There are about 4.5 billion internet users around the world. According to CMI, half of today’s 18 to 49-year-olds read news and information online and 61% of American consumers made e-purchase decisions after reading recommendations on a blog. What does this data mean for marketers? Online consumers today are smarter and more informed. They don’t rely on companies or brands for answers. They choose and review a wide net of resources to extract the information they need. As marketers, it’s up to you to create this valuable info-pool, and make it available across all channels. That’s content marketing in a nutshell. Creating value-added nimble content that educates and informs readers rather than explicitly promoting a brand is the key to increasing the value of your brand. If you haven’t incorporated content marketing in your digital strategy yet, here are compelling reasons for you to do so: Great content builds brand trust People should see you or your brand as an authority in your field. For instance, what’s the first name that comes to mind for sports shoes and accessories? Most would say Adidas or Nike. That’s because these brands have established themselves as unshakeable experts in the domain. Or at least, created such messaging. Both companies spend time and effort to create snappy, share-worthy, and value-added content. People love that they anticipate questions and provide fun answers, which boosts brand perception. Gradually, consumers begin to see you as a reliable authority. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it does, over time. Smart campaigns grab eyeballs You’re new in the game, and nobody’s heard of you. But a clever marketer can generate the right kind of noise to create awareness and pull in leads. For instance, a software development firm that sells e-learning tools can publish how-to videos about their products and its benefits, which are then boosted on YouTube, your website and social media. Create blogs about their unmatched benefits for users, send e-mailers, and reveal how corporations can weave in e-learning in everyday operations. Slowly and steadily, online readership will rise. Your blog organic traffic will increase, and so will your search rankings. Instill brand credibility in the eyes of Google The search engine’s algorithm remains a mystery, and nobody knows the exact formula (or its extent) that Google uses to rank search results. But what we do know, is that the algorithm is centred around providing the most useful, vetted results for users. As long as you create high-value content (preferably, multimedia) that readers love to read and share, you’re good. If your ranking doesn’t match your best SEO efforts, it’s time for something different. Today, digital > traditional In 2014, the Aberdeen Group showed how online marketing is six times more powerful than traditional media when it comes to converting leads into paying customers. While TV, print, radio and newspapers hold considerable sway in developing countries, digital marketing methods like social media, e-mailers and blogging have made a powerful climb to the top. Build relationships If your website has unique, informative content that provides value, visitors will keep coming back to your website. For instance we all know Neil Patel as an SEO expert. Every blog he writes is focussed around offering valuable tips and strategies to help brands and digital marketers solve problems faced by them in today’s ever competitive scenario. Similarly Backlink’s Brian Dean is known for providing valuable tips in the form of case studies which gives the impression that it’s tried and tested and therefore trustworthy. People have come to regard them as experts in the field and look to him for any information around the subject. That’s the kind of relationship you should be looking to build with your visitors. Earn precious backlinks Backlinking is when an external or third party website hyperlinks to your SEO content, citing it as a useful reference. If that site is a credible, high-quality source, your audience will multiply exponentially, boosting referral traffic and leading to a higher presence on the seach engine result page (SERP). Google takes the high quality backlink as a sign of trust, and pushes you up on the radar. Targeted content influences purchase decisions Most people look up product recommendations, study user complaints and compare prices before making an online purchase. Blogs, aggregator websites, news portals and best social media channels present a crucible of varied opinion, and brands must strike while hot. Turn buying behaviour your way by providing answers to the questions the user might have. It can be about a common problem that the product aims to solve or a how-to guide that tells or shows the user how useful and easy-to-use the product is. For instance how-to videos, podcasts, social media posts etc are a good idea. Funnel your inbound marketing Gone are the days when you could push marketing material into people’s faces—think direct methods like flyers, brochures and TV commercials. Audience these days hate pushy advertising and being told what to do. They’d rather exercise their own sense of judgement, compare brands, and see if you work for them. Content marketing does just that. Help them decide what is best for them. If somebody wants the best sunscreen in the market, create indirect content that also lists peripheral information. Why are sun-screens essential during summer? What are its scientific benefits? Do effects differ with age and location? Track the common questions a potential customer might have, provide all answers, and voila—you’ve built credibility. Here are some tools that help identify you identify such opportuinities. BuzzSumo – Simplifies content research by bringing up popular posts using keywords. UberSuggest – Primarily a keyword research tool. Can help content research by bringing up search queries that users generally type in. Google Alerts – Helps you stay ahead of the curve by notifying of whenever new content is published around your keyword. SentiOne – A social media listening tool, it tracks brand mentions and conversations around a given keyword.
