’re not quite sure where to get started, we can help. Below, we’ve created a guide to help you get started with your strategy as a B2B marketer and curate content that helps with lead generation, creating a loyal audience and building revenue.

B2B Content Marketing: What Makes It Unique?

Before you can get started with content marketing, it’s important to understand how it comes into play from a B2B perspective. B2B marketing derives from a strategy or content that is made specifically for a business. Typically, this refers to an organization that sells some type of product or service. In comparison, B2C marketing works for companies that are targeting individual consumers who are making purchases for themselves.

Goals for B2B marketing vs B2C marketing differ greatly, as HubSpot explained in this example:

In B2B marketing, customers want ROI and expertise. When it comes to B2C content, customers want deals and entertainment. That means the latter needs to be more fun, and the former needs to be more educational and logical.

If you’re a B2B company and you’re putting all of your focus on advertising, now’s a good time to consider adding creative content to your collateral. According to Demand Metric, 70% of people would prefer to learn about a company through content like a blog post or article in comparison to a typical advertisement.

Creating Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy: 10 Steps to Success

So maybe you’re on board with the idea of content marketing, but you’re not sure where to get started. Don’t fret—we’ve created a step-by-step guide to creating a B2B content marketing strategy and executing it properly:

1. Define Your Overall Goals

Your content marketing strategy should be built with purpose. Setting goals in the early stages can help you bring your business to life. We recommend following the SMART process when coming up with your goals:

Specific. Don’t be broad, hone in on exactly what it is you want to achieve.
Measurable. What does your business’ success mean to you, and how will this motivate you to move forward?
Achievable. Are there going to be blockades keeping you from achieving your goals, or are they truly attainable?
Relevant. Your goals should not only be realistic, but make sense regarding your business strategy.
Time-bound. How long is it going to take to achieve your goals, and does this timeline work for you?

Using these criteria as the blueprint to your content marketing strategy can make it easier to envision the bigger picture during the beginning stages of the process.

2. Understand Your Audience and Create Buyer Personas

Who are you creating content for? How are you going to resonate with your target audience? What does your potential buyer want to get out of visiting your website?

Getting to know the individuals who are paying close attention to you, your products and services all starts with creating a buyer persona. Essentially, a buyer persona is a fictional character created to represent a person who would be interested in your product.

This fictional representation is curated by market research and data collected about your customers in an effort to create as real of a person in this scenario as you possibly can. Individual buyer personas should include demographic information, job role, as well as specific goals and challenges this decision-maker faces. Creating buyer personas will give you a better idea of how to create your message and who you need to tailor it to.

3. Create a Brand Voice

Does your brand have a certain style that sets you apart from your competitors? Creating a distinct voice and tone will give you the leverage to stand out in your industry. Decide what your brand’s personality will be in written format, whether it’s educational and serious or humorous and relatable. Tone is something that offers more flexibility, as it can be used in content based on specific buyer personas. Think about it this way: Your tone isn’t going to be the same in a short blurb as it would be in a white paper.

4. Map Out the Customer Journey

Now that you’ve established a strong foundation for your brand in general, it’s time to think about how you’ll leverage your company to bring in customers through the sales funnel. This takes place after putting forth lead generation efforts; it’s where your potential customers start at the top and come out as loyal clients. Also known as a marketing funnel, this is where your customers start their journey with you and are welcomed to explore what your business has to offer. As they get to the middle, you nurture them and guide them toward the bottom where they can start the beginning stages of a sale.

The sales funnel isn’t a one-size-fits-all template. In fact, we put together a list of different examples to consider for your own business. Take a look and decide which makes the most sense for your content marketing strategy.

5. Understand What Your Competitors are Doing

While most of your focus should be on bringing customers in, you still need to pay attention to your competitors. With a strong understanding of what they’re doing, you can be better prepared to face them in your industry and learn how to provide potential customers with a better product or service. A simple way to do this is by benchmarking, which the American Productivity & Quality Centre defines as a way to measure your own key business metrics and practices and compare them to your competitors. This gives you an inside look at what’s working for them and what isn’t, which can give you the upper hand to better define the industry standard.

6. Brainstorm with Your Content Team

With the backend research in the palm of your hand, it’s time to get together with your team of content creators and assess the content types you want to move forward with. Brainstorming sessions can come in handy when it comes to collaboration among a content team, and this can involve keyword research, topic generation and choosing content format options.

7. Create a Content Strategy Blueprint

After brainstorming with the team of creators, it’s time to move forward with your specific content types. It’s important to be flexible throughout your strategy, however—down the line, you may find that a content audit and ROI shows one content format is producing better results for you than another, which can ultimately guide the future of your process. Having a flexible blueprint will keep you organized and prepared to navigate a different route if necessary.

