Month: August 2017

“Mamma let’s do an interesting cake this time. It’s needs to have a good design”. That was my 10-year-old’s demand for her birthday. She was bored of our usual bakery shop which had been baking her birthday cakes since she was 3. I listened, frowned and then gave in on the logic that she at least said “better design”. So I sat hunting for a cake shop on Google – one that could do “awesome” designs and also bake yummy cakes too. Google pushed me to Zomato, which showed several bakeries that served my area. There was, however, one that stood out with its designs and location (was near my house). Shuga, the name of the bakery, seemed a perfect fit and so I decided to actually visit it since I didn’t find much about it online. To cut it short, I found Shuga in the middle of this really chaotic market. It was a pretty-looking chic bakery shop where the owner offered her design suggestions to my little one, a clear departure from earlier experiences. We closed on a beautiful designer cake that also seemed pretty reasonable and I was happy to have found a business that understood my exact needs. I wanted to understand how such a great bakery shop had missed my attention for so much time. And also how did Shuga manage to drive in people to its little café since it was pretty difficult to locate. When I started asking the owner how she promoted her cakes and how she got her leads, she said it all came through Zomato and she was tired of all other online stuff since they never worked. Small business she said always had it tough. You always had to manage costs and offer better products than larger brands to win customers. Even though Shuga had been growing at a good rate, it would be great to get more organic growth, she admitted. “But I am not sure how to get that going since its very confusing. I once was approached directly by Google who ran Adwords for me and that did nothing for me. So now I don’t really do anything,” she said. As I offered her to reach out to me whenever she needed to ask anything about content marketing, a term she was not really aware of, I realized there were several businesses like Shuga, which offered great services and super products but were not reaching out to the masses or the target audience. This was mostly because these SMEs were either confused which way to go or didn’t know how to plan their content marketing. On the other end were customers like me who were looking for the business like Shuga who would offer customized services, listen to their customers and meet their exact needs. Q: But what was keeping us from finding them? A: Online presence. Q: What was keeping us from finding them and giving them business? A: Good content marketing. SME content marketing – points to remember So here is what we have done. We created this really concise ebook on “SME content marketing – How to understand content marketing and do it yourself” to help small business owners market their services to the target audience and maximize footfall and traffic. Before that, here are a couple of things small business owners should know about content marketing. You don’t really need a huge budget to get started. Start small by getting your website in order and making it SEO-friendly, making your Google My Business listing visually informative, investing in a Facebook page (best for B2C businesses) or a Linked In profile (If you are a B2B business), starting a blog with one post in a fortnight. If you hire an agency, ask them to show you the sort of content they will use. Crappy content written by thousands of digital marketing agencies will hardly get you results even though your money will be spent. Infact, it will hurt your brand and website’s Google’s rank. Also ask them to show you a list of content they will be producing for the SEO and SMO activities, and how do they plan to market your brand’s content. If they dither on this, its best to look elsewhere. Apart from this, we want every business owner to read through this handy and short guide on SME content marketing. This eBook has been designed to help every small business owner gain an understanding of how to launch their own content marketing campaign. Here is a peek into what this eBook covers – Conclusion There are two things that most small business owners struggle with Getting more clients/traffic Keeping the costs low While both are important, I feel as an entrepreneur that focusing and solving the first challenge is of primary importance. And in order to achieve that you need to create better content and use that content to drive up traffic and get more leads. The combination of techniques or marketing strategies you use is to achieve the above results will vary from business to business, but finally this ebook should help you understand the basics of how to use content in marketing your business better. Happy reading. Click here to Download.

