Marketing Archives - Page 8 of 13

February 21, 2017

Two Vital Elements that Might Be Missing from Your Content (and Precisely Where to Add Them)

It’s taken you more than 10 hours to write a blog post. You’ve researched the topic to the nth degree. You’ve edited it to within an inch of its life. Now it’s time to get it out into the world! You excitedly press Publish, and … even days later … crickets. Heartbreaking, right? We all like to think that the amount of effort we invest in creating a piece of content directly correlates to how deeply it resonates with readers . But, experience has repeatedly shown this is not the case. So, what’s the deciding factor if it’s not effort? Luck? Timing? Skill? Yes, the factors above do play a part. But, more often than not, it comes down to these two elements: If your content doesn’t hook readers in the first few sentences, it doesn’t matter how good the rest of it is, you’ve lost them. If you […]

How to Use Psychology to Create High-Performing Content

When email marketing first started becoming popular in the late 1990s, it was possible to get open rates over 80 percent . When AdWords started getting traction, you could buy clicks for high-volume keywords at very low cost. In the early days of content marketing, it was easy to rank in search. As time goes on, you have to deal with more and more competition, which makes it harder to stand out. It’s not as easy to rank or drive leads as it used to be. But, there’s a deeper, more pernicious aspect of aging marketing channels that people rarely talk about: As more and more content gets created, it gets harder to make your company sound different from its competitors. Related: The 3 Types of Marketing Emails That Nobody Has Opened in Years One of the reasons for this is that we tend to look to our competition, […]

33 Tips to Build a Memorable Online Brand

“If you’re not on the internet. You don’t exist.” Seth Godin said that – or maybe it was Winston Churchill? Whoever it was, they had a point. Dramatic? Definitely, but not any less true. If someone Google’s (it’s a verb now, right?) your business and it doesn’t show up, then you’re as good as dead. But you already know this. You’ve been doing the online branding thing for a while now and it’s not working! Your brand doesn’t have that many followers on social media or maybe it does, but they’re not converting. Or maybe you don’t know this stuff, and are just preparing to hop onto this whole online marketing train everyone keeps talking about. Either way, you’ll be able to find some helpful tips in this post. These tips are probably not going to be a magic cure for your branding problems (it’s not a 12 step […]

5 Ways to Level Up Your Content Marketing Maturity

Large or small. Growing or dwindling resources. New or experienced in the content marketing realm. Every organization is at a different stage in their content marketing maturity, looking for innovative and even practical ways to bring their efforts to the next level. But as the old adage goes, you have to walk before you run—and that couldn’t be more true when it comes to growing your content marketing maturity. Simply put. In order to grow your content marketing maturity, you have to understand where you’re at and create a strategy to get to the next step. Using TopRank Marketing’s own content marketing maturity model —developed by CEO Lee Odden —below we offer insights to help you determine your current level of maturity, as well as tips to help you move on to the next. #1 – Stasis Stasis is the ground-level of our content marketing maturity model, with marketers […]

Your Essential Guide to Internal Content Linking

22Today, it’s easy to get caught up in the glitzy, glamorous SEO tricks and tactics that are flooding the web. SEOs and marketers everywhere are focused deeply on things like site audits and the latest and greatest in Google algorithm updates, and that’s all well and good, but sometimes it means that the simpler and, often, more critical fundamentals get overlooked. One of these overlooked SEO components is internal linking. If you think of SEO as a house, internal linking is the framework of that house. Internal linking provides the flow of traffic, allows you to navigate the space from room to room, and makes the space comfortable and intuitive. When you think of it this way, why would you build a blog without internal linking? Unfortunately, many people do. (And yes – if you look closely, you’ll notice I internal linked above!) In addition to making your web […]

Writing for the web: 8 must-read articles

You’ve determined what content you need, who is going to write it and when. Yay workflow! But now it’s actually time to write. For some this can be a breeze, for others more of a challenge, especially when you’re creating content that needs to suit both business needs and user goals. Add on top of that the brand style, authentic voice and tone and perhaps even SEO and translation requirements, and it can quickly become an intimidating and stressful task that gets pushed further down the to-do list. Panic not. We’ve published several articles with advice to help you write better content for your websites (and audience!). I’ve gathered 8 of those here and between them they cover SEO, micro-copy, UX, plain English, translations and more. There’s even a bonus article about proof reading your content once you get through the production stage. Getting started: How to write great […]

Keeping content on track for big website projects

Emileigh is presenting at Confab Central in Minneapolis in June. The World Wide Web is turning 28 this year, which means companies, governments, and schools have had almost three decades to let their content grow out of control. Increasingly, these organisations are asking for help, and they’re turning to content and industry professionals, like you and me, for answers. That means at some point, you may find yourself working on a big, messy, existing website. But content on large websites isn’t the same as content for small sites. Existing content is not the same as new content. So how can content designers be successful, when they’re taking on massive projects? Don’t throw away your tools, but do tweak them President Dwight Eisenhower said, “in preparing for battle, I have found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Figuring out the shape of existing content is crucial for project […]

Leverage Your Network to Help Drive Your Own Branded Content

< All Articles    The Content Creation Conundrum If you’re looking to grow your business’s online presence, original branded content is the way to go. According to a Forrester study , 74% of business buyers conduct more than half of their research online before making a purchase. Original branded content allows you to: proactively engage with these prospective customers, establish your organization’s credibility, and increase the chances that prospects find you in the first place. The problem is that creating this content can turn out to be very time-consuming. And if you want to maximize the return you see on this content, the majority of the work actually occurs AFTER your content is published (if you’re interested in learning more about content promotion tactics, this blog post by Ameer Rosic is a great place to start). So what’s a business owner or time-constricted marketer to do?! Start […]

The Truth About How Often to Post in Social Media

Will Roe v. Wade be overturned? Will the United States bail on every international treaty to which it has previously signed? Will Nicolas Cage have a late-career resurgence? How often should I post to social media? These (among others) are the central questions of our time. You could fill Tom Brady’s trophy case with the amount of research that has been conducted on social media posting frequency. Our friends at CoSchedule, in fact, collated much of it to create this nifty consensus guide on when to post . It’s good stuff. But, it’s not true. None of it is true. Because all of those studies look at the success of each post in a vacuum. How many clicks, likes, shares, comments, etc. did a piece of social content get, and what happens to those baseline results when the frequency of publication goes up, or down? Every single one of […]

Want to Scale Up Your Content Operations? 4 Things to Think Big About [Infographic]

Let’s say for some time you single-handedly make something that people love to consume: cinnamon buns, maybe, or content. You decide to go big with your operations and bring more bliss into the world. Boatloads of bliss. We’re talking content (or cinnamon buns) galore. We’re talking more than simply doing more of what you’re doing. We’re talking scaling up. You need to do more than throw more people at the situation. To handle increased complexity, you need updated processes, new strategies, and more automation. For example, in Automating Content Reuse: One Marketing Team’s Story , Jen Brass Jenkins tells the story of the content teams at the University of Utah Health Care system who are revamping the way they create, tag, distribute, and manage their content so they can reuse their content in smarter ways and get it in front of more readers. Boatloads of readers. Many marketers dream […]