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Mining for Content Ideas – Next Level

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By Meghan Pahinui

Not to state the obvious, but as marketers, part of our job is to create content. Whether it’s in the form of blog posts, landing pages, social media posts, emails, newsletters, and so on – there’s no way to get around it. It is a critical component of our job. And sometimes, it can be challenging to come up with new ideas or ways to iterate on old ones. With the world consuming content at lightning speed, it is becoming even more difficult to keep up with the expectation of turning out fresh content.

We’ve recently published some excellent pieces on the Moz Blog all about content distribution and strategy, including the Whiteboard Fridays “How to Maximize Content” and “A Content Engine that Drives Revenue” (both from Ross Simmonds). And, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, content ideation and inspiration can come from anywhere. But what if I told you that you can also use the Moz tools to mine for content ideas? Let’s dig into different ways to use the Moz tools to supplement our content strategies.

Find gaps in your existing content

When supplementing or modifying your content strategy, a good place to start is by examining your existing content and finding the gaps. This can help identify new content ideas and areas where your content strategy may be missing key opportunities to thrive.

The Keyword Gap tool in Moz Pro allows you to enter your site and up to 3 competitors to identify Keywords to Improve and Top Competing Content.

Pro tip: Not sure who your online competitors are? Or just want to confirm and scope out who they may be? Check out the True Competitor tool to find out.

The Keywords to Improve section is instrumental when identifying gaps in your existing content strategy. After entering the sites you’d like to compare, the tool will list keywords for which you and your competitors rank. You can then use the filter option to see only specific segments of keywords. For example, we may want to see only keywords where we’re ranking on the second page to identify opportunities for content improvements. We will even show you the Traffic Lift for those keywords, which is the amount of traffic we estimate you can gain by overtaking your competitor in the SERP.

Another great use case for this tool is to identify new content ideas. Let’s say we’re working on building out the “best of” section of our foodie blog; we can filter to see keywords that include “Best,” as seen in the screenshot below. We can then identify keywords for which we’re not ranking, but our competitors are and work to build content around them. In this case, we’re not ranking for “Best Pizza in Los Angeles,” so we may want to see about creating a blog post about this topic.

Spotting these content gaps can strengthen your content strategy. It can not only help spark ideas for new content but also help identify places where your content can be improved or refreshed for better performance.

Identify what type of content is performing

One of the best places to get ideas for content is to see what kind of content is already out there and performing. Top Competing Content in Keyword Gap can provide insight into what is performing well by listing content your competitors rank for with the Content URL and Top Ranking Keywords.

In this example, we can see that one of the competitors I’ve entered ranks well for keywords related to choosing a mattress size and, perhaps more importantly, that the content ranking is from their blog. We can now look at the blog posts themselves to get an idea of what format has been successful for them and what information they are including. We can ask ourselves:

  • Is this a topic we can cover on our site?

  • Do we already cover this, but it’s not ranking as well?

  • Is there a way we can improve the content or add a different perspective, format, or content type to the space?

The possibilities are endless!

Spot tangential content ideas

Sticking with Top Competing Content in Keyword Gap, let’s see if we can spot some ideas for tangential content. As Amanda Milligan discusses in her Whiteboard Friday episode, content ideas which aren’t directly related to your product can often lead to positive outcomes like links, social shares, and brand awareness. These peripherally related topics can supplement your content strategy and help create a well-rounded library of assets.

Sticking with our mattress company example, let’s say we are looking for content ideas to help build out our newly launched blog. We may know that there is value in creating pieces around mattress-related topics like deciding on a mattress size or determining what firmness would be best, but what tangential content ideas can we identify in our research? The example above shows that our competitors are ranking for content related to topics like weighted blankets and sleep hygiene. These could be great opportunities for me to create new content not directly related to mattresses but still related to the sleep industry.

Uncover hidden gems

Just like content creation, keyword research is a fundamental part of SEO and marketing strategies. And as you’re out there digging into things like search volume, difficulty, and SERP analysis, you may be able to uncover some hidden gems to inform your content strategy as well.

Hopping over to Keyword Explorer, we can mine for content ideas in the Keyword Suggestions section of the tool. Keyword Suggestions will provide a list of keywords related to the seed keyword entered, sorted by Relevancy to the original term. You can also apply filters for the source type, grouping preferences, and volume to further define your results.

