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How creativity can drive business results: Adobe, Lego, Unilever, IBM and Diageo will show the way

April 28, 2021 No Comments

A year on from Covid-19’s first lockdowns, nations and economies seem to have better control and growth is on the mind as a semblance of recovery is in sight, particularly in Asia Pacific.

Even within this chaotic situation, the region has shown signs of faster recovery than many other parts of the world and are even providing learnings to other parts of the world on how best to navigate through the challenges. While that is heartening news, it also leads to the question on how ready are brands from a creative standpoint to navigate this new and emerging reality?

To help marketers unravel this critical puzzle, The Drum and Adobe have put together a power-packed panel with senior representatives from formidable brands like Lego, Unilever, IBM and Diageo. These top brand leaders will come together for a 60-minute session with live Q&A and deep-dive into the key challenges that the marketers and creatives are facing in producing content that engages customers as well as connects with them, at scale.

The session will discuss how a good mix of talent and technology can help in unlocking the answers to these challenges and allow collaboration to thrive in a new hybrid way of working. It will also look at the following key themes:

The changes that the brands have had to navigate and adapt to since the pandemic began
The evolving creative approaches
Raising the role of creativity in driving business goals
The emerging face of creative collaboration in the new world

The discussion, on 21 April 2021, will be moderated by Charlotte McEleny, The Drum’s Asia Pacific publisher, who will be joined by Michael Stoddart, director, strategic business development (APAC) at Adobe, Grace Astari Italiaander, creative lead – innovation at Diageo, Primus Nair Manokaran, head of creative at The LEGO Agency (APAC), Kartik Chandrasekhar, global brand vice president of Lifebuoy at Unilever and Isabella Bain, sales and creative associate director at IBM.

By amit bapna

Sourced from The Drum

In News

10 Awesome Affiliate Marketing Tactics That Generate More Sales

February 15, 2021 No Comments

By Prashant Kumar.

Affiliate marketing is a form of marketing that provides great benefits to marketers and companies. The best thing about it is that there are no contracts or deadlines that have to be met. It allows markets to work at their will to offer the best quality. Affiliate marketing is the practice of promoting someone else’s services or products to their own customers or audience. This is something that social media influencers can do really well. With every sale that is made through the link that is provided to them, they get some commission according to the company’s policy. There are many eCommerce websites like Amazon that provide up to 10-12% commission on the sale of every product that they sell. This is something that creates customers and hype for an eCommerce website and brands as well and they don’t have to pay a fixed amount to them.

Dedication, Regularity, And Smart Work

Dedication, regularity, and smart work are the three factors that can help an affiliate marketer to generate more sales. This might be counted as a great source of side income but it is not that easy to generate sales from it. People who think that they can just post a link and get users on that behalf need to understand that they will not earn anything significant that way. This is why in this article we have curated 10 strategies that can help anyone who wants to generate sales through their affiliate marketing campaign.

10 Affiliate Marketing Tactics to Generate More Sales

1. Know the Products That You Are Promoting

This is a must. No one can market or promote something that they don’t know about. This is the reason why it is important to research and know everything about the product and the brand that affiliate marketers are associated with. It also gives an edge to markets because the more you know about products the better you will be able to explain about them. Convincing someone that the product is better and that they should buy it increases the probability of a sale.

2. Get Expertise on The Type of Products in The Same Category

People prefer to trust experts. They will be able to understand a product just by reading the content that an affiliate marketer weaves around the product and its promotion. Though promoting content is all about describing it properly in a manner that none of it looks false. There should be experts who can write everything that can attract the customers or the audience that is an influencer or affiliate marketer. Without expertise, it can be really hard to tell people why they should buy a product, especially from an affiliate link.

3. Promote the Content in All Possible Mediums

Affiliate marketing works when an article or content along with a link is circulated everywhere. This can include social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and whatnot. Other social media platforms like Pinterest and Quora can also be used to do the same but with some smart placement. The content should only be placed in places where it looks relevant.

However, marketers should not just post the content and the link on all questions. Quora removes answers that are not relevant to a question. This can also result in the profile getting banned from the platform. This is bad marketing and should not be done if marketers wish to stay in the game for long.

4. Have A Backup Plan to Reinitiate the Campaign When It Is Not Working

Not all plans work, because no plan is perfect. In these times where people change their minds in a fraction of a second, it is important to have a backup plan. This will help marketers when the first plan that they execute starts failing or didn’t even pick up in the first place. They cannot just let it go. Having a backup plan will save them from wasting all the effort and the time that they invested in creating content and finding the best images of products.

5. Choose Products Carefully

The products that are to be promoted should be chosen very carefully. The reason behind this is that people will not buy a product unless it provides value for their money, has decent brand value, or is super affordable but has great reviews. These are the things that can be considered before finalizing a product to promote.

6. Provide Real Images and Videos

Many affiliate marketers make the mistake of using staged photos that have been used by a brand. People get attracted when they see how a product looks in real life. This is what attracts them and also keeps them intrigued. It is something that they don’t see elsewhere and that is why there are high chances that they will click on the link to the product and also buy the products.

Unboxing videos can also be used in review and comparison articles – they make a huge impact on people’s minds. These are the things that can trigger the person reading the content to buy the product right away. It all depends on the way the content is written and the way a reader perceives it.

7. Provide Special Offers

Affiliate marketers can provide some special offers to their clients. There can be a cashback or even freebies when they buy from the link that the marketer provides in their posts or their blogs. There might be some reduction in the profit margin of individual projects but it will increase the frequency that will do more than just covering it up.