Content types to consider include:

Blogs
Whitepapers
eBooks
Case studies
Infographics
Newsletters
Press releases
Webinars

Remember: Your content marketing plan can change over time; limiting yourself to only a few different content formats could hold you back from reaching your goals. Consider having these content types in rotation in a content calendar over a certain period of time if you want to explore the different opportunities of each option.

8. Execute Your Strategy and Start Creating Content

Now that your complete strategy is in writing, it’s time to bring your content marketing efforts to fruition. By now, you’re ready to take those content ideas and bring them to life. While content creation itself can be a strenuous task, it can also be considered the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of your content marketing strategy.

It’s where all of your hard work is put to the test: Did you properly educate your team on buyer personas? Was your keyword research and topic selection on point? All of these questions will be answered in the coming months after putting your content out there, but first, you need to put the pen to paper (or, fingertips to keyboard) and get to work!

9. Promote Your Content

Once your content is squeaky clean, keyword-targeted and ready for your target audience, it’s time to publish and promote. This can involve sending out an email blast, posting to social media, or creating targeted ads to get more eyes on your content. How you choose to promote your content should align with your specific goals of the strategy, but the more eyes on your work, the better!

10. Measure the ROI

Now, it’s time to see if your quality content performed as well as planned. The final stage of your content marketing strategy should involve a content performance check, or a content audit to measure the ROI and effectiveness of your content creation process.

In content marketing, ROI shows how much revenue was gained after executing your digital marketing plan in comparison to the amount of money that was spent during the strategy and creation phases. Measuring ROI over a lengthy period of time can be difficult, but it can be simplified by measuring metrics every couple of months to determine if you created engaging content that’s reaching your target audience. We recommend tracking metrics such as:

Website traffic.
CTA click-through rates.
Keyword rankings.
Conversion rates.
Shares on social media platforms.

How to Tell if Your Content Marketing Strategy is Working

Measuring your ROI comes in many different forms, as we detail above. But one of the most important aspects many tend to overlook is maintaining your content strategy over time, or choosing to take a different approach based on the outlook of your current plan in place. A content marketing strategy doesn’t have to be static—with so many different moving parts, there’s always an opportunity to play around with different plans until you find something that works for your business.

You might even reach a point where you don’t think you’re capable of creating a strategy that enables you to reach your goals. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Remember: Outsourcing content marketing is always an option as well. Content Marketing Institute’s research found that 50% of its survey respondents outsource at least some of their content marketing to an agency.

If you’re considering this route, make sure to find a content marketing company that will go above and beyond to get to know your brand. Get an understanding of what they have to offer, ask for samples of writing, video and animation and speak with the content creators themselves if possible. Oh, and don’t forget to browse their website for case studies, testimonials and success stories to seal the deal (hint hint, click the link!)

No matter how you approach your B2B content strategy, just remember to be open minded, take industry trends into consideration and be willing to play around with your process. Starting your strategy is only the beginning—over time, you’ll have the opportunity to experiment, improve your research methods and transform with the world of content marketing.

By Chelsey Church

Chelsey Church is a senior writer and editor at Brafton. When she’s not turning her thoughts into copy, she’s enjoying a craft beer, playing with her dogs or listening to her favourite metal tunes. A Cleveland native, she’ll never let you forget that the Golden State Warriors blew a 3-1 lead.

Sourced from Brafton.com

In News

7 Tips to Use AI to Acquire and Retain Customers

September 10, 2021 No Comments

By Kevin Payne

Artificial Intelligence (AI) mimics the cognitive functions of the human mind, particularly in learning and problem-solving. Many of the apps that we use today are powered by AI. From voice-activated virtual assistants to e-commerce, AI applications are everywhere.

With the advancements in AI technology and access to big data, companies across different industries are integrating AI into their processes to find solutions to complex business problems.

The application of AI is most noticeable within the retail and e-commerce space. Websites and apps can interact intelligently with customers, creating a personalized approach that enhances the customer experience.

No matter what industry your business operates in, these seven tips can help you acquire and retain customers more efficiently at a fraction of the time it takes to do things manually.

How to Use AI to Get and Keep Customers

1. Identify Gaps in Your Content Marketing Strategy

If you’re just starting with content marketing, you’ll need to know what type of content to create.

By using AI, you can identify the gaps, find fixes, and evaluate the performance of your content marketing campaign.

Take Packlane, a company that specializes in custom package designs, for example. They came up with high-quality content like helpful blog posts that provide valuable information. At the same time, the content they publish makes it easier for their target market to understand their brand and services.