Let’s start by looking at the option to filter titled Display keyword suggestions that. This filter defaults to Include a mix of sources, but an option in the drop-down could be the ace up your sleeve when it comes to content ideation – the filter option called are questions. By selecting are questions, we can see a list of the types of questions searchers ask in relation to our initial keyword.

In this example, consider that we work for a real estate agency and are researching content related to buying a house. Filtering our keyword suggestions by are questions will provide us with specific content ideas related to what people ask when buying a home. This can offer a gold mine of content ideas to flesh out a real estate blog or website to help clients find the information they seek.

We can even take this research one step further by grouping our keyword suggestions by lexical similarity. Just a reminder here that lexical similarity refers to how closely related or similar the keywords in the group are. Low lexical similarity will result in fewer groups with more keywords since the tool will group keywords that are less similar.

Grouping keywords can help us identify additional keywords we may want to target and broad-match keywords that may be worth including in our content. Be mindful of over-optimizing, though! We want to avoid keyword stuffing and cannibalization since they may negatively impact rankings. That being said, consider the below example of how grouping keywords has helped to identify a few content gems.

Using our previous example of “buying a house” as the seed keyword, we’ve grouped our keywords by low lexical similarity. Within the “What to consider when buying a house” group, there are two long-tail keywords which may be great inspiration for a new piece of content for our real estate agency – “what to look for when buying a house checklist” and “what to know when buying a house for the first time.” We can now take that information and create a dedicated resource or a blog post that includes a checklist for what to consider when buying a home for the first time and what the buying process looks like. Imagine the inspiration you can get from digging into these suggestions even further!

Scope out the competition

So far, we’ve identified content opportunities, uncovered new ideas, and found gaps in our existing strategy. But what about our competition? What are they doing? We touched on this a bit using the Keyword Gap tool but let’s dig in further. When modifying your content strategy, it’s important to understand what your competitors are doing and what their audience is engaging with. Although you won’t have access to their traffic data (unless they give you access to it, which is highly unlikely), there is a way you can get an idea of what content may be driving traffic to their site. Or, at the very least, what content is of high value. This is through link analysis. Moz offers quite a few ways to do this, but I’m going to highlight a feature which can help get us started with this research.

Top Pages in Link Explorer will return a list of the pages on a site with the most backlinks. This can provide insight into the types of content people find valuable on a site – pages with more links are more valuable. This is partly because backlinks are a ranking factor. Additionally, all those links provide benefits like traffic, brand exposure, and more.

After inputting a competitor into Top Pages, we can get an idea of which pages on their site provide the most value. In the screenshot above, we can see that this particular competitor has a lot of “best of” articles which gain a lot of links. We can now explore these pages and see if there is an opportunity to create or modify content on our own site to meet similar demands.

Pro tip: Once you’ve created your content, you can use Link Intersect to find domains and pages linking to your competitors and not to you. This can offer a great way to supplement a link building strategy!

Discover opportunities for elevation

Just like creating new content, refreshing your existing URLs is essential to any content strategy. Elevating your existing content is like polishing your jewelry – it helps keep it in tip-top shape, extends the piece’s life, and keeps it relevant to your “collection.” There are many ways to identify and update content in your existing library, but here are two ways to get started (and find new content opportunities in the process).

First, let’s investigate featured snippet opportunities. Once we’ve created a Campaign in Moz Pro and are tracking keywords over time, we will have access to the SERP Features section. This part of the tool tracks SERP features included in the search results for your tracked keywords, including featured snippets.

Exploring which of our tracked keywords have featured snippets in the SERP can help us identify opportunities for content refresh and new pieces of content. When looking for opportunities for a content refresh, we can seek out keywords where we are ranking on the first page of the SERP but are not included in the featured snippet. In this case, the tool will provide insight into what page is included in the featured snippet and our current rank. This can make it easier to spot high-value pages with a chance of moving into that coveted top spot of the SERP.

Alternatively, looking at which of our tracked keywords include a featured snippet but where we are not ranking on the first page (or at all) can help to identify possible opportunities for creating new, high-value content. We’ll just want to be sure to optimize for the featured snippet right from the start.

Pro tip: Export a CSV of the SERP Features data in your Campaign to sort and filter outside the app. If a SERP feature is marked Included in the CSV, it means your site is included in that particular feature. If it’s marked true it means the SERP feature is present for that keyword, but your tracked site isn’t included. 

