Category: SEO

SEO is one field where changes have been constant. That’s because Google changes its algorithm from time to time – sometimes even several times in a year – to fetch the most relevant results for queries submitted. This only means that the techniques that worked well a few years ago, won’t get you the same results today. So if you want results, you/your SEO team needs to adapt and learn. And therein, lies the confusion. Many marketers do not really know what works in SEO and what doesn’t. And then there are the myths that refuse to die even though they have been debunked several times. These SEO myths have taken a life of their own and keep confusing business owners on what works and what doesn’t. It also leads people to take decisions of stopping investment in SEO. As Phil Frost, the American entrepreneur says, “Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about partnering with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.” To make SEO actually work for you, here are 6 things to do: Understand that SEO surely works if your website complies with Google’s algorithm. Don’t invest in SEO just one-time. You have to work on it constantly to keep up with changing search algorithms and to update content regularly. Search engines take link-building pretty seriously while ranking your site. So don’t ignore it. Rather than stuffing keywords in a bad content, use the White Hat technique to incorporate keywords in good content. Having a secure site or https site is essential for SEO and high ranking. Extra website pages can rank you high only if the content is good and relevant. So, watch this video to trash the SEO myths you believed in till now, and reframe your SEO strategy for that competitive edge! Are you looking for specialized content for your website that can increase your leads and conversions? Get in touch with us Want to read more check the curated list below. Here Is What The Internet Biggies Were Up To In May [Video] Why Exactly Should You Do Content Marketing And How? [Video] 5 Copywriting Sins That Weaken Your Content ROI 5 reasons why supply chain businesses should invest in content

“Does content marketing work for an industry like supply chain and logistics? Are these not just fancy words being exchanged by marketers?” Those were the precise words that were asked by the general manager of a large supply chain management company. Till very recently, he admitted, he had not even heard of content marketing. Its only after a young turk, who had been recently hired in the marketing department, suggested that they should invest in content, that my client got in touch with us. In the supply chain and logistics business, tried and tested strategies were preferred, he reminded me. The B2B industry of supply chain logistics, he added, was a different beast. Why did they need content, was his question. “Show me the thinking behind it”. And so I made a case for content and gave him 5 reasons why his business should invest in it. In the end, he signed us up for a 6-month trial. That was a year ago. Today, we have been helping this business do 3 things – Create a better brand awareness Cut down the lead nurturing time and convert faster. Reach out to more clients How did we do this? Well, the answer is content marketing. Let’s understand this a little better When it came to B2B content marketing, we have all the stats in the world to show that it is a proven channel to increase brand recall, traffic, and ROI. Here are some stats that I gave –   You may want to ask, how does that happen? Its because, in a B2B business like a supply chain management company, the ‘lead nurturing’ period, i.e. the time since the lead first enters your system until it finally converts, is long with multiple touch points. During this period, a ‘generic’ lead goes to become a ‘verified’ lead (the name, email, phone number etc is validated), the business fit is ascertained, the contact is made over the phone, personal meetings are conducted and then contracts are signed. One of the critical tools that come handy during the ‘lead nurturing’ period is a targeted Content strategy that helps nudge the customer from one level to the next by providing reassurances, testimonials and the brand’s overarching mission that eventually aligns with yours. Content marketing can extend a tangible improvement in results to many of these. Apart from that, content marketing can also help a supply chain business or logistics business establish thought leadership in the sector, create brand awareness and customer loyalty. For those of you who are still not convinced that an industry like supply chain and logistics needs content to push its sales funnel, here are five reasons why you should focus on content to help your supply chain business. Five reasons why a supply chain business needs content marketing. 1. You are more than your product/service You started out as an idea to become a solution to a pressing market problem. To build it, you have assimilated knowledge and talent that makes you uniquely you. Your organization culture is an overarching guideline in everything you do differently from your competitors. Many employees, especially those out there in the frontline of your delivery chain will have amazing stories that become a part of your legacy. Content related to these are not just blogs. They are employee stories, videos, and even photo stories that make you ‘you’. 2. Bring the storytelling aspect The basic truth of how we are wired is that we remember stories more than facts. Content marketers are going big on storytelling. And supply chain companies have stories happening with each product delivery. From a birthday gift order that you went out of the way to deliver on time to the impossibly larger order that you managed to deliver against all odds, to the magnanimous warehouse management that you do every day which is fodder for Discovery’s “How Stuff Works”, there is a story lurking around the corner every day. All you need to do is recognize it and bring it out at the right time, through the right medium. 3.Connect and lead with UGC B2B businesses find it difficult to build on UGC because of the very nature of their business. But it isn’t an impossible proposition for supply chain logistics company. A lot of B2B marketers turn employee content into UGC, which works very successfully. Take the UPS store, for example. Check out their insta and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how they take the content from the interesting shipments they receive and convert into social UGC. Check this one out – it is a perfect capture of what the brand wants to bring out from content on Instagram.   