If you’re in the retail or e-commerce space, you can use AI to identify the gaps in your content marketing. Your content may be focused on your products and their features, but through AI, you can determine the relevant content that addresses your audience’s needs and pain points.

2. Pre-Qualify Prospects and Leads

Not every visitor to your site will become a paying customer. If you’re not getting sales despite the massive traffic, it means you’re generating low-quality leads.

Some reasons why this happens includes:

Targeting the wrong audience
Poor content marketing strategy
Using the wrong type of signup form
Promoting in the wrong social media platforms
Ineffective calls to action

These explain why 80% of new leads never convert into sales. The mistakes can be rectified with the help of artificial intelligence.

AI tools can extract relevant data to help you learn more about your target audience. These tools also provide predictive analytics on your customers’ behaviour. They, in turn, help improve your lead generation strategy because you’ll know which leads to pursue, where to find them, and how to effectively engage them.

3. Provide Personal Recommendations

According to a report by the Harvard Business Review, even though there are privacy concerns when consumers’ personal information changes hands, people still value personalized marketing experiences.

Brands that tailor their recommendations based on consumer data boost their sales by 10% over brands that don’t.

Recommendation systems’ algorithms typically rely on data on browsing history, pages visited, and previous purchases. But AI is so advanced that it can analyse customers’ interactions with the site content and find relevant products that will interest the individual customer. This way, AI makes it easier to target potential customers and effectively puts the best products in front of the site visitors.

Because of AI, recommendation engines are able to filter and customize the product recommendations based on each customer’s preferences. It’s a cycle of collecting, storing, analysing, and filtering the available data until it matches the customers’ preferences.

This is an effective way of acquiring and retaining customers because there’s an element of personalization.

4. Reduce Cart Abandonment

A high cart abandonment rate is the bane of e-commerce business owners. According to a study by the Baymard Institute, online shopping cart abandonment rate is close to 70%.

Users abandon their online carts for various reasons:

high extra costs
complicated checkout process
privacy concerns
not enough payment methods, or
they’re not ready to buy yet.

Using AI-powered chatbots is one way to reduce cart abandonment. AI chatbots can guide the customers through their shopping journey.

AI chatbots can have a conversational approach and give the customer a nudge to prompt them to complete the purchase. These chatbots can also act as a virtual shopping assistant or concierge that can let a customer know about an on-the-spot discount, a time-sensitive deal, a free shipping coupon, or any other incentives that will encourage them to complete the checkout.

With AI, lost orders due to cart abandonment are recoverable and can lead to an increase in conversion rate for e-commerce businesses.

5. Increase Repurchases With Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics is the process of making predictions based on historical data using data mining, statistical modelling, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other techniques. It can generate insights, forecast trends, and predict behaviours based on past and current data.

In marketing, predictive analytics can be used to predict customers’ propensity to repurchase products as well as its frequency. When used to optimize marketing campaigns, AI-powered predictive analytics can generate customer response, increase repurchase, and promote cross-selling of relevant products.

It’s all part of the hyper personalized marketing approach, where brands interact and engage with customers and improve their experience by anticipating their needs and exceeding their expectations.

With predictive analytics, you can focus your marketing resources on customer retention and targeting a highly motivated segment of your market that are more than happy to return and repurchase your products. This approach is less expensive than advertising or implementing pay-per-click campaigns.

6. Improve Your Website User Experience

Every business—big or small—knows the importance of having a website, where visitors can interact with the brand, respond to a call to action, or purchase products. But it’s not enough to just have an online presence; it’s important that visitors to the site have a great experience while navigating through your site.

What makes for a great user experience? Users have different expectations. Some of them want faster loading time, while others want a simple and intuitive interface. But most important of all, they want to find what they’re looking for. It could be a product, content, or a solution to a problem. Whatever they may be, it’s up to you to meet their expectations.

With artificial intelligence, you can improve your website user experience tenfold. Here are some of the ways AI can be used to improve user experience.

Search relevance

This pertains to how accurate the search results are in relation to the search query. The more relevant the results are, the better search experience the users will have. This means they are likely to find relevant content answering their queries or finding products that solve their problems.

Personalized recommendations

Content that is tailor-made for the user tends to have greater engagement which increases the likelihood of conversation. Amazon has perfected the product recommendation system using advanced AI and machine learning. AI gets data from customers and uses it to gain insights and apply predictive analysis to recommend relevant products for cross-selling opportunities.

AI chatbots

The presence of chatbots contributes to a great user experience because they provide 24/7 assistance and support in the absence of human customer service. Users can get accurate answers to their inquiries quickly and efficiently, compared to scrolling through a text-based FAQs.