Next, we’ll pop over to the Page Optimization section of our Campaign. Although the primary purpose of this feature is to illustrate how well-optimized a page is for a particular keyword, there is a hidden gem that can help identify refresh opportunities, new content ideas, and tangential topics. The Content Suggestions tab will list keywords and topics often used on the top-ranking pages for the keyword we’re optimizing for.

In the above example, we’re optimizing for the keyword “best pillow.” Looking at the content suggestions, it may be a good idea to format this content as a list (like “11 best pillows”) or to include information about what types of sleepers would benefit from each pillow listed (like “side sleepers”). These content suggestions can also help us to find ideas for other pieces of content, tangentially related.

Find the sweet spot of innovation

If there’s one thing we can take away from this exploration of content ideation with Moz Pro, it’s that there are infinite ways to do it. This post only covers a handful of them; the reality is that the world (of content creation) is your oyster! The key is to find which features, tools, and processes fit best with your strategy and make them work for you. How do you use the tools to investigate new ideas? I’d love to hear about it!

By Meghan Pahinui

Meghan is a Senior Learning and Development Specialist on the Learning Team at Moz. As a member of the Learning Team, she manages the Moz Help Hub, contributes to the Moz Academy course catalog, and more. She has a passion for instructional design and helping others learn.

Sourced from MOZ

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Confessions of a social media entrepreneur on the pressure to constantly create content

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By Kimeko McCoy

Social media fragmentation, the rise of TikTok and social media’s expedited pivot to video has upped the ante for client expectations. Agency partners in public relations and social media say they’re feeling the impact as clients are increasingly asking for more content, feeding platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels in hopes for a viral moment.

The surge in workload has pushed one social media marketing entrepreneur to remove social media management service offerings to focus on content creation. In this latest edition of our Confessions series, in which we exchange anonymity for candour, we hear from that social media entrepreneur about client expectations in the fast-paced, ever-changing social media landscape.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

As a content creator and social media strategist, what’s your experience in today’s current digital landscape? 

One thing I’ve noticed, for a change, [is] clients don’t necessarily understand what it takes to get the results that we do. They’ll drop a lot of ideas on you at once, or they have a lot of different ideas that they want to do at once, but not necessarily know that it takes a lot to execute it. Then they want you to get it out very timely. This is a process. Sometimes, the process seems a little rushed now because of how fast paced everything is happening — new features and everyone wants to keep up with everybody else. It just seems like people don’t necessarily appreciate the process anymore when it comes to social media experts.

So there’s pressure on you to put out good content fast? How does that impact the way you work? 

It definitely does. My agency recently had 12 clients at once. That was a hard thing to manoeuvre, even now, because of how burnt out I felt in dealing with that. I literally started changing my business activity. I used to say that we specialized in social media management and content creation. Now, I’m saying that we specialize in just content creation.

Why did you do that?

I was making 30 posts a month for my clients. When I got a little bit more experience, I changed my lowest [service] package to 15 posts a month and a few Reels a week. Now, you have to create Reels. It’s just videos. Now, we have to force the clients to get that content. Before, it was just me making the content. I didn’t necessarily need them. But now, I need those Day in the Life videos. I need you to show your expertise, go live and collaborate with others. You have to do these different things now to thrive on these different platforms. [But] they’re busy too. That’s why they hired me. So that has definitely become a struggle within itself too — just being able to connect with my clients for them to get me the content that I need.

What social media platforms are taking up the most of your time and energy? 

Instagram, definitely. TikTok, I see as the least amount of effort. With all of my clients, we’re able to have fun on TikTok. But with Instagram, everything has to be so technical because some of my clients have different [product] features that some of my other clients don’t. If a client sees something, they’re like, “I want that. Can I do something like that?” And it’s like, “You don’t even have that feature [available on your account].” Then they feel upset and we have to manage expectations. [Clients asked for more] when Reels came out. When video content literally took over, because everybody wanted to be seen. When Reels dropped, that’s the only way people saw people’s content. [It] was through video content.

You said Instagram Reels is a heavier lift for you, in terms of content production than TikTok. Why? 