8. Never Lie in Order to Sell

This is the worst tactic that has been used a lot until now: lying in order to sell. Many affiliate marketers lie about the product that they are promoting in their articles. This is something that might generate a one-time sale for it but will kill all the possibility of the users coming back to its website.

In no way is this something that will increase the profit. It is something that will take the affiliate marketing campaign down in just a couple of months or even weeks. Using false practices like promising a discount or a freebie that users will never be able to get will just put them off.

9. Write Top 10 Or Review Articles to Engage People

Most people generally search for the top 10 products when they are confused as to what they need to buy. This is also the keyword for first-time shoppers. The top 10 articles create great engagement and if written in a promotional manner, they can generate great sales. Reviews are another category of articles that can engage people.

10. Place the Product Link (Affiliate Link) Carefully

Make sure that the affiliate link/product link is not stuffed. Users know when you just want to sell and not tell them how they will benefit from buying a product. The first rule of affiliate marketing is that it can’t be obvious that the article is just about selling a product through a link. Remember that people always have an option to directly buy a product from its website.

Conclusion

The strategies that have been listed above are not magic spells. It takes time to implement them and see their results but if done in the right way, they can provide good results. Most successful affiliate marketers use the same strategies and they have earned a lot from them.

By Prashant Kumar.

@prashant-kumar

Tech Writer, Entrepreneur, and a Visionary

Sourced from Hackernoon

In News

6 Tips For Creating Engaging Content

January 6, 2021 No Comments

By Jared Atchison

Having a powerful content creating strategy is key to getting customers to engage with your brand.

Most businesses know that content is the key to winning customers. However, building a content creation strategy that actually engages users is still a challenging issue.

There are a few mistakes that businesses continue to make. For example, focusing on quantity over quality. And creating content that sounds “professional” but impersonal to users.

In this post, we’ll cover several practical ways you can create engaging content. And with the tips given here, you’ll be able to make content that’s appealing and gets attention – which in turn will lead to more sales for your business.

Create content customers want to read

This tip seems obvious, but many businesses approach content creation by keeping their business goals in mind.

For example, I once came across a website selling high-end bathtubs for personal use. The creator of the site and the content focused on technical specifications such as the model names and numbers of the tubs. If they had thought about what their customers want, they would have focused on how their bathtubs could be a way to relax or add a classy touch to their homes. And they could have optimized their SEO for bathtubs and the location they catered to.

To create content your customers want to read, keep the following in mind:

Learn about your primary demographic. You should have a clear idea of whom you are selling your product to. Even if your product is for everyone, you’re better of picking your most important demographic and learning about how they use your product
Focus on the benefits your product provides rather than the features you think are important. Specs matter but what your customers really want to know is that your product will meet their needs

The remaining sections of this post will give you more guidelines on how to make content people want to read. Start with researching who your audience is and what they want. And use the rest of the ideas here to build content that shows them that your business is the right fit for them.

Imagine your audience in clear detail

Have you noticed that when you know someone well, your conversations with them are meaningful and generate a positive response? This is something you can do even when you’re writing email posts, blog content, or ads for your audience.

When you write for a faceless mass, your communication will lack liveliness. But if you can build a customer persona, your content automatically becomes more interesting. For example, a clothing company for plus-sized women will have a different view of their customers when compared to how a fabric manufacturer for furnishings will think about their target market.

When imagining your audience, give them an age, a name, a profession, and make them “real.” Then, when you think about them and write your blog post or create your video, you’ll approach your material with greater energy and personalization.

Have a tone of voice

In a sea of impersonal content, having a ‘voice’ and a specific tone for your brand can set it apart. As an example, consider how Old Spice differentiates itself from other grooming brands for men. All their marketing, from their website copy to their ads, use a fun, humorous, and cheeky tone. This makes the brand memorable and people immediately associate their content with grooming and self-care products for men.

After you’ve made a clear picture of your audience, imagine that you’re talking to them directly as you would a friend. With practice, you’ll find that creating and maintaining a tone becomes easier and will also engage people more.

Choose a tone of voice that’s right for your business. Humour in content is always engaging but is not necessarily appropriate in all situations. You can opt to be professional, academic, uplifting, or choose any other tone that makes sense for your audience and your business. The important thing is to remain consistent across your communication.

Engage your audience’s emotions

A critical element that makes content jump out online is the use of emotion in your blog posts or social media content. Always look for ways to connect with people at an emotional level. Here are my suggestions for doing this:

Make use of power words that are proven to get people’s attention. Words like “Free”, “Best”, “Guarantee”, and many others create an impact when you add them to email subject lines, blog titles, and ads
Craft blog titles with “How-tos” and “X Best” or “X Easiest” and similar formats as these tell users that your content will help them
Pique your audience’s curiosity by building a suspenseful opening sentence in your emails
Ask a question that makes your audience think
Make a bold statement or an assertion that compels people to keep reading your content
Add stories, case studies, and news to add examples to your posts and provide context to users

The next time you’re on social media, observe posts that go viral. You’ll note that virtually all of them evoke people’s emotions in some way or the other. Keep working on making emotional content and track the impact of your content through analytics. You’ll identify what works and how to leverage your content for the best effect.

Format your content

Nothing will put your readers off as much as a badly formatted blog post. Even though an article may contain extensive information, your audience will not consider it helpful if they can’t scan it and understand whether it’s relevant to them in a brief glance.