  We’ve all read so much about great content being a link magnet which also gets shared organically. But, does it? Does writing good content automatically ensure traffic and links? Afraid, not. If you just write good content and expect magic to happen, it is like the Spaghetti on the wall approach. You’ll throw it and see what sticks. But that isn’t what content marketing is about. Content marketing is a process that requires a good degree of hard work, research, systematic planning and scheduling. Much of it happens even before you start writing about something. In our blog about tools to promote content, we share ideas on not only how you can promote your content but how you can create promote worthy content in the first place. A research by OkDork showed that of 1 million posts, 89% posts have less than 100 social shares. How can you be in the remaining 11% and ensure your content gets organically promoted?   a. Choose the right blog topics A research by marketing expert Brandon Gaille shared the blog topics that are likely to get the most social shares. The hottest blog topics list is a good beginning point for choosing your blog topic or even adapting it to fit one of the topics. Here are examples of the hottest blog topics and how you can adapt them to the content marketing company. Saving Time: 21 tools that’ll save your time when writing long-form content Health and Fitness: How being a freelancer can take a toll on your emotional health Money: How much money do bloggers around the world really make? Have a look Life and Happiness: How you can use the World Happiness Index to craft interesting content Travel: Can you sustain your living as a Travel Blogger? Find out from those who’ve been there done that   b. Use the Skyscraper technique Whenever you research a particular blog topic, you’ll see a string of Google results already written about it. The only way to outrank them is if you write better content on the same topic – more authoritative of a better quality. Become higher than your closest competitors on the same topic to be promoted as the best authority on it. Now that your content is all set in terms of quality, here are seven tools that you can use to promote it which will make it go from an ordinary blog post to the one that drives traffic and conversions.   1. Boost your post on Facebook Facebook doesn’t give the same organic reach that it did a few years back. Fans and Likes on your page by themselves aren’t enough to drive virality into a post. But Facebook offers other features that’ll help you reach more of your existing base and even new people. The Boost Post feature on Facebook is one of its most economic options to get results within a short period. It doesn’t require you to create elaborate ads and drilled-down targeting. Instead, if you boost a post to reach more of your existing audience and some new ones, you can see some good results even for as small as $20. Over 2 billion people use Facebook every month, which means you’ll be definite to find your customer base in there. Even a $5 boost can sometimes increase the reach of the post five times making this a very interesting medium to promote your prized posts. Pro Tip: Pay extra attention to you your social metadata. What is social metadata? It is the text that appears below your social post. If you leave this unedited, the platform will automatically pick up the first few lines from your post. This either gets repeated along with the post content or isn’t very readable including the author, post date and time and other irrelevant data.   2. Find your promoters using Buzzsumo Buzzsumo is an amazing little platform that allows you to discover trending content by typing in keywords. It then shows you the best articles for the particular keyword and its social shares. Now, what you need is pick out the best articles that come close to what you’ve written. After that, identify the people who’ve tweeted and shared the article. If these people have liked and shared the earlier article, they may be likely to look at a (preferably) better one on the topic and share it too. It’ll take a while to create the list and reach out to them but you’ll see the difference in traffic when each of them actually share and promote your content. Pro tips: You can use a tool like hunter.io if you want to trace out official email ids. You can use either mail merge for gmail (using Google docs) or a tool like Gmass to send out your outreach emails efficiently. For the most important promoters, customize your email mentioning something that could interest them If all else fails, you can @tweet to them to catch their attention   3. Use MeetEdgar to schedule and re-post content for better visibility Meet Edgar is an intelligent social media scheduling tool that automatically re-shares your content at different times. This increases your social reach and the there is an increased chance of each post being visible to more people. The tool automatically re-shares your content to ensure you are never left with an empty queue. Pro tip: You can also try a scheduling tool like Buffer. The paid account has unlimited scheduling that can allow you to schedule content for a week or more without hassles.   4. Spy on competitor backlinks with Ahrefs Ahrefs is one of the most comprehensive tools out there that pulls out your competitors best strategies and presents it to you in neatly done reports. It is most popularly used as an SEO competitor checker tool that shares the entire backlink strategy of your competitors. For content, add the url of a blog with similar content and active social shares to see