Everybody wants to be perfect on Instagram. TikTok thrives off of authenticity. You can literally do a video of you in bed, talking about whatever and it will blow up because people love you, relate to you… As far as Instagram, you may not see a post for three days that somebody posted. Or you may not see somebody’s story because Instagram is only showing 10% of their followers’ posts. There’s so many technical things with Instagram now that’s just drawing people away.

By Kimeko McCoy

Sourced from DIGIDAY

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How to Create Content for Different Purposes: Branding, Sales, and Retention

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By Tom Gil

Different parts of the sales funnel need different content types. Here’s how to make them.

We often talk about content creation and repurposing it using different channels, like blogs and social media. What isn’t often mentioned is how to create different types of content for different stages of the sales funnel: branding, sales, and retention.

Every end goal can call for a different kind of content. For example, you might need content that’s designed to move people closer to a sale, make you more memorable (branding), or help you maintain clients (retention). Usually, in your marketing funnel, your target audience is within one of these three stages:

  1. Awareness (made aware of your brand)
  2. Consideration (considering your solution)
  3. Decision (moving towards buying from you)

What content the customer needs to consume in each stage differs. But the first hurdle, as Devin Reed, head of content strategy at Gong, notes, is simply making all your marketing messages relevant to the consumer: “When it comes to actually creating engaging content, it needs to be relevant, insightful, and actionable. This is critical if you want to grab — and keep — their attention. Unfortunately, most B2B companies focus on themselves, specifically their product/service, and as a result, their content is boring and fails to influence how their audience thinks or acts.”

Retention

Your end goal shouldn’t be to simply make a sale. Instead, it should be to create loyal, long-term customers. Here are three methods you can implement today for better retention content:

  1. Use storytelling in your marketing: Customer-focused stories win. Describe how your product or service empowered a business with a solution that yielded results.
  2. Publish quality content consistently: Creating a blog is crucial nowadays. Aside from helping you rank higher on search engines, it enables you to build trust with your ideal customers and craft a unique voice for your brand.
  3. Continue to educate your audience: Having a separate section for unique studies and stories (not blogs) is a way to stand out, and is one of the best ways to show up for your audience consistently. Try different mediums, like podcasts, vlogs, guides, and case studies.

Now, let’s focus on a topic that is often ignored. Retention branding.

Are you pleasantly waving customers good-bye when they choose to leave or are you pointing a sword at their backs, making them walk the plank while they gaze at sharks below?

Even after you lost the battle — when a client cancels their membership or unsubscribes — the psychology of user offboarding is paramount. Just like the aftertaste a drink can leave you with, the offboarding experience can make or break your brand’s reputation. An unreasonable layer to a journey’s end can cause friction and leave a bitter taste.

Making it hard for customers to leave your product is unethical, and usually does more harm than good. There is a way to make a person smile even as they’re about to unsubscribe. AppSumo‘s messaging around cancelling a subscription is a good example: The unsubscribe screen says “It looks like you’ve had enough of us (tough but fair).” A small thing like that can take a stressful process and make it more enjoyable. It’s a reminder of what brands should do: let you leave with a smile, remembering them positively.

That’s retention branding. If you still want to leave, at least you left smiling. If you changed your mind, you stayed smiling. You smiled either way, and that matters.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Tom Gil

Certified real estate copywriter & marketing consultant

Sourced from Inc.

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It’s Never Been Better To Be Talent

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By Alex Kantrowitz

If you make stuff for the internet, and are good at it, you are very happy right now.

It’s an absolutely incredible moment to be creating stuff online.

After long neglecting people who create content for their products, the tech platforms are showering them with money, support, and opportunity. Facebook just pledged $1 billion to creators by 2022. TikTok is on its way there. YouTube, Pinterest, and others are promising millions of their own. Snapchat wouldn’t return creators’ calls a few years ago; now, it’s paying them millions per month.

We’re seeing a stark — but inevitable — shift in the conventional belief that user-generated content was enough to fill social platforms’ feeds, and keep them vibrant. It turns out that making videos, photos, or words that people want to watch or read is difficult. Only a select few are good at it. And the platforms are all competing for their work. So, it’s advantage: talent.

“We want to build the best platforms for millions of creators to make a living,” Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday, no doubt looking at TikTok’s hasty, creator-driven incursion on his territory. The bulk of Facebook’s payments will likely go to thousands — not millions — of creators. But its plan to supply a livelihood to individuals who post on its services represents a significant shift.