7. Social Listening for Potential Customers

Social listening is the process of analysing the conversations, trends, and buzz surrounding your brand across different social media platforms. It’s the next step to monitoring and tracking the social media mentions of your brand and products, hashtags, industry trends, as well as your competitors.

Social listening analyses what’s behind the metrics and the numbers. It determines the social media sentiment about your brand and everything that relates to it. It helps you understand how people feel about your brand. All the data and information you get through social listening can be used to guide you in your strategy to gain new customers.

Social media monitoring and listening can be done much more efficiently with the help of artificial intelligence. It’s an enormous task for a team of human beings to monitor and analyse data, but with AI-powered social media tools, all the tedious tasks can be automated. They can be trained to leverage data to provide valuable insights about your brand with high accuracy.

With AI and machine learning, your social listening can easily determine your audience, brand sentiments, shopping behaviour, and other important insights. By having this information within reach, you’ll know how you can connect with them more effectively and turn them from prospects to paying customers.

Key Takeaways/Conclusion

More companies across different industries are using the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to significantly increase brand awareness, enhance customer engagement, improve user experience, and meet customer expectations.

AI can identify gaps in your content marketing strategy so that you can create content that’s relevant to your target audience.

AI can help you generate high-quality leads that are likely to buy your products.

With AI, you can personalize and tailor-fit your product recommendations based on your customers’ preferences, increasing repeat purchases.
AI can be integrated into your e-commerce site to reduce shopping cart abandonment.
AI significantly improves website user experience by making it intuitive, accessible, and easy to navigate.

AI-powered social media tools can help you monitor and gain valuable insights about your brand. You can then use this to develop a social media marketing strategy to gain new customers.

Achieve these milestones, and you’ll be sure to acquire new customers and retain existing ones.

Feature Image Credit: iStock/monsitj

By Kevin Payne

Sourced from https://www.blackenterprise.com

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Steps to Create a Content Marketing Strategy to Grow Your Business

July 22, 2021 No Comments

By Vipul Tripathi,

Today, content marketing is important because it can easily take a business to the next level. Especially when a business has to operate on a budget and grow exponentially, the reliance on content marketing is justifiable and for that, you have to learn how to Create a Content Marketing Strategy. Gone are the days when firms had to invest in conventional marketing tools such as pamphlets, flyers, television or ads. Now, content is king and it can easily expand the horizons of the business in a defined time. Here, in this feature, we will guide you through a few steps to grow your business through a content marketing strategy:

Carve a Plan

Before you sit back, grab a cup of coffee and invest in a certain strategy, you need to do a little bit of homework first. How do you want to expand your business? What are your business goals? Where do you wish to publish your content? What channels will be responsible for the distribution of your content? You need to answer each and every one of these questions before moving towards carving a certain strategy for your content.

Secondly, when you carve a content marketing strategy, you need to ensure that it is measurable. In simple words, if you can’t measure it, you won’t be able to manage it either. However, when you have a plan in place, you can achieve your marketing and business goals easily.

Always Work on Original Contents

Sharing an article or a retweet might work for a while but your target audience is always looking for something that will bring a change in their lives. This is where your brand can assume the opportunity and work with unique content to grab more attention. Remember, you can never make the most out of somebody else’s perspective.

So when you have an opinion of your own, it will stand out to the customers. For example, if a customer wants to learn about the Aluminum laser cut by ACT Laser and applications of laser cutting technology, they will only swoon over a website that has something unique to educate them about. So if your website provides them with an educational article about this topic, you will easily get more traffic on your platform.

Distribute Your Content

Now that you have carved a plan and have identified the targeted audience, it’s time for you to share your content. Bear in mind, your content is a means to finding ways to the hearts of more audience, so you better stick to your plan instead of making any changes. Create an engaging blog post for your website and keep updating it every month. This will improve the quality of your website and get it ranked at a higher position in the search engine.

Keep a Track of Results

This is probably the part, you’ve been waiting all this while. So did the content marketing strategy help you accomplish the goals you wanted to achieve? You can make sure of the Google Data Studio and the Google Analytics to keep a track of the results and see how everything has been done. This will enable you to keep on investing in content marketing because it is the most powerful marketing tool out there right now.

By Vipul Tripathi,

Sourced from Trend Pickle

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7 Steps to Create a Perfect Content Marketing Plan for Your Business

June 4, 2021 No Comments

By Arif Chowdhury,

Content is the king of any type of marketing; there is nothing new here. However, creating a perfect plan for your next content marketing is the key to success. Almost anyone can create content but making it perfectly suited for your business is the key.

Long ago, before 2005, B2B and B2C businesses usually did not care about creating fresh content regularly. However, because of the audience’s ever-increasing desire for fresh and engaging content, search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., also give priority to fresh and engaging content.