Let’s have a look at the picture below: Will you remember this picture and where you saw it? Seems unlikely. Here’s something interesting. During the mid-1940s, a serial killer named Markos Valaroje was known to have stalked and killed at least a dozen girls in their mid-teens. The killer had a weird fascination for laying down his victims in bathtubs after he killed them, making a gruesome scene. Eventually, Markos was about to be apprehended by police officers in his own house. When he tried to escape from the bathroom window, he slipped and hit his head. In a weird twist of fate, Markos was found just like all his victims – in a bathtub, in his own pool of blood. This is that bathtub. Now, will you remember this picture and where you saw it? What changed between the first time you were asked this question and now? The answer is that your brain has now connected the dots. It has many pieces of information and an interesting story that helps you connect to an inanimate bathtub much better than before. Before you decide to Google Markos Valaroje, the story is fake. But the association your brain made between the story and the bathtub was real. This is the power of story telling. And brands today can’t help but leverage it to connect with their consumers. There are five parts to having a good story for your brand and how brands are using them. Understand What does your consumer understand best? If the story comes from an insight derived from their own behavior. Most A-ha moments for brands come when they take an analytical deep dive into their consumer market or research the behavior of their existing customers. When Kellogg ‘s first came to India, guns blazing, it thought it would take the Indian breakfast market by storm. But it ended up becoming as soggy as its flakes when they were doused in hot milk. Kellogg’s had not done its research to understand its consumers. The paratha-gulping, spice loving Indian consumer found corn flakes to be bland and non-satisfying. The brand also turned the Indian housewife indignant by calling her regular breakfast less nutritious. To cope up, Kellogg’s had to re-look at its positioning strategy and understand its consumers. The brand eventually re-positioned itself as a fun and quick breakfast which could be had more regularly than as a one-off. It roped in local people like yoga teachers and dancers to push the nutrition factor and used local terms like ‘shakti’ (power) to make it an ally to the Indian housewife. Posted by Kellogg’s ‘Anaaj ka Nashta’ on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 When Kellogg’s changed its story, it tasted success. The brand now enjoys a 40% market share in India and with local flavors like Chocos, it definitely has a winning strategy under its belt. Connect How does the consumer connect with your brand? When you take something relatable and ordinary and state it in a way that surprises them, you have a connect. They instantly ‘relate’ to your brand and picture it as a part of their lives. Think of the first Markos Valaroje story. You couldn’t ‘connect’ with the bathtub until you heard the story behind it. Most often than not, brands feature their consumer in the story. They make them feel like the story is their own. This makes the story relatable. Take one of the best advertising stories where a picture truly speaks a thousand words There is so much said without saying it in words. There is not only an instant understanding and connect but also the fact that the ‘cat’ in the picture is indeed their consumer. Remember If you have the Understand and Connect part right, your story becomes memorable. This is the essential key for a brand’s success because once the story becomes memorable, the consumer remembers it subconsciously at the point of sale too. Think of the most memorable write ups or ads you’ve come across and why you remember them among the thousands of ads you see every day. They are funny They are emotional They are audacious All of these advertisements have an emotional connect with the audience that makes them memorable. Propagate When you have the other parts of your story right, your users will become your biggest voice. Take Uber’s #ApniHiGaadi commercial. Launched just a week back, the ad has raked in over 2M views on YouTube. What makes this commercial so special? The ad is born right out of their consumer insight that Uber is being used for big and small reasons by its consumers. The other part was connecting this insight to the fact that people have almost started using Uber as their own car – available whenever they need it. The ad showcases a variety of occasions and a good cross section of consumers on a screen which has each of us identify with at least one segment. With something for everyone, a good story gets propagated across media easily. Impact It takes a little bit of creativity to pack insights, branding and social impact in the same story without sounding corny. But if you get this right, it can be the best highlight of a story. In this case, the story goes beyond the brand and the consumer but aims to touch at a collective conscience. The Jaago Re campaign from Tata Tea is a perfect fit for an impact short story. Tata Tea – Alarm Bajne Se Pehle Jaago Re! We know the issues around us today. We care about things that are wrong, but we choose to wait till crisis strikes. Why react once the tragedy has happened? Let’s act when it matters the most. Let’s be Pre-Activists. Alarm Bajne Se Pehle #JaagoRe Posted by Jaago Re on Monday, February 13, 2017 The latest ad from Ola #FarakPadtaHai is also a nice example where brand meets impact. The insight comes right in the beginning of the ad where you see