Just five years ago, a group of Vine creators walked into Twitter’s headquarters and asked to be paid for their work. Going viral was fun, they said, but the app would be nothing without them, so they wanted to be compensated. Twitter balked at the request, Vine crumbled, and the rest is history. Creators moved to Snapchat and YouTube (the former had promise, the latter had money), and both platforms are now worth billions.

When TikTok arrived a few years later, it didn’t rely on its technology alone. The company struck deals with creators, paid some of them salaries, and emailed updates winking at what trends would be popular (check out Bloomberg’s Foundering podcast for more). TikTok’s creators responded, and it’s now the most vibrant social app in the world. TikTok recently became the first non-Facebook app to hit 3 billion downloads. And Facebook is now so concerned that, on top of the $1 billion it’s spending on creators, it’s running a set of experiments that would essentially turn Instagram into TikTok.

Facebook and its counterparts’ plans to pay creators are unique because they empower the individual. Tech platforms like Facebook have paid limited sums to media companies like Viacom and Hearst to produce video for their apps. But the platforms long viewed individual creators as insignificant players who could be satisfied with a brand deal. Now, they see the individual creator as the key differentiator, so they’re paying the talent directly. No middlemen.

A similar shift is taking place in journalism, where tech companies are throwing money at individual journalists and putting pressure on institutions to pay stars and keep them happy. “Lucky for me, if not for you, it’s a rare moment right now where it’s actually good to be talent,” Choire Sicha said as he left his job running The New York Times’ Styles section, one of journalism’s most desirable management jobs.

Asked to elaborate, Sicha said journalists are “just a part of a larger boom” where individuals are getting “some weird fat one-off paychecks.” He emailed:

Podcasts, newsletters and the digital media subscriber business overall means that people need … actual people, actual voices. (This is why it’s also a boom for people to write pilots and other televisual stuff.) And so, if you are willing to go through the steps to commodify yourself, you’re actually a well-valued commodity! Think about how hard a Kara Swisher had to work. They had to start whole companies! Now all you basically have to do is tweet really aggressively for a few months and someone pulls up with $300,000 in Substack Bucks. The real winners are gonna take that money and then go live somewhere cheap and wonderful until they die.

Sicha said he expects this moment to pass. And it may well do so. But until it does, those who create things online will continue to have a blast.

By Alex Kantrowitz

Sourced from Big Technology

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How to Create Quality Content That Ranks

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By Usman Raza    

Quality content does not always rank. The advantage of Author credibility and how up to date the content is can sometimes be irrelevant to how it ranks. That isn’t to say those factors are useless, but content creators tend to miss an important factor that controls ranking: Relevancy.

What is Quality Content?

This is a simple definition. Quality content is determined by its success. If it has achieved a goal, drives traffic, conversions, or Google search rankings, it is seen as quality content.

The quality of content is not determined by what is put into it as much as its effect on a particular audience or search query.

The definition of quality content has shifted from the past, where it was defined by its relevance to a search query. However today, it is formed by relevance to the people who search for it.

What’s the Difference?

When creating content that is relevant, it is important to realize the difference between content that is relevant to a search engine, and relevant to the person searching. Content should be designed to meet the needs of the customer, first and foremost. That is, producing content that meets the needs of the person searching, instead of matching keywords to a search query.

How to Be Relevant

That is not to say using keywords are bad. Instead, evolve your experience with keywords to prioritize those people. People with problems to solve and questions to answer make content Relevant.

Know your Audience

When creating relevant content, it is important to know your target audience. The best way to do this is with tools like Google Analytics. It is designed to analyze different aspects of a website, from viewer location, most and least searched content and best to worst content.

When creating content based on analysis of your website, keep in mind the nature of your target audience. These questions here are perfect to consider what your target audience is all about.

  • Who are they?
  • How old? What gender?
  • What Social status/ background?
  • What do they like?
  • What are there problems?
  • Where do they live?

Now that you have figured out just what your target audience is like, it’s time to produce content that is based on that information. Make sure to write at a level your audience can easily comprehend.

Finding out the nature of your audience is an immensely experimentative path. However, deciding and sticking to a particular niche is the best way to normalize your audience.When posting content on social media, make sure to utilize analytics tools to determine the state of your content in relation to your audience. Audience analysis helps content creators adapt to their needs to keep content relevant to the audience. This is more officially known as data-driven marketing.

