Content Archives - Page 2 of 17

April 17, 2017

3 Data-Driven Insights to Boost Your Guest Content Strategy

It’s every content marketer’s dream to have a perfect company blog. Imagine your site filled with a variety of content that shares unique and thoughtful insights, from exceptionally written articles to interactive infographics to professional videos. It’s enough to make any marketer swoon.

Unfortunately, even this stellar blog of your dreams isn’t enough on its own to get your brand in front of your full audience. It’s unlikely that your entire target audience already visits your blog regularly, so by posting only to your own site, you miss out on reaching those potential consumers who don’t follow you yet.

Enter guest-contributed content. Guest posting is a natural and effective way to meet consumers where they already are, and it promotes your ideas, raises brand awareness, and, ultimately, increases your bottom line . The Right Way to Contribute Guest Content

There is definitely a right way and a wrong way to get […]

Why the Future of Marketing Is Curiosity, Not Creation

Since the beginning, marketing has required a balance between analysis and execution. Especially in digital marketing, the cycle of analyze > optimize > execute > repeat is the nucleus of all successful initiatives.

But the age of cognitive marketing has begun, and robot assistants will handle more and more of the creation duties that used to belong to human marketers.

IBM (a Convince & Convert partner) is the forward guard of this movement, with their Watson Marketing suite of tools and APIs powering an increasing number of real-time analysis and optimization opportunities. The IBM Think Marketing portal , for example, uses the Watson CMS to automatically serve up a different mix of content based on what you’ve read in the past. This past weekend gave us another glimpse of marketing’s future, at The Masters golf tournament. IBM is a long-time sponsor of the storied event and provides all the technology for […]

Is Technology Actually Making Us Less Productive? [New Research]

After working in my role here at HubSpot for almost eight months now, I’ve started to go into autopilot when I turn on my computer every morning.

I open up my email app, my calendar app, my organization and productivity app, my grammar-checking app, my note-taking app, my analytics tool, and my blogging tool.

And that’s only when I first get into the office.

By the end of most days, my browser is full of different tabs, and so many apps and tools are running that they eventually start shutting down of their own accord. When all of these sites, apps, and tools are working, I spend a significant portion of my day using them: to write, to proofread, to extrapolate data, to keep track of what I’m working on, to update notes — all in the name of efficiency.But as it turns out, the tools and apps that we marketers use […]

17 Tricks for Boosting Conversions On Any Landing Page

Your new year’s resolution?

Boosting conversion rates , increasing business leads and achieving success!

You probably know from experience that just driving traffic to your website with content, social media, and paid ads is only half the battle – you either need to get more specialized landing pages, or perfect them so a visitor considers buying.

That means creating an effective and emotionally compelling case that showcases your product or service in the best possible light.Here are 17 tricks to making any landing page convert. Let’s get started. 1. Craft the most compelling headline Research shows that you have 0-8 seconds to capture a visitor’s interest with a compelling headline and landing page. After the eight seconds is up, most visitors leave.The headline is the first thing a visitor sees, ultimately deciding whether or not they want to stick around. When writing an effective headline, you should aim for a mix […]

Steal These 5 Subject Line Tips for Increasing Your Email Open Rates1

121.

That’s the number of emails the average person receives per day, according to a study by the The Radicati Group .

Does this mean that sending email marketing campaigns is futile? Is there simply too much clutter in the inbox for your company to break through? Heck no!

While there is definitely steep competition for attention, a strong subject line will put all eyes on your email. That’s why I’m going to share five stellar examples of email subject lines that you can adapt for your own campaigns to cut through the noise! 1. Create a sense of urgency According to the Email Institute, email subject lines that create a sense of urgency can lift open rates by up to 22% !When a consumer feels a sense of urgency they are compelled to move through the sales cycle quickly so they do not miss out. Brands can create a sense of […]

How to Write Compelling Email Content Customers Want to Read [Infographic]

As consumers, we’re often quick to delete emails that don’t seem relevant to us. So when we put on our marketer hats, we should be thinking about what our customers want to hear more than what our brands want to say.