We’ve always heard and believed that there is no such thing as a free lunch. As content marketers we shoulder the sombre task of constantly feeding the interests of 99% of the Internet – which is a HUGE responsibility. While written content should always be original and crafted with purpose, we’ve wished more that once that we had help on the visual front. Good images are job half done for a good blog, webpage or article. They attract, retain attention and remain in memory much more than words. As always, we’ve turned to stock photos more than once only to find that some of the images are too plastic. The worst mistake that marketers make when using stock photos are using standard or common photos that the user may have already seen a few times. Something like this In such cases, the image is so generic that it makes it difficult for the user to use it as a specific point of recall for the brand. In other cases, the images are so ‘plastic’ that the user can’t relate to it or associate it with your brand. While choosing stock photos for ourselves and our clients, we began to recognize a pattern to pick better stock images. Choose images that don’t look staged The moment we mention stock photos, we often think of picture-perfect staged photos that have models with perfect smiles, clothing and setting. Users don’t stop to think much but subconsciously, they know that the picture isn’t ‘authentic’. It is staged. This creates a disconnect with your brand and doesn’t allow them to fully trust the content as a whole. There are simple little things that allow us to perceive the image as ‘authentic’. The people in the image aren’t perfect models but ‘common’ people (or at least look like it). The need not have perfect hair, make up and clothes. The overall setting is more ‘natural’, which means everything isn’t colour coordinated and set up like a studio. The activity in the picture needs to look genuine rather than being captured at the perfect moment. Compare these two images of a woman shopping. Image Source: Woman Shopping Staged  Woman Shopping Natural Choose images that go with the flow of the content In today’s #blog, we take a look at all the latest happenings in the digital world and the big names that come with it…. Posted by Justwords Consultants on Friday, July 7, 2017 Most blogs, web pages or articles have a ‘feature’ image. This is the anchor image that gets shared automatically on social media so this needs to be chosen with utmost care. After all, when your user is swiping through his feed, it is this image and not the text content that’ll grab a user’s attention. It is also the first image that builds the impression for things to come. The feature image and other images used, therefore, have to be linked as closely to the content as possible. If you have a bulleted list blog and have started by placing an image under each point, make sure you all points have a proper image in the same position. It helps the user follow a pattern which makes reading easy. Your image should speak 1000 words Whenever you pick an image, always ask yourself how the image visually connects with your brand. When using images in-between content, don’t post ‘filler’ images or pick others as an afterthought. How does the visual add to the overall experience of the blog post? What does it convey that the text doesn’t? When you are writing about freelance content writing, showing the image of a beach babe with a laptop isn’t the most authentic one you can pick. Instead of showing an interesting home office setting with a little mix of work and play gives it a more realistic tone. It offers users a glimpse into the life of an actual work from home professional with its quirks and imperfections. ‘Personalize’ the image and make it your own If you’ve discovered a great stock image, chances are many others before you have too. And many others after you will also use the image. Even if you use such an image, there are some neat tips and tricks to make your image different from the original stock image. You can add text overlays, enhance colours, a colour overlay over certain areas, crop the image to use only a portion of it, add a filter and enhance contrasts. This makes a good image better than before and personalized to an extent so that your image doesn’t look like similar images found online. Find new pastures for your resource base As content marketers, we all have our comfort zones – websites we go to whenever we need to dip into a pool of inspiration and find something that becomes a part of our story. But the fun lies in the discovery of something new altogether that makes you grab an extra cup of coffee and sit up. So, we’ve put together a cool list of websites that you can raid for your free stock photos. You may already be using some of these. As for others, here’s to discovering finer pastures. Please note that ‘free’ doesn’t mean it doesn’t have terms attached. Each website has its own criteria. Some licenses allow only personal use and restrict commercial use unless you buy it. Others require attribution to the photographer. Be sure to check the website before you use the picture. In our last article 10 websites that give stunning free images, we gave you a list of websites that offer fantastic resources. If you don’t want to go back there, here it is for your convenience. Pixabay Unsplash Public Domain archive Stocksnap.io Getrefe Splitshire Death to stock photos Little visuals Picjumbo Startupstockphotos A fresh list of websites that offer absolutely free awesome pictures Since then, our team has been scouting for more such websites that offer great photographs and for free. Based on

