Category: SEO

In our discussions with clients, we’ve often come across a common pattern of questions about content marketing. Some stem from worrying if it is worth investing in the medium. Other questions are around having clear measurement metrics or success stories from their industry. Below, we’ve put together 11 questions that most of our clients want to know answers to. You might find your answer here too and if not, you can scroll down to see how you can reach us. We’ll be glad to help out.   1. We are already putting out blog posts regularly. What else can we do? So, you are getting the ‘content’ part right. You need to work on the marketing. The first thing you can do is a content analysis. Since you’ve been putting out content for a while, it’ll be great to check what type of inbound traffic it has be drawing in and if the traffic is ‘sticky’ (people who start from the blog check out the rest of the site).  This will demonstrate the current effectiveness of your content and if the blogs are serving their purpose. If they are working, you need to work on expanding their reach via newer social channels. If not, then you’ll have to go back to the board and chalk out alternate topics and strategies. When you do a content analysis, don’t forget to check if all your posts are optimized well (SEO tags, meta information, Content, images, videos) and if they have the right call to action in place that’ll keep your user on the site and push them to take action. Last but not the least, check on how your marketing actions like campaigns and newsletters change the footfall quality from the post over time.   2. How do you take a company that has mostly done traditional marketing and transition to content marketing? Content marketing has many facets. Simply put, it plays a role in helping create and maintain the perception about your brand online. If you are a brand who is already reaching out to your users via traditional channels, you’ll now need to modify your content slightly without changing your voice or tone to fit into online media. The first step in taking your brand online is your website.  A website allows you to say a lot of things that traditional channels with limited time and space doesn’t. Though users generally come with limited time, they can choose to stay and engage with you if your content is good. Creating an engaging and optimized website is the first thing you can do to being your online content marketing efforts. Next, you can work to claim your handles on popular social channels. Most people know for sure that Facebook and Twitter will have a big subset of their target audience. The rest of the audience may be divided into channels like Pinterest, Instagram, G+ and Linkedin depending on their fit. Even if you don’t plan to use all of these channels, it’ll be good to claim your handles and create a basic bio to avoid conflicting claims from competitors. The above strategies work to generate brand awareness.   3. How can I use content for brand awareness and differentiation when I and my competitors are selling the exact same thing? Interesting question. When you are selling the same product, content actually is the best weapon in your arsenal to chalk out differentiation. That’s because even if you have the same customer base, the persona represented in your marketing can be different. Let us take two financial institutions that offer student loans. One company focused on the emotional aspects that govern the decision-making. Student loans are seen as a medium to fulfil aspirations and dreams. Hence the company and their loan projected themselves as a medium to help students achieve their potential without money being a roadblock. On the other hand, the second company decided to focus purely on the practical aspects of taking a student loan. It described in length about competitive interest rates. It also put out offers on concessions during the entire loan tenure and special offers for girls. Students looking for a loan are likely to come across websites from both these financial institutions. One thing that does tip in the favour of the former is a highly detailed FAQ section that cuts down the time during the decision-making process, providing better clarity.   4. How can you create thought leadership using content marketing? Thought leadership is honestly a highly abused word in the field of content. We are a tad wary of self-proclaimed ‘thought leaders’ who claim to be one on their profile bios. Thought leadership does not come from one activity but a sum of all your activities online. It is about engaging in meaningful conversations, sometimes about your product and industry but also outside it. This means you can share other people’s content if it is relevant. You can jump into conversations where you can add value. You can summarize your own experience on aspects of your industry/product that colleagues and outsiders (even those who are just beginning to cue in on the topic) will find of value. Being a thought leader is not about selling but becoming a resource.   5. How can content marketing help a new company / startup? As someone new, you’ll be eager to share information about your product with prospective customers. And customers too, will, likewise want to know what the new player is doing to keep things different. Like all brands, you can do the regular stuff with updating content on your website, providing detailed FAQs and sharing updates on social channels. Even then, there are two things are come highly recommended for startups How-tos: How to content in the form of text, video, images, and infographics will help prospective customers understand your product better. If you are selling a soil sensor that provides info on plant health directly to a smartphone, it’ll be great to demonstrate