Here’s how to format your content for the best effect:

You can make your content scannable by breaking your text into smaller paragraphs – keep each paragraph to three or four lines each
Run your content through an app like the Hemingway Editor. It will detect sentences that are too wordy and highlight them for your attention
Use a casual way of speaking or writing in your posts. A friendly and conversational writeup will make your content easy to understand. What’s more 83% of people prefer an informal and chatty tone.
Break up long posts with images and video content. Images retain people longer on your website and illustrate your point well. Posts with images get 94% more views as opposed to ones without any visual elements.
Use headings and subheadings to tells users what each section of your posts is about. This makes it readily apparent to your users whether your post will help them or not
Make use of bullet points and numbered lists to break up long paragraphs into actionable points

A well-formatted blog post or article will make your content look appealing to people seeking relevant and informational material. These tips will keep people on your page longer, impacting your engagement rates and SEO too.

Leave a call to action

When you end a piece of content, whether it’s a video, social media post or a blog article, be sure to give your users something to do.

A call to action serves the purpose of driving customers to take action that leads to further engagement. These actions can include following you on social media or liking a video. You can direct users to subscribe to a newsletter or join an exclusive membership site.

When you don’t add a call to action, even one as simple as telling people to check out more of your content, your audience will lose interest fast and find content elsewhere.

With calls to action, you’ll be able to reengage your audience. When they receive your emails, get notifications for new videos and posts, you’ll have the opportunity to continue nurturing your relationship with them.

The tips given here are practical and proven to work. By implementing just some of them, you’ll see an improvement in how well people respond to your content.

Of course, you’ll have to go through some trial and error before finding what works for your business in particular. But if you keep working on these tips and use analytics to support your efforts, you’ll see a boost in customer engagement.

By Jared Atchison

Co-Founder of WPForms, one of the largest WordPress contact form plugins in the market. I have been programming for over a decade and enjoy creating plugins that help people create powerful web designs without touching code. See Jared Atchison’s Profile

Sourced from business.c

In News

Why Content Is Vital In Digital Marketing

December 24, 2020 No Comments

By Seth Price

Digital marketing is advancing each and every day. Every business will progress (or decline) depending on current trends and specific marketing strategies they set forth. The trends and strategies that are seen in digital marketing boil down to one crucial aspect: content creation. Content creation is crucial in digital marketing because it attracts and engages consumers, which leads to an increase in business.

Content can be as simple as making a statement. Anything from professional, financial, legal or technical advice to posting an entertaining GIF can all be considered some form of content. It is imperative to identify your target audiences because they are the ones who consume your content and essentially bring your business to life. Every business should know their target audiences, area(s) of focus and the type of content necessary to produce. Identifying these will effectively promote and improve the online presence of your business.

Identifying Your Target Audience

Convert your target audience to loyal customers by creating winning and distinctive content. The content you create will help you connect with your target customers’ needs and personas. Research and strong analytical data is required to secure all information needed to increase the traffic to your business. Gaining access to your target audience’s personal information (name, age, gender, geographic location and job title), along with answering questions and identifying their challenges, will help you improve the content you make and fine-tune your business agenda.

To adequately cater to new and current customers, research tactics such as interviewing past customers, conducting surveys and analysing the traffic you receive is vital. Use Google Analytics to view your site traffic and to analyse your audience by looking at the insights displayed. Having a very specific agenda that bookkeeps information such as key demographics, key psychographics (attitudes, aspirations and other psychological criteria of a person), challenges and preferred communication will help you create outstanding content that is unique and authentic. After identifying your target audience, the overall goal is to provide value to each consumer with the type of content you create.

Types Of Content

Content is used to entertain, educate and persuade. Businesses gain better visibility online by focusing on the content they create, increasing their exposure and attracting new leads. Every type of content produced should resonate with each consumer and provide them with a great deal of resources. High levels of engagement depend on the type of content generated.

• Blogs: Blogs are a great way to provide content and optimize search engines. Boost organic traffic by attracting potential customers who are looking for answers and other information that your business specializes in. With any blog, it is a great idea to create link pages within them so other people can share your post. Writing blogs is one way to have more interaction and develop strong customer relationships.

• Memes: Memes are videos or images that include correlating captions. Memes have become extremely popular this generation and are always going viral throughout social media. People create memes by embedding specific text into edited clips from videos, television and movies. Memes can easily create traffic because they are a fun way to engage people on social media.

• Live video/webinars: Online streaming is an effective way to increase traffic for any digital marketing strategy. Live videos and webinars allow businesses to inform their audiences, connect with them virtually and answer any questions or concerns they may have. Businesses can easily broadcast a live video or webinar to an online audience on multiple platforms.

Content Drives SEO

Content creation is to SEO as peanut butter is to jelly. Content increases traffic to your business and helps you become more visible online. Including valuable content on a business page gives owners the opportunity to reach more clientele. Content is created to be posted throughout the internet to build brand awareness and generate a larger audience. Every search engine has a variety of ways to index and provide information that determines your business exposure. These algorithms will decide the ranking of your business depending on a person’s search query.

Content creation benefits SEO because the words produced in the specified content highlights keywords that consumers search. These keywords are relevant to your business because it may create a higher ranking in the search engine result pages (SERPs). More keywords will result in a higher click-through rate (CTR) that will increase traffic and potentially bring new clients to your business. It is important for your content to be strong enough to appear in relevant search queries.

Keyword placement, backlinks and website visitors are all extremely crucial in the world of SEO. Lacking content will result in no keywords being found, no page for your future customers to view and no improvement in your SEO. Giving customers the best content possible is needed to eventually help lead your business page to one of the top search engine results.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Seth Price

Managing Partner at Price Benowitz LLP and CEO of BluShark Digital LLC, a digital marketing agency that specializes in SEO and SEM. Read Seth Price’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

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

November 9, 2020 No Comments

By Rooney Reeves.