Every month, one of our team’s internal KPIs is the learning each member brings to the table and how the learning can be collectively applied to solve client problems. Generally, when we are faced with a ‘How are we going to get this done’ situation, the team takes a deep dive into research, case studies, conflicting opinion and customer surveys to find the answer. In the process, we end up coming across some really interesting reads. Here are 10 reads from the world of content that got us talking. 1. The black white and grey of content marketing The first one on our list this month is an article that doesn’t mince words. It compares content marketers to snake oil peddlers (yikes!) and asks some hard-hitting questions on that interesting term called ‘ROI’ and if your content is actually delivering it. We tend to agree in some places and disagree in others. Content can be connected to ROI if the goals and metrics are plotted out in advance and trackable analytics is used to determine the results. Problem is that several people in the business don’t do this easily or well. In this day and age, content marketing need not be a blind term that promises a few blogs and engagement in return. It can do much more. Or can it? Read this for the flip side of the coin 2. How the right email can land you a CXO meeting And right on the heels of that, we ask you to turn your coin around and read this interesting account of how content marketing can and did help someone land a C-suite meeting. When you talk about the exact ROI from content marketing, not everything translates easily to money. But the explanation given the article is quite compelling. According to it, a CEO is almost worth on an average, $800 an hour to a company. Can content make it compelling enough for him or her to give you $800 worth of time? Yes. It can. The right kind of content can get noticed by influencers and organically drive results. This isn’t a one-off. There have been many instances when well-written, targeted content has set ships sail in the right direction. Our personal experience with content proves this. For a client looking to source leads, we had suggested the trial of a cold email trail to see if things convert. Not only did the targeted, well-written email get them the meeting, it got them new business worth lakhs. 3. The ‘business’ of content marketing and murky facts July seems to have put us in the yo-yo zone. Or is it a coincidence that we ran into another article that is calling content marketing ‘a calculating, dollar-driven invasion on the internet!’ As unbelievable as it sounds, it is true to some extent. The fact that 43% people on the internet have read misleading medical information is an alarming number. There have been proven experiments that click baits that have the right strategy but are low on quality can easily make it to the top of Google’s search results for quite some time. With content penetrating into journalism, there is a thin line between news, facts, expressions and regurgitated mix of all of it. Can the ‘business’ of content marketing cause more harm than good? Find out here. 4. Five keys to driving sales with content Even then, businesses know for a fact that good content can eventually drive sales. This article on Forbes continues to put us on the yo-yo journey which states five keys to driving sales with content. From testimonials to stories to website text to blogs, all go a long way in creating your brand, the emotions associated with it and the reason that pushes a sale. In the end, we have a compelling proposition in front of us. Content can lead to sales. How much is a question…. probably for another blog all together. 5. Is your brand’s direct content marketing breeding distrust? We are on a swing once again. Apparently, business2community states that ‘marketable’ content created by someone actually breeds distrust. People only trust when the content is written by a third party. We wonder where the line starts and ends then. People seem to be trusting advertising all these years and make their purchase decision based on them. They do this fully knowing that the advertisement is a direct message from the seller. Content, on the other hand, is more to do with subtle persuasion. When practised with the 80/20 rule, content can be useful while aiding the seller too. But we are in full agreement with the third party rule. Which is why influencer marketing is also a part of content marketing. But that doesn’t’ mean we leave our websites and blogs unattended. 6. If you market apps, don’t miss these successful mobile marketing campaigns So how can self-created content be useful? By enhancing (knowledge), entertaining and being used in more ways than one. With news doing the rounds about branded apps being dead, author Ian Naylor, the founder of AppInstitute has shared three mobile marketing campaigns that show how things can be done right. Some of the apps have explored a latent need and converted it into a successful product. Others have just been made so useful that you can’t get them out of your smartphone anytime soon. 7. How tech is transforming content marketing And we are back to scoring once more in the favour of content marketing! Yay! This article of how technology will transform content marketing rings a few notes close to home. It shows that if you produce x content, then technology today aids the marketing to get the content a reach of 10x. Brand content is only the tip of the iceberg and the real strength lies in its amplification via the right marketing channels. While company blogs have been created and may be even maintained over the years, the changes in technology and its accessibility has opened new