Backlinking

Backlinking is a great way to ensure your content is relevant. Web pages rank because websites link back to them. The reason they are linked to the web page is because they add useful information. Giving and receiving backlinks are truly one of the most powerful ways to rank content.

The benefits of backlinks for content ranking are:

Ranking is Organic – Backlinks drive organic traffic to your website. Organic traffic ranks content and web pages a lot higher than paid traffic. Websites and content that ranks organically are also more likely to be clicked.

Organic traffic is ideal for establishing trust with consumers over time while PPC traffic is great for producing short-term conversions.

Index Speed – Backlinked pages can be found more quickly by a search engine’s bots which in turn index’s it much more effectively. The quicker a page is indexed by a search engine, the faster it can start ranking.

Referral Traffic/ Low Bounce Rate – When producing blog content, the aim is to have a low bounce rate. This is the rate at which people come to your website and the time they spend on the website. If the content does not constantly grab the attention of the readers, then high bounce rates are sure to come as a result.

When receiving or giving backlinks, referral traffic is distributed from the referer to the authority content. Referral traffic is good because it usually has a low bounce rate. Since referral traffic is comprised of users looking for extra information relevant to the primary search query, it has lower bounce rates.

Also, referral traffic is trackable in Google Analytics, making it a useful way to monitor the strength of a backlink.

How Backlinks Affect Relevance

Backlinks should come from pages that are relevant to the content. This is how backlinks create relevancy.

When backlinking content to a web page, you create referral traffic to the backlinked website. Although this does not inherently create more traffic to your webpage, it does, however, increase its ranking on a search engine and strengthens the credibility of the page if the backlink is relevant to the page’s topic.

When receiving a backlink from another website, users are referred to you. This improves the relevance of your page and drives referral traffic to your page. Since that traffic is referred, there will be a low bounce rate for users who have searched that topic. This also establishes your page as a form of authority because your source supports related content.

When creating content, It is important to know your audience and seek the support of backlinks. When users view content that is relevant to their needs and supported with information that is also relevant, the content will rank highly in search engines. Use keywords that relate to your target audience and seek the aid of data to drive content that highlights your audience’s needs.

By Usman Raza    

View full profile ›

Sourced from Business 2 Community

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18 Marketing Principles You Need To Strictly Follow For Success.

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Sourced from Beyond Execute

e’ve been doing marketing from almost a decade now and frankly speaking our journey wasn’t easy. Believe me it wasn’t all success. Beginning months was really tough, and we failed a lot. But we keep experimenting and figured out we were making same mistakes over and over again. If some one says that they are best in marketing and know everything, then thats a trap. It requires continues experiments and learning. One thing that we learned is to create marketing principles to strictly follow.

Why create marketing principles?

When creating a project or even this blog post, it helps us. We figure out we were making some small mistakes and wanted to reduce them (and ultimately remove them.). We make this list to ensure we never break them off and we keep adding newly into this list.

Over here are 18 marketing principles we followed with our marketing (and you can too.):

  1. Welcome your new customers.

When you visit a store, usually their staff welcome you. Even if they don’t do so, you can physically see them. But what about an online store? Where your audience can’t see you, how will they trust you? It’s really important to make sure whenever a new audience subscriber’s you or follow you on social media – Greet them!

Make them feel special, like you care for them. Because and of the day they are the one’s who fill your pocket. It’s really easy, let’s begin with email subscriber. Create a Welcome series email (read this to know how to create one.), whenever a person subscribes your list send them welcome email. Include things like – what you do, services or product you offer, articles to read and social media links. You can create welcome series email through email service provider. 

[Recommend – How to attract new email subscribers?]

Social media – truly speaking consider it secondary. If you really want to build customers, focus on creating email list first. A research states that only 30% of your social media audience really care about your service or product. But these 30% can turn into big business, if you care about them. 

Send them messages including intro and link to your website. Several apps can help you send automatic messages to your new followers. You can check it out from here. Mostly they are paid but it’s worth trying. But I would encourage not to do it often, just send them when they follow you.