Tag: content marketing
Content Marketing During the Times of Crisis
If you are a business owner who relies on online marketing to help your customers discover your product, engage, and nurture, now is the time to think differently. Unnatural times require big course correction. And that is what needs to happen with your marketing plans. You need to take into account that most business and communities are planning and preparing for turmoil and uncertain times, and hence your content marketing should talk to that change. Also, we need to remember that agility and flexibility are not enough if not supported by sensitivity, creativity and more innovative thinking. Here are few marketing tips. Share your business continuity plan As a business, you have already been making plans for the best and worst-case scenario. It is important to let your existing customers know how you are dealing with the situation and that you have a long-term plan and coping mechanism. This isn’t black and white for any business and what you say may possibly have grey areas that will evolve with the situation. Share an update about this via your official blog, social channels and also on email. Let your customers know about your actions Many businesses are helping out the society, the government and their customers in different ways. You could be contributing efforts, finances or offering a helping hand to people who are fighting this battle in the front line. Keep your customers posted about such actions, but do so in a careful way so as not to get a PR backlash. Do not sell. Do not promote drop your home-cooked favourites in the comments ?? 15.8k Likes, 606 Comments – Zomato India (@zomatoin) on Instagram: “drop your home-cooked favourites in the comments ??” Many content marketing company is talking about salary cuts and furlougs and several sectors are staring at job losses. In this situation, no one wants to risk investing their savings when they don’t know what they are going to need in the next few days. Be sensitive around your context of communication. Definitely don’t cold call! Understand what your audience wants to hear You customers and prospects are mostly in a state of anxiety with the evolving Covid-19 situation. They may be hungry on the breakdown of information shared by the governing bodies in the country. They will want analysis and research on the topic and need tips and ideas on what to do next. Content creation that can help them – blogs and infographics that could probably be circulated via email. If you are not sure of what to communicate, get your team together and brainstorm on these possible ideas – What do your customers like? What do customers wish to hear about from your industry? What are your competitors doing right? If a marketing channel is being dropped, what could be other ways to achieve the same marketing effect? You might even want to talk to some of your customers to understand what they are thinking. By the end of this exercise, you will know if any changes are needed in tone, style, and execution and whether any new channel should be adopted for outreach. Use your social channels effectively View this post on Instagram कोरोना वायरस दुनिया के विभिन्न देशों में पहुँच चुका है तथा 118,000 से ज़्यादा लोग इस वायरस से संक्रमित हुए हैं। आइए जानते हैं कि तेज़ी से फैलने वाले इस वायरस से बचाव कैसे करें | #Coronavirus #Covid19 #CoronavirusPandemic A post shared by Genus (@genusindia) on Mar 12, 2020 at 6:29am PDT The current ride on social channels is all about helping people cope with staying at home. Whether it is about helping them keep children engaged, learn to cook, learn to save, or simply cope, you can deviate to create social media content that shows you in a positive light. Use this time to fine-tune your business’s online presence This is a great time to work on things that you normally don’t get time to work on. Since how long have you been planning to redo your website content and create that explainer video. Use this time to build great website content – content that will explain to your customers what you do and sell, boost your SEO with the right keywords and get in the traffic. Have your team work on research papers and e-books that were in the backburner. Where possible, speak to an industry expert (in your customer’s industry) to share their insights on what they are doing within their organization. Take this opportunity to polish and revamp your company’s online visibility and marketing strategy. Don’t forget your SEO While you go on to create content, make sure your SEO is still on track with the changing search trends due to Covid-19. Many brands are noticing a downturn in brand searches. Instead, a lateral approach to write about topics with high relevance as per the times and optimizing it can be a source of incremental organic traffic. ‘How to prepare for recession’ has 8,48,00,000 search results. Search trends for recession have peaked. We are, indeed, living in difficult times – both you and your customers. This too shall pass but it’s important to plan We don’t know how the world will change at the end of this crisis, or worse still, when will the crisis end. But your business will be better prepared to weather this storm if you have a proper marketing plan and clarity of what the action plan is going to be if the crisis worsens and if you are ready to embrace the change and innovate accordingly. In difficult times, your brand will be remembered for how sensitive it is to its employees and customers. As a business, the content you create now will go a long way in being the light at the end of the tunnel. Choose to be that business who will be remembered for good.