Create a Perfect Content Marketing Plan for Your Business

And this is where it begins; from personal bloggers to big brands, all are racing to create fresh and engaging content regularly for their business website to get their share of organic traffic.

Because only by creating fresh & engaging content that their audience love, a business can increase not only sales but also build a brand name among the crowd. Thanks to social media, audiences can share content among them that creates a massive awareness for a business. Which, in turn, helps to increase revenue by many folds.

A recent study says 69 percent of B2B businesses have documented content marketing strategies. And 76 percent of marketers judge the success of a business by measuring their organic traffic statistics. As you can see, in this new digital marketing era, content marketing is the key to drive more organic traffic to your business.

In this article, I will discuss how you should build a perfect plan for your content marketing.

Step 1: Build Your Brand by Creating Mass Awareness

If you want to get success in the long-term, then branding is essential. Look at the big brands; their audience knows them for their brand name, not the product itself. This is a smart way of marketing that your audience will purchase because they trust you more than they trust their judgment.

Let me give you a perfect example of this. You may have seen many of your friends buy an iPhone without even a second thought. Even if they have seen recent bad reviews about that phone.

Why does it happen? Well, it does not happen in one day; it took them years to gain trust from their audiences. Now people buy iPhones from day zero when they get released.

This is a vital reason why you should focus on building a brand among your audience using mass awareness. However, before you do that, ask yourself the below questions to identify the right approach.

Who is my target audience?
What type of content is my primary focus? Text, visual, audio, or a combination of all.
Who are my competitors? What kind of content are they using?
How do they create mass awareness? Which online platform are they using?

Step 2: Tweaks Your Existing Marketing Campaign

Again, I am saying this; nowadays, it is a highly competitive era. It’s not 2000 where people are just starting to get along with online content & bloggers are just emerging from the womb.

It is 2020 & to date, more than 500 million blog posts exist & 1.7 billion websites all over the globe. In recent statistics, almost 80 percent of people do not even read your entire post, only read the headline and pass it. According to MOZ, 92 percent of Google searches never visit the 2nd page.

These statistics only tell us one thing. Content marketing is becoming harder every day. You have to focus on your target audience by creating highly engaging & relevant content. Otherwise, all your efforts will go in vain.

So, the question is – how are you supposed to tweak your existing campaign? Well, it is simple. Take a look at the below table. I have presented 3 of my favourite content & keyword analysis tools for you to get started. If you plan for long-term business, then you must have to use a tool like this.

Best tools for Content & Keyword Analysis

Best tools	Costing	Free Trial
Ahref	$99 per month	7-days for $7
Semrush	$99.95 per month	7-days free
Ubersuggest	$12 per month	7-days free

Step 3: Set Your Marketing Goals & Stick with It

Before you do anything, it’s always better to create specific goals of marketing your content and stick with it. Set your goals and synchronize them with your entire team for better collaboration. This is the digital era — do not forget that.

You do not have to arrange a meeting every single time you update your decision. Use the power of management tools to collaborate with your entire team, including sharing files, photos, and videos on the fly. Use a secure channel to share classified information without using third-party applications like Gmail, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp, etc.

Once you can collaborate with your entire team securely & on time, it is time to set specific goals that can be achieved within a specific timeframe. Do not target a goal that cannot be achieved or too hard to get desired success.

Also, you need to focus on time management. Look for your competitors’ weaknesses to identify the untapped opportunity to seize it. For example, if your competitor is Microsoft, you can still beat them without directly targeting their focused objective. Instead, find the hole to get into the market by searching for an untapped opportunity that even Microsoft didn’t see.

It’s so obvious, you cannot fight head-on against a powerful opponent, but as they are your opponent, you have to find their weakness and hit hard to beat them.

Find Content Gap using Ahref “Content & Keyword Analysis Tool.”

It’s so obvious if your competitor is strong, then there is no way you can beat them head to head unless you have a large amount of funding to back you up.

So, what to do? Here is the answer for you. I have given you 3 of my best content & keyword analysis tools to begin with. For this example, I have used the Ahref tool. Take a look at how I find more than 2,000+ keyword gaps in their website.

If you want to beat your competitor, then this is the chance. Find their weakness by using “content gap” to find out which type of keywords they haven’t ranked yet. Now, create powerful content on that keywords & start to win the market.

Step 4: Plan for Your Target Audience

Always remember that the audience is the ultimate success key. Without them, no business could exist because they are buyers & the lifeblood of any business.

Every business’s target audience could be different. It is a vital task to identify the customer’s interest, habit & lifecycle. If you do not analyze your audience and build the correct content, then even if you have high quality and engaging content — your target audience may not be interested in those.