Our jobs aren’t glorious every day. But sometimes, we get to go home to our spouses and tell them, “Honey, somewhere out there, somebody is drinking out of a grotesque foot.” We did that. We made that happen. #unexpectedpackandship 69 Likes, 1 Comments – The UPS Store (@theupsstore) on Instagram: “Our jobs aren’t glorious every day. But sometimes, we get to go home to our spouses and tell them,…”   4. Push out thought leadership Challenges faced by logistics companies when doing on-ground expansion is something on another level. It is the one thing that differentiates from the survivors from those who perish under pressure. Keeping focus on ground realities, sharing case studies, creating a sharable knowledgebase that allows the career progress of the talent within the company should be one of the key focus areas for your content. The best part is that you’ll not need to look beyond your office to do this. 5. Your competitors are doing it The thoughts of doing content marketing often drives people to discuss the merits of it. But think for a moment that your closest competitor is already capitalizing on content. Can you really afford to stay back and lose your grip on the game? You don’t have to go in guns blazing, but it is important to

As content marketers, we are often approached by businesses who want content marketing programs designed to achieve quick results. And even though people are coming of age with their understanding of what content marketing is, I am sad to report that the current state of affairs isn’t very great. Most businesses understand content marketing as something that will either lead to quick results or a race that has to be run once. Most brands and the top management do not understand that content marketing is a long-term game. And even if they do, most CEOs are in a dilemma on whether they actually want to commit to a longer-term thing. So What should be done Here is one thing to remember – if you are a brand looking at embracing content marketing then do not look for quick fixes. As the CEO, do not ask your marketing team to produce immediate results or short-term results. You must be in it for the long haul. As a content marketer and a strategist, I have found that the best way to work around this is to make sure that your client understands what content marketing actually means. Also, we make it a policy to not work with businesses that do not have the time or patience to understand what real content marketing and are always looking to cut corners on what is actually needed. Over time, we make sure that if we are working with a brand which requires content marketing, they understand the following – 1. Content marketing – understanding the whole picture Brands often want to invest in content marketing without understanding the real deal. Hence it’s important to convey that content marketing is not just about creating some pieces of blogs and articles in a month and pushing it out through your owned media. Or it’s not just about doing SEO or SMO and targeting some 10 or 30 keywords. Content marketing works as a whole. You cannot create just create content and not plan how to distribute it. You cannot create random content based on certain keywords and market it to just everyone. You will need a content strategy that will define what needs to be written and how it is to be written and a marketing strategy that will define how that entire content set will reach the targeted audience and set the inbound traffic wheels working. So get the understanding correct and make sure the top guys are willing to invest that time and money into the whole process. 2. Content Marketing is not a quick fix  Get this thing sorted right at the start. What does the brand want and how much time does it think it can invest in getting the results. We have heard answers like – “I need XXX amount of sales in 3 months because I am launching a product.”  “I think content marketing is trendy. Our CEO wants some content written because he feels it will get us some traction before this summit we have next month” “What is the ROI on this monthly investment that you want us to make. I finally want my products selling. I want my stuff to sell fast.” If you hear the above answers, your client probably does not understand a thing about content marketing. Content marketing is not just a quick race that will lead you to the victory stand. It’s not something that you do quickly that will get your products to sell fast. Content marketing is about building trust about your brand, product, services. It’s about creating brand awareness among the target audience. It’s about providing value to your users and establishing that belief in your brand. It’s about connecting with your target audience without pushing for sales. 3. Its okay to start small as long it is done in the proper way Sometimes, certain businesses will understand the full thing, but the top management might not be prepared to go the full hog without seeing the results. In such cases, it’s okay to start small – like a certain line of the business or a certain product. Make sure you are working small but working with the basic set of content marketing ammunition – a proper strategy, buyer persona mapping, content creation according for all channels and platforms to be used, a content distribution and promotion plan, and tracking of metrics. Without the implementation of the whole plan, results will not be achieved and it might be difficult to see the big picture. Conclusion Content marketing is difficult. The results need time. And clients need to be ready to give the buy-in time. But once the results start coming, there is no stopping it. So are you ready for the marathon? Want to know more about content marketing for your business? Write to us at sales@justwords.in or drop in a query here. Want to read more check the curated list below. 9 best ways to reuse that blog pile in your archive and get more traffic [Video] Why Exactly Should You Do Content Marketing And How? [Video] 5 Copywriting Sins That Weaken Your Content ROI 10 CONTENT MARKETERS YOU NEED TO FOLLOW TODAY AND WHY  