  1. Marketing Principles #2 – Reply immediately. 

Many brands and businesses have a bad habit of not replying to there followers at all, this damages their reputation. Would you trust a brand or business that doesn’t reply to you at all? I don’t think so. In this period, on social media, people don’t even like to wait for a minute, why would they wait for you for hours. 

Many brands and businesses have a bad habit of not replying to there followers a lot, this damages their reputation. This will not only increase their trust in your brand but also create customer engagement. Replying with words like “Ok”, “Thank you”, isn’t enough. Write engaging comments and keep conversation going. 

  1. Create content like nowhere, with full of secrets.

No wonder content marketing is a powerful way to market your business. It will get you more traffic than any other promotional means. But more than 10,000 blogs are created every month, some of them can be from your niche. So how to stand out? By creating content full of secrets and unique.

It isn’t necessary to have a good-looking blog, but having amazing content like no one else can get you into the spotlight. Others might not know a lot about blogging world but you can catch attention with pouring out some secret tips and tricks in your content. You can create your own marketing principles which helped you minimize small mistakes and focus on development. And many other ways to stand out.

Make sure your content has the right message, and it’s easy for your audience to understand. It doesn’t make sense if it’s written in shabby language or grammar. Check spelling and grammar through online tools. Here is some list of tools you can find helpful.

  1. Marketing Principles #4 – Offer free guides and resources in return for email.

Ok! So you write amazing content, now what? Until and unless your users don’t visit you again, how will you get more engagement and traffic? Less than 10% users who visit your blog sign up to your email list. Its human nature, if you don’t offer something for free or on a discount, they won’t do what you say.

Create downloadable resources or guide. But that’s not it, make it as unique as you can. Fill it with useful resources  and make sure it’s short. Tell me, do you even read or download guide that takes more than 2-3 hours to complete? No! And not even your users will do. So why make the process so complicated?

Free resources have to be detailed and short, and quick to understand. Use images, graphs and infographics; study shows they help readers understand fast. It’s not necessary to only offer free guides, if you’re a designer you can offer some free downloadable designs or templates. 

When you offer them something to download for free ask them to subscribe. This way you’ll get to build up email list and whenever you send them email about updates they can visit to your site.

[Recommended: How to start attracting users to sign up to your email list?]

  1. Ask yourself why would someone like your content and get hooked with it.

Everyone writes content but users like to visit blogs that write with quality and informative content. No matter how effective your traffic generation skills are, you won’t win if people don’t understand why they should buy from you over the competition. A great example of this is Airbnb. They beat Home Away and are worth roughly ten times more.

Typically, ask or take surveys from your audience. Ask them if your content is understandable or it effectively helps them buy your product or how can they improve. Keep conversation going.

  1. Marketing Principles #6 – Create infographics.

Infographics summarizes whole blog post into images and graphs. Usually, people like to share it, cause they are easy to understand and can get you a lot of traffic (if you share them on Pinterest). Creating infographics is easy and doesn’t require much effort. So it is advisable to include at least one infographic in your every post.

  1. Create headlines that says about the entire blog post.

70% of people read you posts title and description through search engine and only 25% will click on it. To increase the percent you need to take your time writing effective and click-worthy headlines. Even if you write content related to what your users are searching for, but your headline isn’t descriptive, then why would they click to it and visit your site. It’s a good idea to invest on click worthy headlines and description. 

  1. Marketing Principles #8 – Be everywhere.

Normally, you’ll hear focus on developing one social media or channel or community, and create engagement. But today if you aren’t everywhere you won’t be able to attract audience. Over these years many communities and social media platforms have been created and disappeared. It always keeps changing algorithms, that might affect your business and traffic. So why worry about this? 

Imagine being on 10 different social media or community platforms, the amount of traffic it’ll generate. Mostly, if you stick to one social media, like Instagram, you won’t be getting as much traffic from this single source as you’ll be getting from 10 different sources. Comparatively, if you use one platform you get only 37% of traffic, but if you’re at 10 different places you’ll get 48% traffic from all those sources. 

Though, you don’t have to be available on all these platforms all the time. You can set a time or day per week. Some of them don’t even require you to be there all the time. Here are different places you can traffic from.

  1. Marketing Principles #9 – Define your USP.

USP (Unique Selling Proposition) describes about your business and why it’s different from your competitors. In such a competitive world it’s really important to stand out and define your USP, to let your audience have an option to choose from.