Some audiences may be interested in video rather than simple text content. Some may be interested in audio content but feeling bored with video & text. It can vary from the audience. Thus you should find out in which type of content they have an interest.

You may face that some group of the audience does not buy products right away. They always research first and take a decision after a while. Your task is to convert them before your competitors convert them. To do that, analyse your target audience and build a perfect marketing strategy.

How to Identify Your Audience Interest?

Using Google analytic, you can easily do it. Visit Google analytic, then click on the audience tab. Here you will find all sorts of information regarding your existing audience. Their age, location, gender, interest, income level, etc.

Visit Google Analytic – Audience

Step 5: Create a Plan for Content Creation

It completely depends on your business brand & target audiences. Some content creation strategies may work for my business. However, the same strategy may not suit your business.

For example, my target audience always searches through Google and research by reading the blog, article, forum post, social media post, etc. Therefore, my content creation plan is – highly engaging, helpful & fresh content that is built with text & images.

Because search engines like Google love text & images, which is perfectly suited for my business marketing plan as well. Now think very carefully what type of business you have, thus building your content creation strategy. For example, if it is a cooking course, then you should focus on video rather than text & images.

Step 6: Leverage Social Media to Create Mass Awareness

Though you can spend thousands of dollars on your business to market it. However, this is not a cost-efficient method. Better to focus on social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., for online marketing.

If you use Google ads service for marketing your business, then for a single visitor, you may have to spend $1-2 on average. Most businesses from small to large spend $9,000 per month on average for online marketing.

However, if you can build a community on social media platforms, then you may get millions of visitors to your website without spending a dime. Though, not all social media may suit your business. For example, if your business is cooking-related or furniture-related, you may get massive visitors from Instagram & YouTube.

Step 7: Analyse & Track Your Business Performance

This is the final stage of success. After you have planned for your audiences & build a powerful content marketing strategy now, it’s time to focus on the result. By analysing your website visitors, subscriptions, sharing on social media & purchases made by the audience. It’s so obvious; not everyone gets their desired result without trial & error.

You may create an excellent strategy, but it will only become perfect when you test it out and get the desired result. If you do not get it — then find out the errors and fix it & again test it.

There are several metrics to test your business performance.

Audience Behaviour: bounce rate, visit duration, etc.
Revenue: subscription, conversion, etc.
Mass awareness: sharing, comments, backlinks, etc.
Organic Traffic: visitors from search engines, fewer advertisements needed

These are just sample metrics you could use to measure your performance. However, there are many CRM software out there you could use to handle these complex analysing tasks automatically.

Conclusion

How you should market your content completely depends on your business & audience. I can only show you a general way to get success. However, you have to walk by yourself. Analyse your audience & learn about them.

Then build a content-making & marketing plan. Finally, analyse your business performance to see if it works. Remember, every big brand once struggled many years to get the desired success. But they never give up.

Feature Image Credit: rodnae productions; pexels; thank you!

By Arif Chowdhury

Arif Chowdhury is the founder of Cliobra. An active digital marketer specialized in both search engine marketing and social media networks. With more than 10 years of practical experience in small to large organizations management, he provides consultancy on how to manage both sales & marketing departments.

Sourced from readwrite

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Content Marketing Strategy vs. Execution: Finding the Ideal Balance

December 14, 2020 No Comments

By Michael Brenner

Content marketing is a contact sport. Just like any coach, you’re in charge of preparing for the game and carrying out those plans. Such is the life of a content marketer, where you must balance content marketing strategy vs. execution.

You can’t “win” at content marketing without a solid strategy. Nor can you do so without the ability to execute on it consistently. Let’s look at how both of these functions are critical to your game plan and how to find the right balance.

Quick Takeaways

A fruitful content marketing return for your organization requires both strategy and execution.
Different resources and tools are necessary to handle both sides.
Finding the right balance ensures that you can consistently publish content that’s relevant and engaging for your audience.

Start with a Strategy

Your first play should be a content marketing strategy. The good news is that most of you have one. According to a SEMRush survey, 77% of organizations have a content marketing strategy!

For those with a well-documented content marketing strategy, you can expect to benefit greatly. The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) reported that those that fit within this category are the most successful.

Having a Strategy Doesn’t Always Mean Your Content Marketing Is Effective

Just because you have a strategy, it doesn’t mean it’s effective. This is something many organizations struggle with due to a variety of reasons. They don’t have leadership buy-in, resources are slim, it’s just words in a document, or it’s not really a cultural foundation.