With the amount of content created churned out into the digital universe, it is a little amazing to see how people keep coming up with new things to write about and others make the time to read (some of) it. We say this from the perspective of a content marketer who has to churn new, interesting, relevant, SEO-friendly, traffic driving, conversion-oriented content with high frequency. Even with all the hacks and tricks outside the book, it still isn’t an easy job to keep the content calendar full for many of us. That’s why, when we create a content master plan for our client, we are very specific about doing a thorough content audit about all the content that has been created until the date and see how it fits in with our plan going forward. This helps us map out the analytics around that content and also see how the content can be purposefully reused. While new and fresh ideas are always welcome, ignoring the evergreen content you’ve created putting in your blood and sweat is a criminal offense. Old content pulled out from the archives can very simply and easily be used to support your existing content strategy. To Begin With Other than solving your ideating problem, repurposing content is good for you in multiple ways. To begin with, it will save you a ton of time. Content creation is a time-consuming process which involves multiple resources in your company. Everyone from the editors to writers will be devoting time to creating new content. In addition to this, the content marketing team will work up a strategy to get it the attention it deserves. Contrary to this, old content will need a fraction of the efforts to repurpose it. Your content marketers will create a funnel strategy to analyse and use the medium which has worked well for the content before not making it a shot in the dark. And believe us, Google is also going to love you for doing so. Fresh and better content around a topic can generate additional opportunities for you to rank on a targeted keyword. The enhanced quality can also mean better backlinking opportunity. Here’s how you can get started. 1. Do a content audit to find the content you can repurpose  Content that can be reused multiple times over the years is essentially evergreen content. This could be content about your brand, product or industry which has remained constant over time. To find such content, head over to your Google analytic and look for content that has been receiving steady or incremental traffic over the last couple of years. For example, the blog that we published last July “How to write an SEO proposal that will get the client on-board”. It still ranks as one of our most visited blogs over the years. The next step is to look for blogs that you think could have done better in terms of traffic and continue to be relevant. These will need minimum edits and a better push from the marketing team to experiment on traffic pull. 2. Flip the Format Once you identified a piece of content to be worthy of repurposing, the simplest way to do it will be to change the packaging. If it is long-form content, you can convert it into a listicle with pictures. If it a short piece, you can make an infographic or video out of it. The other options are to do a ‘How to’ piece, podcast, slides and more. 3. Add an update to existing content Have you been following the Facebook data breach fiasco? Who hasn’t? And beyond a point, many people have fragmented updates from multiple sources. This is a perfect case for creating a piece of content and keep updating it as more news comes in. This will give you the authority you need to rank for a topic and also keep your readers happy to have just one piece of news to follow. 4. Convert listicles into detailed pieces We’ve all written “Top 5 ways to…” content which follows the catchy headline style and a quick list that can be surfed during a commute. If any such topics have caught your audience’s fancy, you can pick out points from the listicle and expand them into complete articles. This builds a strong internal link system and also helps with creating authority content on a topic. 5. Refresh it for social Remember the article about Cannes fashion that you had written about last year? The bloopers never seem to stop getting attention. Take advantage of the back history of bloopers you’ve already covered, add a new one and voila, you have another audience magnet ready to grab attention. With a news and dated headline, this can easily get attention from your social audience. Another example of refreshing for social comes with writing different angles to the same content based on the medium it is consumed from. Let’s say you are working with a local destination tour operator. You are more likely to share stories via Facebook, nugget facts via twitter, visuals via Instagram and business overview via Linkedin. You can look at the avenues you’ve missed and created specific content for specific media. 6. Pick your top five blogs and give them a mix If you have written multiple pieces of content around the same topic, you can get the best snippets from these articles to create a fresh view on the same topic. It isn’t the most exciting way to repurpose content but it works to attract new target audience as they may not have access to such content elsewhere. 7. Create a series  Take an article like this. Each point in this article can be repurposed into a chain in an email series that can be sent at regular intervals to keep the interest alive about the topic. Besides, it will keep people coming back for more if you do it right. 8. An eBook is often the ‘free giveaway’

Are you a modern day business seeking to establish better relationships with your customers? Do you want them to feel a personal touch with your brand?A good way you could go about it is to think in the direction of setting customer support services on social platforms. Remember, the last time you dropped a complaint on Twitter on your bank’s handle and they actually responded resolving your issue? That did feel nice right! Research from a survey suggests that about 67% of 23,000 online customers surveyed have contacted a company via social media. Another study by Gartner points out that ignoring customer service on social media can result in an average churn rate of 15%. In light of such commonality these days, progressive businesses are exceedingly resorting to customer support through social media, which is why you must not shy away from it too. However, you should remember, only setting up customer support doesn’t solve the purpose. What’s more important is that it’s done right for you to get desired results. Setting up inefficient and ineffective customer support can be counterproductive and end up annoying customers. Here are some ways by which you can ensure customer service through social media –   Assigning a Dedicated Team  Maintaining effective customer support on social media is no cakewalk. You must assign a dedicated team of agents to handle the entire process efficiently. You may set a customer support guideline outlining protocols related to escalation, the tone of voice, time to be spent on each channel and so on for standardization. After all, how would you feel if the response you got after tweeting wasn’t polite enough? Your executives should be trained to be polite at all times and familiarised with the ways of handling the new age social and mobile customers too.   