We deal with a fair share of e-Commerce clients, some are giants, some smaller ones and some who are just about riding the wave. From our understanding of this particular industry, I believe that when it comes to content marketing, e-commerce has the best options to directly track the result of your effort. Within as little as 3 months, you’ll be able to tell if a particular marketing activity is driving sales or not. This makes e-Commerce a potent playing ground for trying out content marketing strategy too. If you do not believe me, just read the stuff below. Statistical evidence shows that content marketing can increase the average conversion rate to almost 6 times. But if done right, you have the potential to go beyond ‘average’. Content marketing can not only give you immediate spikes in conversion analytics but also long-term dividends. And that’s just one reason to ensure that your e-Commerce website adopts a good content strategy. And there is more. Image Source: Lemonstand Content marketing plays a crucial role in crafting your overall online reputation. It helps build trust in your company, increases word-of-mouth mentions and is the best way to gather buzz for your products. It even allows you to build a community around your brand and have followers convert over a period of time. While you mull if the time and money investment in content marketing for an e-commerce site is really worth it, here is some food for thought – You can generate 3x leads from content marketing than traditional marketing Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing 82% consumers have a more positive opinion 70% feel a closer connection with the brand as a result of content marketing 60% users enjoy reading content from their brands 70% prefer to learn about brands through posts rather than ads 72% users believe that they form a bond with the brand as a result of custom content Source: The Demandmetric If you haven’t tried content marketing for your e-Commerce business, its high time you get started. Considering that running a business is already a full-time job, it’s a great idea to have an expert consultant who can handcraft the strategy for you. Starting randomly and not know what and how to measure generally proves to be a mistake that costs more than money – it costs valuable time that your brand could have spent building customers for the near future. If you decide to get the ball rolling, we have a great list of strategies below with examples on how you can implement them. 1. Create useful content People don’t like to be sold to all the time. They certainly aren’t crazy about in-the-face advertising. What they do like is content that is useful. Content filled with tips and tricks and hacks that can make things easy. As an e-Commerce platform, you’ll have many opportunities to use this strategy. It sometimes may relate directly to your products. More often, it may not. Nonetheless, being useful will draw users back to your site. One of the best use case for this can be seen with Lowe’s. The retailer makes an innovative use of short Vine videos to mostly share useful tips with its users. There is only an occasional product plug and no one really minds it. You can see that most videos have thousands of loops and likes showing the amount of engagement they generate. This simple yet innovative practice is followed by many non e-Commerce sites too. Take the Jugaad page on Facebook which is actually run by the Punjab Kesari publication. Full of useful hacks, the brand is only subtly mentioned in the end. But it creates an interesting strategy for association and recall. No wonder you see your Facebook feed filled with’life hacks’ these days. 2. Create content that resonates Each section of the target audience for your website falls into a ‘category’ that likes and enjoys certain activities. If you can be an advocate for these activities, it is likely that your audience will begin to bond with you beyond your products. A good example is the Scotts Menswear blog which shows how this is done. You’ll find the blog covering fashion, film, TV, life, music, and sports. From the most talked-about boxing matches to covering exclusive interviews and behind the scene notes with music bands that their target audience follows, the blog is full of life. It also has ample product plugs from the store but they make the blog look nice with high-quality photos and interesting content. 3. Don’t forget to have a sense of humour Everyone needs a good laugh once in a while. Or at least a smile would help. And it’ll help your e-Commerce website too if it puts your customers in a better mood. No matter what channel you use to communicate, adding a sprinkle of humour can keep things light and happy. Take for example Amazon India’s posts on their Facebook page. The ad works the excuses-to-take-leave angle perfectly and prepares you for its annual mega sale. 4. Develop a YouTube channel to drive traffic Wondering how e-Commerce platforms can use YouTube? Considering that video is one of best mediums to quickly share information with your users (and YouTube is one of the most popular channels on the internet), it can definitely play a role in driving traffic to your e-Commerce platform too. YouTube videos are a great way to showcase the benefits of your products. Think of making the videos interesting by showcasing use cases that your audience may not have thought about initially. If product plugs are too obvious,  then go back to useful and resonating content. With the eventual growth in subscribers and views, a part of the traffic will come back to your e-Commerce website too. Zagg is a company that creates screen protectors for iPhones. If you are an iPhone user, you know how supremely important this product is. But how will you know if it is as