It’s easy to get derailed with your strategy. It’s also something that’s living and breathing. It’s not static. Rather, so many things, internal and external, influence it. Just consider the pandemic impact. This global health crisis changed the message and strategy for basically every company.

However, you can’t dwell on your strategy and stop executing it because it’s not perfect. It never will be. You have to start somewhere with good enough and then look at your content performance analytics and data to determine if your strategy is on point or way off.

What Makes a Content Strategy Effective?

If you aren’t sure if your strategy is effective, then it’s time to find out. In general, the most successful ones have these attributes:

Specific definition of goals and the KPIs (key performance indicators) you’ll rely on to measure effectiveness.
Detailed and heavily researched buyer personas. You must really know your audience to develop content that will resonate with them.
Types of content (blogs, eBooks, webinars, video, etc.) you’ll use and how they align with your buyer persona preferences.
Channels you’ll use to disperse and distribute content (social, email, paid, etc.)
Tools you’ll need to develop content workflows, track audience behaviors, set up campaigns, aggregate analytics, and leverage automation.
Foundational language that should influence every piece of content you create (value prop, USP (unique selling proposition), elevator pitch, taglines, vision statement, and mission statement).
Content production goals (how much throughput do you commit to every month—check out these insights on blog frequency, for example).

If your strategy addresses all these points, you should feel pretty confident that it can be effective. The challenge for many is how to execute it.

Content Marketing Execution: Turning Strategy into Action

Coaches create game plans with precision, and then they attempt to execute it. They know they’ll have to course-correct along the way because the unexpected is inevitable. When you watch an NFL game, you know these guys are professional athletes, the best of the best, but you can also tell when they aren’t executing—dropped passes, sacked quarterbacks, and huge mental errors.

That can all happen in content execution as well. Strategists lay out the plans for a content team to be successful. Yet, the same challenges keep popping up. Some of the biggest around execution are consistency and content creation workflows.

Consistent Production and Content Workflows

According to the CMI, 32% of marketers said their content workflows were either fair or poor. Additionally, other research confirmed that 60% of marketers find producing content consistently as one of their biggest challenges.

There is certainly reason for friction here. However, it’s not difficult to improve this part of execution. Technology is the answer. A content marketing platform can streamline workflows, provide you with dynamic content calendars, and help you identify where the impediments are.

For example, you might have a few design resources, yet they’re necessary for almost all types of content. If that’s what’s slowing your production, you can consider hiring more in-house talent or outsourcing.

You’ll likely never have “enough” resources. But redistributing them and augmenting your team with outsourced talent can help you reach your content production goals.

Data Should Influence Execution

Execution isn’t on autopilot. The content performance data you generate and analyze should inform it. It could change your strategy, as well. For example, you may learn that your audience has a high preference for visual content over written content. You’ll change your execution of tactics based on this to meet your audience’s expectations better.

Execution Requires All Hands in the Same Circle

Sports teams huddle and put their hands together to show they are one. Your content marketing team should do the same when it comes to execution. Much of this comes down to accountability and transparency. When you have a technology platform that tracks the status of every project, you’ll have a clear picture of who isn’t playing their role.

Then it’s time to investigate the issue and find out what’s actually happening. It may be a time to coach up, add resources, or make a cut.

Finding the Right Balance for Your Business

Content marketing strategy vs. execution is a core concern for any organization committed to content marketing. Having the right balance means your strategy has all the essentials, and you refresh it regularly but aren’t getting caught up in it being perfect. On the execution side, it means analyzing why you aren’t meeting production goals and how to fix your strategy so you hit your goals.

These two areas are necessary for achieving wins in content marketing—more traffic, leads, and sales. And we can help!

If you’re ready to get more traffic to your site with quality content published consistently, check out our Content Builder Service.

Set up a quick consultation, and I’ll send you a free PDF version of my books. Get started today and generate more traffic and leads for your business.

By Michael Brenner

Michael Brenner is a Top CMO, Content Marketing and Digital Marketing Influencer, an international keynote speaker, author of “Mean People Suck” and “The Content Formula” and he is the CEO and Founder of Marketing Insider Group, a leading Content Marketing Agency . He has worked in leadership positions in sales and marketing for global brands like SAP and Nielsen, as well as for thriving startups. Today, Michael helps build successful content marketing programs for leading brands and startups alike. Subscribe here for regular updates.

Sourced from Marketing Inside Group

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Make Your Content Marketing Strategy Useful – Do It in Visuals

August 21, 2019 No Comments

By Nadya Khoja

Imagine you are in a meeting, furiously taking notes as the marketing manager speaks and shows a slide deck to review your brand’s content marketing strategy. Or you receive an email with several bullet points touching on the strategy. And what about those quick conversations when your manager stops by your desk and tells you about an element in the strategy?