Our round up of interesting stories from September
Let’s get right down to business, shall we? After all, the ten minutes of your coffee break should be worthwhile. So instead of reading some meandering preamble, we present our pick of top 10 stories from the world of digital and content marketing that can do you a load of good. Show me the ROI of your content marketing If you’ve heard that from your boss and are looking to put your thoughts to paper, this article is for you. Katie Dufficy, Communications Director for Salesforce, Asia Pacific, shares how her company measures the effectiveness of content marketing. From having an effective elevator pitch like “Content marketing drove 20% leads for our business last year” or keeping relevant statistics handy like “72% of marketers think that branded content is more effective than magazine advertisements” are points that’ll not only convince your boss but your team to join the content marketing team. Visual Content Marketing: 10 Brilliant Examples Images play a big role in content marketing. People are not only attracted to a good visual instantly but are able to comprehend and respond to them better too. You’ll see these days that the visuals are getting bigger and better on social too. If you are looking to make your campaign more memorable and powerful, take inspiration from these 10 campaigns that have done it right. We especially like the “Liking isn’t helping” campaign by Crisis Relief Singapore where the image says it all. It makes people stop in their tracks and reflect their activity on social media and urges them to be more proactively involved offline rather than giving an easy thumbs up. What Will Google Stamp Mean for Content Marketing? Have you heard of Google Stamp yet? If not, now is a good time to take notice. After Google’s failed bid to buy Snapchat, the search giant is said to have worked double time to replicate the Discover feature from Snapchat and named the product Google Stamp. ‘Stamp’ stands for Story and AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages. From views rife on the internet, most people say that Stamp will allow mobile users to easily swipe between different types of content and a possible differentiator will be the addition of search intent to these actions. Though there is a lot of speculation, a product like Stamp can blur the lines between search, advertising, and content creation. 2018 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends Source: 2018 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: A First Look at Brand-New Research The new benchmark report for Content Marketing is out! Put together by MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and sponsored by Brightcove, it’s time you get your hands on the 8th annual content marketing survey. There are some trend figures in there that can be useful during your next content strategy presentation to your boss or client. A strange metric that caught our attention – the spend on content marketing has definitely increased buy lesser number of marketers are able to align metrics to content marketing goals. This seems like a common struggle in the industry and if you have trouble doing this too, we suggest you go back to the first story in this blog. Do you do the right mix of gated and ungated content? Find out here Content marketers seem to be a bit divided on the topic of gated v/s ungated content. Some believe that content should never be gated. Others think premium content shouldn’t be given out for free and should always be gated. While there is no absolute answer, the trick lies in mixing both gated and ungated content as a part of your strategy. Would you prospect every girl you date for marriage? Not likely. The fact that you want all their background info during the first date will scare them away. Similarly, if you ask all your first-time visitors to fill out a scary form, they are likely to bounce off sooner than you can say hello. Putting out the gating form at the right time for a piece of content that is unique makes sense. All marketers should use gated content to move people down the lead funnel. Is your brand romancing a scandal with a wrong content placement? Remember the YouTube ad and content scandal that broke out earlier this year? The incident showed that even a company can like Google can land in a soup if it doesn’t give enough importance to handling content right. Several top-tier advertisers in UK including Toyota, Marks and Spencer and Tesco and French media group Havas pulled out of advertising on YouTube after it was unearthed that their ads were appearing next to extremist content. 62% marketers believe that adjacency could undermine a brand’s qualities and values. As a content marketer, you may be responsible for where your client’s content may appear. So better pay heed to what the industry is saying. 80% of Instagram Users Voluntarily Connect With a Brand on the Platform And that’s happy news coming our way! Instagram’s COO Marne Levine recently revealed that 80 percent of the 800 million monthly users on Instagram connect with brands voluntarily. This makes it your best friend for visual content marketing. It seems to be one of the most successful among social platforms that are allowing people to view brands in a visual flourish and engage with them happily. Even though it is a seven-year-old brand, Instagram has been trying out innovations to connect the dots between customers, brands, and actual ROI. Looks like a solution may soon be around the corner. How to build a fashion brand Leila Fataar became global director of social media and public relations for Adidas Originals in 2012. The company hoped that her ‘Green and White Takeover’ campaign would sell 30,000 pairs of shoes. It ended up selling over a million. Fataar has gone on to craft many more success stories. When asked about what it takes to really