Ensuring Speedy Reply Being prompt in replying to a customer’s comments is extremely important. It can actually work the other way round if you set up a customer support on social media and end up not responding promptly to customer queries. Ideally, you must try and ensure that your customers are communicated to within an hour of their query. In fact, for any other types of mentions too, you must be careful that there isn’t a delay of more than a few hours. A research by Bain & Company suggests that customers whose requests have been responded to promptly by the business over social media, end up spending 30% more with the company.   Prioritizing Responses Based on Importance The volume of social media noise that a business generates could vary depending on the size of its operations and customer base. If you’re a company that receives too many customer messages, it can get hard to reply to all simultaneously and promptly. In that case, an organised approach is helpful. You could manage responses in terms of setting an internal priority ranking methodology. The order you pick should depend on your business specifics. As an example, you may prefer to reply to complaints and grievances before technical and account related doubts. Alternately, issues that affect the image of your brand could be more important in terms of demanding promptness than catering to product or service requests.   Following Your Customers Providing superlative customer service implies literally following your customers to wherever they are socializing. You could begin by searching for mentions of your business/brand on social sites. You could also follow this with queries/interests/grievances and even discussions. You should never leave it on an online commenter or the search algorithm to respond to your customer. You will be surprised by how impressed a customer will be when the brand itself catches up with him/her. Another aspect could be to add something valuable to the conversations relevant to the industry, if not your specific brand to look like a thought leader.   Setting Up Automated Monitoring Tools Once you know where and how your customers are connecting with your brand, it is time to connect back. The quickest and easiest way of doing it is using an automated monitoring stream. You can customise the streams like positive and negative comments, questions, blogs etc. Depending on the segment you like, let the tool monitor the streams for you.   Grabbing the Pulse of Your Audience Monitoring the mentions, comments and so on about your brand may be automated. However, it’s still important to listen carefully to your customers and observe a general pattern. The idea is to analyze their activities to get a grip on the issues that are normally raised over a given period of time to improve in an overall sense. For instance, which comments are induced by a poor experience or which ones are pure feedback.   Adding a Personal Touch How would you feel if you tweeted Samsung with a drawing you drew for them along with asking for a free phone and they actually gave you one, customised with the drawing you sent? Well, that’s actually happened and also hints at why a brand like Samsung has a loyal base of customers. Customer service is all about building great relationships. The more personal touch you are able to add, the better it works. Personalizing your response with a simple ‘Hi’ followed by the name of the customer can work wonders. Similarly, discussing sensitive topics in a private setting implies showing respect for the customer. Paying attention to these small details doesn’t go unnoticed and makes a significant difference. With that, we can come to some good examples of brands who are social support ambassadors.   Some Examples Of Brands Doing Great At Customer Service On Social Media When it comes to marketing, starting to list good examples is seldom without Nike being at the top of the list. Nike has dedicated support handles in eight languages on Twitter, with the executives being patient and prompt to requests all day along all through the week. Their responses are always polite and always make the customer feel

Are you a business owner who approaches marketing like a ‘one-night stand’? As nasty as it sounds, you could actually be doing that with little realization. Put differently, are you following the approach of shoving your product right at your target customer’s face just when you spot them? Well, if you’ve done that, you may have already realized, interruption is something that is clearly not going to work. So what does? One of the most effective strategies out there today is content marketing. As Seth Godin, says “Content Marketing is all the marketing that’s left.” So what is content marketing?  To explain this in the simplest manner, it’s a way of marketing in which you educate your customers about your products or services and create a value proposition. You just don’t sell our product or service. You sell value, tips or information that helps the customer in some way. This engagement builds trust and when a customer trusts you, he is more likely to buy from you. But how should you do content marketing? What is the secret sauce for the perfect content marketing campaign? Doing content marketing and doing it the right way makes all the difference. Content marketing is not just about generating endless blogs on your website and seeding your content with keywords or blindly populating your social channels with content posts. Whether it’s the content created or the content marketed, things have to be done a right way. For business owners who want to know why should you do content marketing and how here is a short video that explains the basics. Hit the play button ONLY if you’re seeking answers to the following – What exactly is content marketing? How to decide what content format to use? What are the steps involved to get it right?     Once you have got your strategy right, you will definitely see the traction you want. Please remember this – if you have to court content marketing, make sure you are not looking for overnight stands. You need to nurture and grow this one to see its beauty and power. Want to know how to get your content marketing started? Drop us a mail at sales@justwords.in for a quick consult.