18 marketing principles to follow by beyond execute

  1. Like, comment and share other stuff.

Competition is healthy when it’s good. It’s great to be connected with your competitors because sometimes they can be in your need or via versa. If you don’t have connection or don’t know much people in your industry. You can build connection with them through continuously liking and commenting on there posts or articles.

At time, if there is some useful content that you find interesting you can share it with your audience. This can both getting exposer to their audience and building connection with influencers. You need to begin by creating contacts with other influencers, don’t wait for them to notice you and share your content. 

  1. Make is easy for people to share your content

Most of the time when your content is very unique and very well detailed, people will like to share it with there network or audience. So make it easy for users to share your content. You can install image sharer, if you use WordPress install plugins like SumoME or AddThis. They will help users share images to there accounts.

But having an option to share where you aren’t is useless. Suppose you gave an option to share your content on Reddit but you don’t have a Reddit account it’s a good idea, because at the end of the day they would like to subscribe to your account to receive more updates. So, make sure to keep minimum options to reach higher audience.

  1. Marketing Principles #12 – Weekly send email newsletter with updates.

It’s important to keep your subscribers up-to-date with your business. No wonder you might be sending email about your latest posts but it’s important to keep them updated with your latest improvement or development. Sending weekly email newsletter can be effective. You learn every day and revamp your content, website and taste everyday, so to ensure your audience is keeping up with you through weekly updates can increase engagement.

Many a times your subscribers don’t even open your latest blog post email. To make sure they get updates on what you published this week can be done through weekly newsletter. Include from whatever milestone you have achieved to what you published on your social media.

  1. Marketing Principles #13 – Optimize your site with SEO.

SEO – One of the main reason for your website ranking. Take time to optimize your website with SEO. Make sure your every important page is indexed with search engine. If not, submit it to search engine. Whenever you publish a new blog post make sure to submit the link to search engine. You can easily do it through Webmaster by Google.

Use plugin, either Yoast or All-in-one SEO, to check your post is fully optimized for SEO as per preferred by search engine.

  1. Marketing Principles #14 – Consider ads.

No matter how much traffic you get from organic marketing, it’s never going to be as fast as paid media. You really have to go through strategic way to spend less on paid media and get higher ROI. We did create an article on how to start with social media ads. If you have budget it’s advisable to invest in paid social media marketing.

  1. Keep updating your old posts.

We still get traffic from our old posts. So, it’s necessary to keep them updated with new experiments and tips. Almost 60% of our traffic is driven by old posts. Most links get broken or content requires some changes. There are plenty of things that you can do with content that you’ve already published to make it more up-to-date.

Brian Dean from Backlinko, for example, has only published around 30 posts in two years. Yet, he keeps all of his posts up to date by rewriting them and adding new information as he finds it. But some of them needs to be updates in every once-in-while.

  1. Start a campaign to attract followers.

Companies like Airbnb, got popular through social media campaigns they started to attract users. Campaigns not only create customer engagement but also drive huge traffic. People enjoy taking part in campaigns that are trending today and to make your campaign trendy, you need to make sure your campaign is interesting to people.

Campaigns might take a lot time to create, but they are worth sending your time and dedication. Create such campaigns that send some social message or value some cause and people are willing to take part in it.

  1. Add affiliated links to your content.

Even if you are starting at small and get very few views on your post. You can still earn something from Affiliate Links. There are always people within your space who aren’t competitors and have an established user base. Have a dedicated resource continually reaching out and partnering with these sites and companies. Make sure you use “nofollow” on those links because Google doesn’t prefer any kind of paid content or links.

  1. Build a Community and create engagement.

Whether you know it or not, your business has a community. To collect loyal fans or customers, build a community either paid or free. This can help you stand apart. Most businesses don’t think beyond collecting emails, but you can be the one building a strong and huge community. You can give your exclusive community members offers you don’t give it to outsider, this can make them fell special.

You can also keep only those people who gradually create engagement and are loyal to your business. Mostly these types of community is offered only by inviting. So, make sure you create a one and build a loyal fan base community. 

This marketing principles list is not done!

We’ll keep adding new principles as we encounter new issues. Some of these will be obvious you but not to others. Consider creating your own marketing principles list for you and your team to follow. It shouldn’t be only under marketing department; you can create it under any field or department.

Sourced from Beyond Execute

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