“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

There is an untold confession in digital marketing – SEO is hard. No one can really guarantee to get you into the front page of Google or keep you there all along in the same place. There are too many factors that go into getting the equation right on ranking. Besides, you all need to stay abreast with the latest tweaks in search engine’s algorithms. And that is only part of the hard work. The other part is actually having to explain it all to your client! Organic traffic is a heavily loaded word. By calling other kinds of traffic ‘paid’, clients automatically tend to assume that Organic is free. Technically, it isn’t if you are (and should be) paying an SEO professional to get and maintain rankings for you.   While you can’t over-dramatize and commit on getting an amplified x times traffic in a proposal, nor can you promise “Page 1 rankings”, but you can always use examples to help clients understand how things may look in the near future. SEO is a long-term commitment and the proposal has to convince your clients that you’ll be around and get them the results they are looking for. It will showcase you as an agency or freelancer who is updated with the latest in SEO and can be agile enough to tackle future updates from search engines too. So is this THE SEO proposal that’ll work for you? We don’t know. A simple search for ‘SEO proposal template’ on Google gives 16,50,000 results. Those are templates that seem to have worked for a bunch of people. We can tell you that this one works for us. In this second part of our three part series on writing proposals, we present the tried and tested SEO proposal template that has helped us not only get a good few SEO clients but also retain them. Get our guide to writing winning Social Media proposals here   As always, let’s start at the beginning – The Brief Before a written proposal is submitted, you’ll most likely have a call or meeting to discuss the problem at hand. Over the years, we’ve noticed that most of these briefings have two common points – – I want to rank on No. 1 for x term – I want to increase my traffic exponentially At this stage, many clients aren’t too keen to press about targeted traffic, leads or conversions. It is about building reputation and visibility with the right terms and getting a boost in traffic. Then, depending on how much knowledge they have about SEO and its workings, other demands then crop up. During the brief meeting, it is important to gauge your client’s knowledge graph on the subject. If it is just the page 1 rankings they want or the overall online reputation management that comes from real SEO. Use the brief meeting to analyse the client’s most important business goals and how it maps back to marketing goals and metrics.   Set expectations right Take the opportunity of the brief meeting clear off the myths on SEO. It isn’t a magic portion. It will cost money and that too monthly. It will need to be done consistently. You can’t just stop with On-page SEO. You’ll have to complete a round of technical SEO too. The effects of SEO will be seen only when you sustain it with link building efforts. And last, but not the least, it doesn’t come with guarantees.   Gather data to be used in your proposal / pitch Data is an invaluable driver in an SEO proposal. Unlike social where the numbers are clearly visible, an SEO check will require some digging into analytics to give a proper audit report. You can either ask for view access or specific reports to be emailed to you.   The Proposal We use four key elements when we design a proposals   1. A background After you present a quick executive summary, you can delve down straight into the insights and analysis that you’ve gained from your research. Right from the opening part of the proposal, you’ll have to find and use every opportunity to wow your client. The research has to be thorough, but more importantly, the insights have to be well-presented and aligned with the business. Limit yourself to 5 key takeaways at the end of it so that you don’t overwhelm with too much jargon or analysis in the first go.   Reports to include a. A website audit report: The report that presents a health certificate rating for the website. There are many free and paid audit tools available including some with white label options to do the heavy lifting for you. We use a mix of tools, not just one to do our analysis, pick out the best insights and put it together. Other than testing for the standard content / text ratio and page speed time, deep delve from a customer perspective – were you able to quickly find what they were selling. Did the check out process work find. Use both Search engine and human element when doing a website audit. b. A ranking report: Without going into indepth keyword research, this report can include the top 10 non-brand keywords that you would generally type into Google to look for a site / product like this. You wouldn’t need any sophisticated tools right now but going forward you’ll definitely need a tools like WebCEO to keep a track of your client’s ranking over a period of time. It helps when memory fails on what the ranking was a year back and you need a quick graph to showcase the ranking changes over a period of time. WebCEO is one of the best ‘Rank checker’ tool out there which has automated scheduling and even does ranking checks for blended search. c. A link audit report: Research on the clout your client holds in the online world. If they are new, this report wouldn’t make