Retention of what you’ve seen and heard in any of those scenarios is difficult.

To ensure that all involved understand your content marketing strategy, you need to document it in an easy-to-digest format. Text-dominated documents or presentations with a few reference images thrown in don’t work well. Create something that will remain in the minds of your team members and colleagues.

It’s easier and quicker to absorb visuals. Using them to communicate your content marketing strategy is the best way forward. Here are a few ways visuals can effectively convey your strategy.

Using visuals to communicate your #contentmarketing strategy is the best way forward, says @NadyaKhoja. Click To Tweet

Lay the groundwork

To get colleagues and upper management better acquainted with using your content marketing strategy, break it down visually.

The mind map below clearly outlines the aspects of the strategy, including suggested tools, how to set goals, and how to conduct effective meetings. This single visual gives its viewers a clear road map of what to expect and how to proceed, without you having to speak at length or give a presentation on the subject.

Click to enlarge

TIP: Print the strategy mind map and place it in meeting rooms so everybody can see how powerful visuals can be in conveying information.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Want More Productivity? Make Your Strategy Visual

Paint the big picture

With an accepted understanding of the power of visually communicating strategy, your first step is to create a visual that effectively shares the company’s primary goals – where the company is going and why it wants to get there.

Use a simple flowchart or mind map to convey this information. This visual contains important information with a long-term impact on your team. It rarely leads to immediate action unless broken into smaller projects and tasks.

Make this visual easy to read by using contrasting colors for the background and text. However, avoid using too much text as that negates the use of a visual. Instead, employ numbers, graphs, charts, or diagrams to convey the big picture. Bite-sized information is easier to retain.

You also should create a visual for your marketing team’s goals. Use more detail, maybe even use an infographic that outlines what the aims are for each month, quarter, or year.

Create an infographic for the marketing team’s goals for the month, quarter, or year, says @nadyakhoja. Click To Tweet

Look at this simple mind map for digital marketing. It clearly outlines what the team is meant to achieve. You can customize mind map templates to include numbers the team has to hit or to highlight components that require immediate action.

Click to enlarge

TIP: A simple graphic using icons and limited text immediately captures the imagination of those viewing it and gives them more incentive to work toward the goals.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

Plan a project

Now you need to show the team how to accomplish the previously illustrated goals. This is where you bring in your project planning and management skills.

Project timelines are an excellent way to visually convey to your team what its tasks are and when they must be completed. The strategy workflow below details the tasks and time allotted for each. Note the minimal use of color to ensure that the focus is on the information. The icons also give a quick visual to remember the tasks to accomplish.

Click to enlarge

Project timelines are a great way to visually convey the team’s tasks and deadlines, says @NadyaKhoja. Click To Tweet

A Gantt chart is another visual template you can use to show your project strategy. The simplified chart below clearly shows which team members are needed at which stage of the project, as well as what their tasks are for which field. The contrasting colors minimize any confusion about their roles. The calendar layout makes it easy to understand when and who is involved in the activity.

Maps and charts impart important information easily to your team, eliminating the need to use complex Excel sheets or long presentations.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Want Better Content Marketing Management? Try One of These Tools

Involve the team

At this point, get your team involved in communicating visually. Ask them to create personal strategies using visuals to detail their goals and how they intend to achieve them.

Creating these personal visuals will not only help them retain the strategies they have been seeing but also help organize their activities. As you know, writing things down the moment you hear them is an excellent way to recall information, and plotting tasks into visuals is even more effective.

For content marketers, a simple mind map like the one below works effectively to help retain what you need to achieve. In turn, it also will lead you to organically generate content ideas efficiently.

With the tasks in place for the team member, a personal Gantt chart (like the one below) gives individuals a way to plot their activities and timelines.

Visual mind maps and timelines keep people on track and give them a quick reference to see while working. They make a manager’s job easier as team members have a degree of autonomy and responsibility to complete their tasks and projects.

Develop your strategy picture

In a work climate where pressure is high and time is short, making it easier for everyone to absorb the company ethos and understand the tasks in front of them will lead to more efficient workflow. Using a visual strategy in the marketing team is an excellent way to obtain top performance from your team and eventually lead to your business achieving its goals.

Get the best visuals in the content marketing industry. Attend the world’s largest content marketing event Sept. 3-6 and view (and hear) presentations from over 100 in the industry. Register today using code CMIBLOG100 to save $100.

Feature Image Credit: Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

By Nadya Khoja

Nadya is the director of marketing for Venngage, an online graphic design software. She also runs a web-series called Drunk Entrepreneurs. Follow her on Twitter @NadyaKhoja.

Sourced from CM Content Marketing Institute