Our list of the best content marketing articles in August
There are several trend stories that caught our attention this August. We are past the mid year mark for 2017 and so it is logical to pick out learnings from what’s happened so far and also take a peek at the future on what surprises the rest of year has for us. You’ve got an interesting take on online reviews, ways to engage millennials with content marketing, how to make content go viral and a beautiful updated list of free and fabulous stock photo websites. Get your coffee before you begin… this will be an interesting ride Survey results: Here’s what 376 marketers say is working in online marketing Don’t we all like data-backed insights, especially when they are neatly packaged and presented in a quick blog. In a survey of our own species, (yes, we are a specie!) digital marketers shared their thoughts about trends in the Online Marketing industry and where things are headed. There are a couple of good things there on how people are likely to spend more on digital marketing than before. Strangely, though, ROI for marketing seems to be as elusive as the singing Sasquatch, probably more. Here’s to hoping we all have better and more real answers to that in the months to follow. Instead of Staffing Up For Your Marketing Campaign, Build A Chatbot Have you built a chatbot for your marketing campaign yet? If not, this is the perfect time to try it out. Chatbots aren’t just a customer service tool. They can take up some of the work done by real people in real time, saving time and resources for a marketing campaign. What’s more, since they can be governed by Artificial Intelligence, they will only get better with time. They won’t go on leave, will be available 24×7 and won’t leave without notice. Chatbot can be used to nurture leads and even up-sell products. Ready to give it a try? Learn how to make something go viral There is a proper ‘From the horse’s mouth’ course available to learn the techniques behind making something go viral. Look up the Online Diploma in Viral Marketing Live Course Webinar. Over four weeks, eight lessons and five tests, you’ll be taught to identify your target audience, tailor your message and create and deliver content. The course apparently costs $395 but is miraculously available for $9.99 for limited time. Is that good enough to make the course go viral? We’ll wait and watch. Meet the fake news of the online marketing world (that Google loves!): Review sites Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you would have surely heard that user generated content (in this case, reviews) is one of the best online currencies to help you improve your ranking. The marketer in you wants to go all out to create a Google My Business listing for your client and get started with review maintenance. Since Google’s rankings are now a mix of branded content and user reviews, these have become very important for a brand. Like all good things from Google, touts have found a way to exploit this feature too. Which is why you’ll see some bizarre, never-heard of the company with bad link profile is ranking well while those caught in between the optimization cycles are pretty much stuck. Google is yet to create a full screening process. Until then, get going with genuine reviews only. Five Ways To Engage Millennials Through Your Content Marketing Millennials are the biggest marketing segment and a tough one to crack for content marketers. They are fast, have access to tons of information from various sources and can quickly change sides if given a compelling reason. The right mix of communication without sounding too preachy about a brand is one of the ways to reel them in. They are often the first adopters to new technology. They value being true to themselves and expect brands also do the same. Read through to know some low hanging fruits on how you can engage the generation of the future. 11 Trade Secrets From An Expert Project Manager In a recent survey, it was found that 94% of people manage projects at their job, but only 47% of those workers actually have “project manager” in their job title. This means there are many people in the role but don’t have formal training or expertise. This blog outlines some pro tips from someone who has been there, done that. From a timeline estimation to how to calculate the right compensation for your work, have a look at everything you can do to rise to the next level. Keywordtool.io Review: A Simple, Useful Research Tool For SEO So, we promise we aren’t paid to do this product plug. It comes sourced from its original content on nectafy. As content marketers, we often have to write highly optimized content and keyword research is a part of our daily work. It is time to leave your favourite Keyword Planner tool behind for a while and try Keywordtoo.io and see why it is doing a better job. You type one high lever term and in the tool and you’ll get all possible Google Suggest and auto complete phrases. The fresh and fabulous list of websites that offer free stock images Images are a big part of the content and they do tend to take away the need of us content marketers to be intensely verbose. They are easy on the eyes of the reader. They also don’t come free – well, almost. There are plenty of free stock photos available online – genuine, high quality and those that can be printed out into tees and billboards too! This isn’t a too good to be true offer. Our fresh and updated list of free stock photo websites is worth being bookmarked. So don’t forget to save the page! 7 Tech Trends That Will Shake Up Content Marketing in