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

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

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

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

Proven Content Marketing Strategies to Drive More Traffic

Build Astounding Content for a Very Distinct Audience

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

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

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

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

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

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

backlinks
inbound links
site architecture

Networking and Guest Posting

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

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

Segment the Audience and Build Various Landing Pages

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

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

Q&A Marketing and Forum Marketing

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

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

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

Master One Social Network yet be Present on all the Others

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

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

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

Repurpose, Update, and Link to Old Content

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

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

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

For Better Results, Leverage Professionals

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

By Rooney Reeves.

In News

Content Syndication Is Making a Comeback: Here’s How to Make it Work for You

October 2, 2020 No Comments

By David Crane.

Content syndication and other forms of third-party lead generation are having a big year. To be fair, spending on all B2B digital channels is way up. According to eMarketer, B2B digital spending will hit an estimated $8.14 billion this year, up 22.6% from 2019.

Yet, content syndication is having a particularly good year. I’ve seen this at Intentsify, where I work. Our intent-driven content syndication solution has generated five times more revenue this year than the preceding one. And as much as I’d like to think the jump is a consequence of our solution’s differentiated value (not to mention my fantastic marketing abilities), every lead generation vendor I’ve talked with recently has enjoyed significant increases in spending.

Several factors are responsible for this renaissance of content syndication.

Why Content Syndication Is on the Rise, Again

COVID-19

Let’s start with the obvious. A pandemic shuttered in-person events, where B2B organizations typically allocate around 20% of their marketing budgets to fuel their sales pipeline. Digital events, while helpful in the absence of the real thing, can’t fill the void. As a result, B2B marketing teams have been reallocating event budgets in part to content syndication programs to help make up for the loss.

Inbound Marketing Isn’t Enough

Traditional inbound marketing results can’t scale to meet businesses’ needs. I’ve written on this topic before, so I won’t belabor the point here. Suffice to say, however, the combination of account-based marketing’s rising importance and the increasing saturation of inbound marketing tactics have made scaling inbound results much more difficult and expensive.

Content Syndication Services Have Evolved

Content syndication programs are far more sophisticated today than they were just a few years ago. Between the ability to generate leads among specified target accounts and the near universal use of lead-data governance technology, marketers are seeing more value in such programs.

Intent Data Has Amplified Content Syndication’s Strengths

Intent data — used by both marketing teams and their content syndication partners — has added another level of targeting precision. Not only do intent signals identify which accounts are in an active buy-cycle, they also highlight the content most likely to resonate with those accounts and at which geographic locations. When used correctly, this results in better prospect experiences and increased conversion rates.

B2B Marketers Are Better Equipped to Leverage Syndication

Finally, B2B marketers have gotten much better at nurturing leads, a prerequisite for content syndication success (see below). Further, marketers’ ability to measure program performance and optimize accordingly has also improved.

Related Article: When Did B2B Marketing Become So Complicated?

The Foundations of a Successful Content Syndication Program

Though content syndication is enjoying a strong resurgence, B2B marketers should take a few steps to ensure success when delving into this marketing channel.

Put Significant Thought and Effort Into Developing Your Target-Account Lists

One of the best things about content syndication is it allows you to select the accounts from which you want leads. You shouldn’t take this selection lightly. A strong target-account list will comprise businesses that both:

Fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) (i.e., firmographic and technographic data); and
Are actively researching topics/keywords related to your products or services (i.e., showing intent to buy, preferably across multiple intent data feeds).

Target the Personas That Really Matter

A common misperception: the higher the title, the more valuable the lead. An executive may have a great deal of decision-making authority, but that doesn’t mean they’re the best personas to target for content syndication, for several reasons:

Executives typically don’t fully recognize the problems your solution solves, and therefore won’t prioritize it, decreasing the chances of lead conversion.
Execs often rely on their subordinates (i.e., directors and managers) to recommend new solutions, because they’re the ones who have the specific expertise needed to evaluate options.
Targeting higher job titles can increase the cost per lead (CPL) substantially, hurting your ability to increase target-account engagement.

If you’re marketing a solution geared directly to helping alleviate executives’ pain points, it may make sense to target them. Yet this often isn’t the case. And it’s far more effective to “get your foot in the door” by initially targeting personas who feel the pain, understand the problem and see the value in your solution. Convince these individuals of your value and they’ll become your internal advocate, which is more powerful than targeting the execs directly. To make this work, however, you must develop your persona profiles before launching a content syndication program.

Select the Right Content Assets According to a Buyers’ Journey

Marketers are often too lax when selecting content assets for their syndication programs. Instead, you should base your asset selection on a carefully developed buyers’ journey map, aligning content to targeted personas and funnel stage.

If you’re using intent data, you should also be segmenting your content syndication programs by target accounts, based on their shared research activities around specific topics. (You can read more using intent signals for content marketing efforts here.)

Content syndication is usually a top-of-funnel channel used to familiarize relevant personas at targeted accounts to specific problems, your brand and your brand’s solution (from a high level). In this context, the content assets you use should:

Educate target audiences on current challenges and trends that they’re facing;
Provide prescriptive advice on what they can do to improve their situation; and
Briefly introduce your brand’s approach to solving the problem or improving efforts.

That said, you can also use content syndication for middle-of-funnel efforts. This is typically more valuable for larger, established companies selling solutions in well-established product categories, and who are focused on differentiating their offering from competitors’.