That may seem obvious, but writing compelling content is harder than it looks.

Luckily, an infographic by Campaigner gives actionable tips on how to write great emails.

For example, 69% of email recipients report an email as spam based solely on the subject line, the infographic says, and it offers six tips for crafting read-worthy subject lines.In addition to the message and the words, focus on the layout of your emails, the infographic suggests. Many people skim emails, so using lists, bullets, and easy-to-read formatting can make a big difference.For more tips on crafting compelling emails, check out the infographic: Join over 600,000 marketing professionals, and gain access to thousands of […]

Don’t Kill Your Audience’s Vibe with These Content Marketing Turn-Offs

As of 2017, the overwhelming majority ( 89% ) of B2B marketers use content marketing in some form. As you can imagine, how well marketers execute their campaigns varies quite a bit.

Or, as The Content Marketing Institute would put it, there are differences in “content marketing maturity levels.” As you can see, a fairly small number (28%) would be considered either mature or sophisticated.

The rest could definitely use some improvement, and there’s a lot of room for growth for many content marketers.

One thing I’ve noticed (especially when it comes to those new to the game) is that many brands engage in tactics that could be considered turn-offs.This doesn’t necessarily mean being unethical or using black-hat techniques.It means unknowingly using tactics that annoy site visitors and slowly but surely drive a wedge between the company and its audience.At best, this results in diminished engagement, a lower follower count, etc.At worst, […]

What Is the Difference Between Content and Content Marketing?

Editor’s note: There continue to be a lot of questions about how content and content marketing differ. This post shares an insightful answer that resonates with marketers, so we are bringing it back.

What is the difference between content and content marketing? The answer is the destination you will use to attract and build an audience.

Content marketing is about attracting an audience to an experience (or “destination”) that you own, build, and optimize to achieve your marketing objectives.

Content is everywhere. There’s product content , sales content, customer-service content, event content, employee-generated content, marketing and campaign content. Even advertising is content.With content marketing you are attracting an audience to a brand-owned destination versus interrupting or buying an audience on someone else’s platform.Think American Express’ OPEN forum: Or Red Bull’s RedBulletin: Or my latest favorite content marketing destination, Casper’s Van Winkle’s: These are three great examples of content marketing destinations […]

Part 1: Getting started with content personalisation

This is the first of a three part series about content personalisation. The series will address when it’s advantageous for organisations to press pause and consider the best route to optimise its strategy and approach: Before getting started

After a series of “one-off’ forays into content personalisation

Post platform and tech investment

If content personalisation was easy, everyone would already be doing it. This is the inconvenient truth about personalisation which is defined as contextually targeted content to a specific person or user. While interviewing senior leaders for the Forbes “Publish or Perish” report, Mark Yolton, then senior vp of digital for Cisco shared the following: Personalised experiences improve content performance, but create huge upstream challenges. Introducing personalisation around just three personas increased content volume 30x and created pressure to update the website every four hours, instead of every week. Why such a large increase in content requirements? The […]

Eight Simple SEO Mistakes Killing Your Content Marketing

Search engines help you get new readers, viewers, and listeners for your content, but all too often you yourself are the reason search engines hold your content back from prominent positions in their search results pages.

Search engines want to show the world your content, but not if you’ve made mistakes that undermine the user experience and search engines’ guidelines.

So give the search engines what they want by avoiding the following common mistakes that content creators make.

1. Short Content Google likes long-form content because it gives searchers enough information to satisfy their needs. Generally, the more in-depth the content is, the more likely it solves the searcher’s intent or question, and that is what Google wants.A SerpIQ study found that content shown in Google search results in positions 1-3 had around 2,400 words, on average. In short, long-form content ranked better in Google. Does this mean you should be […]