In either case, having a content map is incredibly important here. Not only will it help you provide the right assets to audiences via the content syndication campaigns, it also supports the effectiveness of your nurturing and sales’ follow-up efforts.

Develop Strategic Nurturing and Follow-Up Processes

Content syndication leads are not the same as inbound leads generated via your website. With inbound leads, prospects are engaging with your brand and its specific solutions; they’ve likely already completed some preliminary research into the problem (which is what led them to your website). They’re further along the buyers’ journey, so sending them over to a business development rep (BDR) for immediate follow-up can make sense.

On the other hand, with content syndication leads, prospects are engaging with your content: the research, ideas and advice around a specific issue. They’re typically far earlier in their journey and should be treated as such. Nurturing these leads with relevant content before BDR follow-up is crucial. If you’re already using intent data to identify which accounts to target in your syndication programs, you should also use it here to designate which content and messaging to use in your nurturing efforts.

Once content syndication prospects have engaged with enough pieces of your content (or have a high enough intent score based on their overall content consumption behaviours), you can send them over to the BDR team — along with an assigned talk track, relevant to the prospect’s interests.

Content syndication is clearly on the rise again, a result of both new capabilities and unfortunate circumstances. Its ability to provide much needed fuel to B2B funnels is clear. But those marketers who put some time and effort into building a solid content marketing framework will see much greater return on their syndication investment than those who don’t.

Feature Image Credit: PALEONTOUR

By David Crane

David Crane is VP of Marketing at Intentsify, a leading provider of intent data solutions. With a decade of tech-industry B2B marketing experience, David leads Intentsify’s go-to-market and messaging strategy.

Sourced from CMS WiRE

In News

Content and Content Marketing Are Not the Same. Here’s How to Frame the Top 11 Content Formats.

September 4, 2020 No Comments

By Julia McCoy.

The term ‘content marketing’ is getting thrown around a lot, but discerning marketers know what’s going on: A lot of things getting labelled as content marketing are anything but.

On the internet, content is anything that expresses thoughts, information or experiences through written, visual, or audio form.

This article is content. The 95 million photos uploaded to Instagram today are content. The 500 hours’ worth of videos uploaded to YouTube in the last 60 seconds are all content.

The internet is built with content and always has been. It also means everyone has content, and everyone creates it all the time.

That creates some confusion when it comes to content versus content marketing. A lot of content is intended to market a brand … but that doesn’t mean the brand does content marketing.

Here’s why.

What does content marketing really look like?

Content marketing is a strategic approach to marketing that emphasizes the creation and delivery of valuable content to attract, retain and convert a clearly defined audience.

In other words, it’s using content strategically to provide solutions to problems that either your business or your readers have. Great examples abound:

The fitness brand that creates a community and encourages its subscribers to share knowledge.
The home décor retailer that distributes a monthly magazine on minimalism and good housekeeping practices.
The SaaS platform that uses gamification to encourage users to discover and get to know its features.
The travel company that uses a thrilling interactive website to hint at the experiences it offers.
The health supplement site that publishes a vegan recipe blog.

Do you see a difference? All of these efforts position you as an authority in your industry, demonstrate your expertise in your topic over the long run and cultivate trust in your audience by putting their needs and interests first.

How to tell if you’re doing it right

You’re doing content marketing (and not just content creation or digital marketing) if your content:

Puts your audience first. Be customer-focused, not company-focused. You’re delivering helpful, valuable content and letting the customer decide when they trust you enough to buy from you.
Links back to a business goal or solution to a problem. You’ve laid out how your content works together to further your business goals.
Rarely, if ever, actively promotes your brand outright. CTAs are great, but you aren’t trying to push your readers to your solutions.
Attracts readers to your turf. You’re building authority by providing readers with a destination to which they can keep returning.
Gets published consistently and continuously. You’re building trust by proving you’re an expert in the matter over time rather than publishing one-offs.
Uses metrics to measure and optimize. You can identify what’s performing well, and where you need to improve based on data.

To master content marketing, you must master these 11 content types.

High-performing content is central to your content marketing, but the way you craft it can make or break your strategy. It’s not enough to simply create eBooks, blogs and catchy social media that provide helpful information … that’s still biased toward your brand.

People are catching on to even that now.

Yet, with all the content creation that you will still do, it can be easy to lose your focus. Here’s an overview of how to use the eleven main types of content in content marketing:

Blogs. Make sure they’re optimized for SEO because they’re one of the best ways to boost your page ranks. Include a CTA and consider opening up comments for further engagement.
Case studies. Illustrate your expertise by taking your readers on a journey that showcases solutions to their pain points.
eBooks. They make great lead magnets, especially when you craft a magnetizing title and supply information people can’t find elsewhere.
Emails. Write direct, powerful, concise copy that contains information that can change your readers’ lives. They’re a direct line to your audience and can build long-lasting relationships when done well.
Headlines. Powerful, compelling headlines (that don’t sound spammy!) let your readers know exactly what they’re getting. They’re also a great way to convey brand with language.
Meta titles and descriptions. Put yourself in your readers’ shoes and let them know you have the answers they’re searching for right now.
Product descriptions. Optimize with keywords and describe products in terms of benefits rather than features.
Social media posts. Create an experience that puts them at the center and encourages engagement. This helps your audience connect with your brand emotionally and can help you find their pain points.
Video scripts. Tell your brand’s story engagingly. You can also include the script text on the page to make your content more accessible, and boost SEO.
Web content. Make important or helpful information prominent, include a clear CTA, and use high-quality images to craft a powerful message.
White papers. Explore relevant topics in-depth and give your target audience ideas that they can apply to their own problems or daily life.

Content making content marketing work: an example

By now, I hope I’ve demonstrated how content creation is intrinsic to content marketing. However, just because you’re creating content, it doesn’t mean you’re doing content marketing.

I want to drive things home with an example.

Let’s say that we’re growing an athletic clothing brand and looking for ways to attract more customers to our e-commerce site. We’ve decided to turn to content marketing for help. It might look like this:

1. You want to increase your brand’s presence on Google and social media, but you don’t want to constantly annoy your readers with ads. How else can you get your brand in front of your readers?

You decide that the best way forward is to start a blog full of topics that interest your readers. A few things that come to mind include clean eating, exercising at home, and personal empowerment. You can also talk about clothes, of course, but your models can all wear your brand, which eliminates the need for more direct advertising.

2. You start your blog, set up your social media and let your following know about it.

Engagement metrics indicate that readers are most excited about exercising at home. Looking through their comments, you notice that things like staying focused, finding the right space, and keeping a schedule are all major pain points that they have.

3. You respond by creating an online guide to exercising at home.

You use a combination of eBooks chock-full of challenges that are available as lead magnets, and video tutorials for exercises hosted on your site. To demonstrate how popular your guides are, you create a way for users to record their progress and encourage each other.

4. To maintain engagement, you start up an email newsletter with the latest challenges, shoutouts for people who have achieved their goals and occasionally a promo here or there.

Throughout this, you continue to grow your online community, adding more content to your blog that addresses questions or pain points. You even start a hashtag that your followers can use to highlight their fitness efforts so that they can spread the word about you.

5. At some point, you realize that you can enrich your readers’ experience with case studies and white papers.

You begin to include “white papers” about health and fitness that are relevant to your target audience. You also start to create case studies of “success stories” from your community.

6. As fitness centers start to notice what you’re doing, you start getting offers for sponsored classes and requests to sell your brand in their shops.

Your content marketing is now extending your brand’s reach into the offline world. You’ll continue all of the efforts above, as the results are feeding further content production.

Can you spot all eleven content types above? Look carefully. They’re here.

(Bonus: Do you know what brand I just described? Spoiler: This is Athleta’s content marketing strategy. Check it out at https://events.athleta.com/)

Now you know the difference between content and content marketing in 2020.

The main difference between content versus content marketing? Content marketing involves a lot more than just content creation. In fact, the emphasis isn’t content creation at all, but crafting an experience that improves the lives of your readers. If you’re putting your readers first, addressing pain points and producing exceptional quality content consistently, then you’ll grow your brand while you cultivate authority and trust. That’s content marketing.

Hopefully, I’ve left you with an idea or two about your content marketing strategy. Now, go forth and convert that target audience into passionate fans.

Feature Image Credit: sunanman | Getty Images

By Julia McCoy

Sourced from Entrepreneur

In News

Are You Posting Good Content? Find Out With These 16 Quality Assessment Methods

July 1, 2020 No Comments

Sourced from Forbes

Successful PR, media strategy, creative and advertising executives from Forbes Agency Council share trends and tips

Content marketing has evolved to become a unique field within the marketing industry. One of the things that businesses have realized when it comes to content marketing is that quality trumps quantity. Companies have understood these developments, and as a result, have been taking more notice of what they share with their audience.

How does a business go about determining if their content is good enough to inform, educate and engage its customers? To answer this question, we consulted 16 experts from Forbes Agency Council about their own experience with content quality assessment. They share their favourite methods below.

1. Do A Little Research

One of the more proven strategies to ensure you’re creating content consumers want is by leveraging properties that allow said consumers to ask their questions. Quora is one such property. Find a relevant category and look for questions that may be trending. Be sure to be as helpful with your response as you can. In doing so, you may find you’ve discovered something new to write about. – Stephen Kleiner, Bloom Ads Global Media Group

2. Look At Relevant KPIs

Quality content can be assessed by looking at KPIs (key performance indicators) including search visibility, dwell time and engagement. Search visibility shows how a website’s content ranks for a wide range of keyword combinations. Dwell time reveals the length of time a person spends looking at a web page’s content, and engagement measures the interests, opinions and thoughts of the reader. – Don Dodds, M16 Marketing

3. Start With Your Sales Team

“Quality” content is in the eye of the beholder — in this case, the customer. Starting with your sales team to find out what prospects are asking about and wanting to solve lets the marketing team focus on how to tell the story of how your brand can uniquely solve those issues. When you can answer questions before they’re asked in your own way tied to your brand values, that’s a quality promise. – Courtney Smith Kramer, Co-Active Training Institute / Co-founder PureMatter

4. Use Data And Analytics Tools

Instead of making assumptions about what your target audience finds useful, use data to see what actually resonates with them. Use analytics tools to understand how your content is being shared on social media and how it compares to your competitors. Dive into what types of content have been most successful for you and your competitors, and use that to assess your content’s quality. – JP Johl, AdTribute

5. Conduct A Content Audit

A content audit enables you to take a deep look at the strengths and weaknesses of your current content strategy in order to determine how to improve moving forward. A complete content audit includes assessing your current topics, link structure, metadata and so on. This allows you to identify gaps and pitfalls in your current content strategy that you can use to improve future marketing campaigns. – Adam Binder, Creative Click Media

6. View Its Quality In A Rounded Way

Impressions, interactions, consumption and the relationship between each are important data to understand in order to answer questions such as, “Is there enough?”, “Was it pitched at the right audience?”, “Was it the right ‘quality’?” But the eyes of your experienced content experts are still important perspectives to complement the data-driven universe. – Ken Mainardis, Getty Images

7. Monitor Engagement Statistics

The best way to assess the quality of your content is to monitor the engagement stats — views, shares, likes, comments and subscribes. If you’re new to generating content, take a look at your competition’s content and engagement. What generates the most buzz? Assessing engagement is a great way to give your audience more of what they want and stay top of mind. – Chelsey Pendock, Innovision Advertising

8. Ask Yourself If You Like It

If you, as a user, wouldn’t engage with your own content, it’s probably not ready for prime time. Before you hit publish, ask yourself, “Does the content inform, inspire or entertain you?”, “Does it serve a purpose aside from promoting your own business and agenda?” Make sure you’ve answered “yes” to both before putting it out into the world. – Kate Weidner , SRW

9. Determine How Much Value It Gives

By giving people a tremendous amount of value in the content that gets put out, you immediately build trust. People still buy from people and trust matters now more than ever. – Seth Winterer, Digital Logic

10. Work With Professional Editors

You should not have the same person who is writing content be the one editing it. Instead, hire an editor or work with an agency that has professional editors to review your content for grammar and style and ensure you’ve cited the correct sources and that the content flows organically. Editors do a lot more than catch misplaced commas, and they are well worth the investment. – Kelsey Raymond, Influence & Co.

11. Look At Your Biggest Competitors

Research is crucial when it comes to generating engaging content. Looking at your biggest competition and what they’re putting out in terms of content, be on top of what’s trending in your industry. Try and emulate what’s getting good engagement and make it better by adding more personality to it. – Sam Founda, Social Connection

12. Check Traffic And Rankings

Days after you’ve posted the content and made sure Google was aware of it, we suggest taking a look at the organic page traffic, number of associated indexed keywords and the rankings of those keywords. If you’ve written something of high quality that’s helpful to your buyers and also has demand in your marketplace, Google will reward that page over time with more views. – Dustin DeTorres, DeTorres Group

13. Plan Ahead With A Survey

Putting together a survey to assess key messaging to a targeted audience before going wide is an important tactic to build into your strategy. Before investing valuable time and resources in messaging that may not have the impact you initially thought, a survey gives you the opportunity to readjust on a cost-effective and targeted basis. – Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, Hawthorne LLC

14. Assess If It’s Useful For Non-Customers

Ask yourself this question when reviewing a concept for any new piece of content: “Will this piece be useful to someone who is not a customer of mine, and might not ever be?” That question helps you determine if the content is valuable to a broader audience or simply serves as a soft promotion for your products. The best performing content is objective and product-neutral. – Amith Nagarajan, rasa.io

15. Aim To Answer Ideal Customers’ Questions

As a business, we’ve hired consultants to deep dive into our client’s psyche to understand their top questions and concerns in doing business with us. This has led us to a list of five key questions all prospective clients ask. One way we assess the quality of the content we put out is to ask ourselves if this content is going to help answer or provoke thought around one of those questions. – Patrick Dillon, WISE Digital Partners

16. Evaluate Relevance By Using Personalized Visuals

Quality content is increasingly rooted in relevance. Brands can tap into user-generated content (UGC) to create highly personalized messages through regional, demographic and culturally-specific imagery. Consumers want to see themselves, their lives and, subsequently, their needs reflected in the brands they support, which cultivates a high-quality overall brand experience. – Analisa Goodin, Catch&Release

Sourced from Forbes

In News

How to Make a Great Marketing Campaign

June 9, 2020 No Comments

Sourced from appPicker

Every successful marketer would want to create a marketing campaign that would bring about the company’s desired results. Alas, every marketing campaign, no matter how well formulated is never devoid of challenges. Add in the fact that budgetary constraints is also another factor that complicates the entire process. The good news is that it is indeed possible to be able to do more even on a meagre budget. You just have to determine the best approach that will help make your marketing campaign entirely successful. Below are some tips that have been proven helpful in making a marketing campaign work to your company’s favour.

Invest on a perfect platform.

No matter how good you think your marketing campaign is but if you are not using the right platform for it chances are high that your efforts will only be in vain. If you truly want to make your campaigns reap the expected results, invest in the best marketing platform that has been known to work wonders in turning everything into a successful campaign. Never let your precious time be wasted on manually sending emails to your targeted audience. Let the power of automation send those emails to the right people, at the right time.

Be more specific.

If you think you can do it on a granular approach, then the better your marketing campaign would be. This way, you will be able to target your most specific audience and then design all your marketing efforts in a way that pleases every persona in your target market. Make sure that your created content, planned events and promotions will most likely engage every persona that fits your company’s target audience. Do not forget to harness the benefits of data capture as well so it would be easier for you to remarket later as you need to come up with future marketing campaigns.

Never settle for mediocre content.

Instead, always opt for an evergreen content that is classified high-value to your target audience. Although this may sometimes depend on the budget that has been earmarked for a specific marketing campaign but in most cases a greater amount of budget is usually set aside for content distribution rather than for content creation. However, if you want your marketing campaign to have increased organic growth then invest more into the creation of high-quality content.

Test and analyse.

Testing your promotional activities can be quite costly and time-consuming. However, if it is part of your first-ever marketing campaign you will realize that it will be more cost-effective if you consider testing your promotions to focus groups before declaring an official launch. This is when you have to make use of feedback and surveys. Afterwards, study the results and carefully analyse the efficiency of your campaign. If you need to hire an expert to help you analyse the results, then do so.

The best marketing campaign allows your brand to be known to its target market. Otherwise, your start-up business will only remain the best kept-secret in town – literally. Luckily, you have many ways to prevent such a thing from happening. Follow the tips mentioned in this article and be prepared to get blown away by the results.

Sourced from appPicker

In News

Want Your Content to Succeed? Make it Resonate with the Right Audience (no, not that one).

June 3, 2020 No Comments

By Rand Fishkin

You know the stats. 75% of content gets no links. 91% of content earns no Google traffic. 85%+ of content earns fewer than ten social shares. And we’re not even talking about all web content — just those pieces creators produced specifically to earn shares, links, rankings, and traffic. Tragically, much like the US economy, content marketing is a winner-take-all world.

IMO, when high-quality, well-produced content fails, three big forces are to blame:

1) There’s more competition than ever before: literally hundreds of millions of publishers, brands, and individuals are creating and amplifying content in attempts to earn attention. Simultaneously, the content bar has been massively raised: what stood out from the crowd in 2010 would be lucky to get 1/10th the attention 10 years later.

2) A tiny handful of monopolies control most web traffic (Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Instagram, etc) and they are working hard to keep visitors on their platforms rather than sending them out. Less than half of Google searches result in a click. The median Facebook page post reaches <0.1% of followers. On Instagram it’s <1.6%, on Twitter <0.05%.

3) Most content creators target the wrong audience.

There isn’t much marketers and creators can do about #1 or #2, but we can do something about that third force: shift our efforts to reach the people and publications able to amplify our work and send real traffic.

At the core of the problem is how so many companies establish the wrong incentives for content creators:

Exec: “We need more customers, but we’ve exhausted our advertising opportunities, so I want you to invest in content marketing.”

Marketer: “Got it. Content’s a slow, flywheel-based investment, but over time we can create a great channel if we earn awareness, trust, and amplification from a broad community.”

Exec: “Let me be more specific. I want you to write blog posts that will convert visitors into customers. You’ll be measured by the expense of your team’s time vs. the conversions we can directly attribute to your posts. If it’s better than the dollars we put into Google & Facebook ads, you can keep the program going.”

Marketer: “Wait… but that’s not… you can’t compare content against the built-in, designed-for-attribution-so-you’ll-buy-more measurability of ads when they intentionally obfuscate organic…”

Exec: “Good talk! Look forward to seeing your progress.”

Ugh. We’ve all been there.

But let’s assume you have some buy-in. Perhaps the nightmarish economic picture presented by a global pandemic has opened your organization’s eyes to the value of building future demand and reducing dependency on expensive advertising? If so, you’ve still got a strategic beast to slay.

Most content, right from conception, still adheres to a vastly over-simplified notion: reach potential customers with content so we can convert them into paying customers. In a zoomed-out view of marketing, this is technically accurate (the worst kind of accurate). But, the zoomed-in view looks way different.

Content can nudge some people who see it to check out your products or services. It might even nudge some of those people to buy. Usually, it does those things as part of a long, complex journey that starts with discovery around a space, moves to awareness of your brand, then into realization-of-a-problem and, finally, evolves into seeking out your solution. Try to rush that process, and you’ll turn most of the audience off. Create content exclusively for those who already know they need your solution, and you’re cutting off your best chance to make content a valuable channel.

In the graphic above, the “Discovery” and “Awareness” groups will always be 10-1,000X larger than the “Problem-Experiencing” or “Solution-Seeking” groups. So, if your content continually targets bottom-of-the-funnel audiences, you’ll quickly run out of newcomers, and often be perceived as a brand outlet that’s merely pounding a limited attention-span begging for sales.

But, it’s not just the funnel; it’s the individuals in that funnel.

Content Audience: The Four Groups -- current customers, potential customers, potential amplifiers, and the broader community.

Your content audience is and should be fundamentally different from your product or sales audience. You’re not (and shouldn’t be) trying to sell everyone who consumes your content. You should, however, be trying to earn amplification and engagement from everyone who consumes your content.

That doesn’t always mean links or social shares. It could mean a private reference, an email, a “hey what was that great cartoon show you told me about last time we hung out?“

But, if you want to earn amplification, the kind you’ll need to build a true content flywheel, you need to appeal to an audience that has both the ability to amplify and channels on which to spread the word. Years ago, these people were called “influencers,” but that noun’s come to mostly refer to a specific kind of Instagram or YouTube creator that’s far too narrow and often irrelevant to what most brands outside swimwear, fitness gear, travel, and a few other often-superficial consumer product companies care about. So, instead, let’s call them “potential amplifiers.”

These potential amplifiers are one of several audiences you should be targeting content toward in the creation and conception phase. They’re the group with the greatest ability to help build your content flywheel, and thus, I often recommend making them the biggest target for your content efforts. If you’re writing or making videos or podcasts for your existing audience or fans, the rate of new-fan attraction will naturally be lower than if you’re also making those things for potential amplifiers.

Maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe some of the things you create for your existing audience or even for potential customers will end up being things that also appeal to potential amplifiers. But why risk it? The far wiser move is to recognize this reality, and intentionally create content meant to get industry publications, potential niche evangelists, customer evangelists you already have, and mainstream press interested.

The most successful content — the stuff that earns amplification, builds your brand in content, gets you subscribers and followers, and eventually leads to future conversions — that stuff sits at the intersection of appealing to both potential amplifiers and potential customers.

But, honestly, if I could only choose one… I’d take the amplifiers. Because once people know, like, and trust you, the path to conversion is wide open.

By Rand Fishkin

Sourced from SparkToro