Melissa is presenting at Confab Central in Minneapolis in June. It has finally happened. After months (or years) of publishing your blog and working your content marketing magic, you finally have a smash hit. A post takes off, and the page views, social shares and comments start racking up. All of a sudden, that one post has twice as many page views as your previous No. 1, seemingly everyone who reads the post is liking, sharing and retweeting, and there’s a spirited, good-natured debate happening in the comments section. Congratulations, you have captured content lightning in a bottle. Now, the temptation comes: That quiet voice inside your head (or the gleeful voice of your boss), immediately insisting, “We’ve done it once; we can do it again! Let’s find out what caused that spike and make it happen again! And again! Bigger! Better! More!” It’s alluring. There is pressure, from […]
Why It’s Time to End Self-Promotional ‘Content Selfies’
Why It’s Time to End Self-Promotional ‘Content Selfies’ “We need to create valuable content that speaks to our buyers’ needs.” “Sell value, not products.” “Our marketing needs to be less about us, and more informative.” Content should be at the center of your marketing efforts. That’s not earth-shattering, but an all too obvious fact in our buyer-centric world. A recent survey from Demand Gen Report and SnapApp found that the majority of B2B marketers are already using or are planning to use content as a central component of their campaign strategy. We can talk the talk but, as it turns out, have trouble actually delivering on what we promise. We’re doing a whole lot of speaking in platitudes like “content is king,” but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of “doing” actually happening. A small number—just 18 percent—of B2B marketers say they are “extremely confident” in the […]
Stop Killing Your Content Team: 3 Ways to Scale Work With Existing Resources
Year after year, many content teams are asked to deliver more and better content with the same staff and budget. In fact, 73% of B2C marketers say they plan to produce more content in 2017 than they did in 2016. But how? Here are three foundational tips for increasing output without burning out your team and losing the talent you rely on. (You may be surprised that only one tip is directly related to the content.) 1. Learn to say no to unnecessary work One way to scale your work with the resources you have is to let go of any content tasks that aren’t meeting your team and company goals . While this can be tricky to determine, there’s one simple question to ask, according to Michele Linn : Would anyone miss your content if you did not publish it? Ouch. Obviously, if you’re just starting down a […]
User Intent: It’s the Future of SEO
In recent years search engines have been optimized around users needs and their search experience . Google has evolved in rewarding content that is valuable and relevant to readers. Modern-day SEO is all about user intent , and you can improve your online presence by focusing on several key psychological principles to entice your readers, rank well in the search rankings and ultimately, help grow your business. Let’s take a look at some ways you can understand your au
dience and the steps needed to create content that gets found in Google. Customer Personas Should Direct SEO Online marketers love to get into the heads of their customers. We do this with A/B testing, analytics, and other methods to understand what our audience does when they consume our content. One tool to understand the mind of your target audience is to build customer personas.
We have now entered a phase where it is no longer sufficient to just provide content and products online
A few years later, the concept of Content Strategy helped shift editorial understanding of web content as more than just uploading a catalogue, to the art and craft of combining writing, linguistics, digital assets and technology in a hyperlinked medium. We have now entered a third phase where it is no longer sufficient to just provide content and products online, but to offer customers a full smorgasbord of consumables from products to rich media with social interaction that can keep them busy for hours. Businesses refer to this as maintaining their Feed.
A few years later, the concept of Content Strategy helped shift editorial understanding of web content as more than just uploading a catalogue, to the art and craft of combining writing, linguistics, digital assets and technology in a hyperlinked medium. We have now entered a third phase where it is no longer sufficient to just provide content and products online, but to offer customers a full smorgasbord of consumables from products to rich media with social interaction that can keep them busy for hours. Businesses refer to this as maintaining their Feed.
A few years later, the concept of Content Strategy helped shift editorial understanding of web content as more than just uploading a catalogue, to the art and craft of combining writing, linguistics, digital assets and technology in a hyperlinked medium. We have now entered a third phase where it is no longer sufficient to just provide content and products online, but to offer customers a full smorgasbord of consumables from products to rich media with social interaction that can keep them busy for hours. Businesses refer to this as maintaining their Feed.
In 1983, Thomas Wolf wrote an essay for Esquire about Intel Founder, Robert Noyce . Noyce grew up in midland Iowa on a family farm and he revolutionised office design by incorporating the egalitarian landscape of his childhood. Gone were the cubicles, offices, and hierarchy. Instead, he introduced the first “open plan” space where employees were perceived as equals and had free range of the farm, er, I mean firm. A few years later, the concept of Content Strategy helped shift editorial understanding of web content as more than just uploading a catalogue, to the art and craft of combining writing, linguistics, digital assets and technology in a hyperlinked medium. We have now entered a third phase where it is no longer sufficient to just provide content and products online, but to offer customers a full smorgasbord of consumables from products to rich media with social interaction that can […]
8 Awesome Ways to Declutter Your Digital Marketing Life
Digital clutter is anything but Zen. It’s the problem every marketer has and nobody talks about. Easy to ignore, hard to see, but what is all the extra stuff and fluff really costing your digital marketing life in time, money, and resources? The number of messages, files, accounts, passwords, subscriptions, notifications, tools, and networks seem to be growing at supersonic speed. Yesterday’s bright and shiny must-haves are ready for the virtual museum of has-beens. There is no doubt: clutter in your digital space will have a negative impact on your mind, mood, and motion. Just take a look at these facts and read on: 80% of what we have, we will never use. The average professional spends six weeks a year looking for something we can’t find. We spend 30 hours a week checking email. People spend up to four hours a week preparing for meetings. The Zero Inbox […]
How to Boost Your Digital Marketing With PR
Recently, I listened to the CEO of a multibillion-dollar corporation tell me about his company’s profit and loss; and I realized that he considered marketing, sales and PR — all of it — as a single line item. In this man’s mind, anything driving new business belonged in just one single category. I can understand how that might seem logical; however, when you look at these separate operations as a joint function, you can’t really see how one affects the other. In fact, they are complementary; so lumping them together makes it hard to understand how to maximize those investments. What’s more, if you don’t think about the symbiotic nature of your various outsourced functions, you could be wasting money on ineffective initiatives. How critical is it to capitalize on your PR team’s earned media in your digital marketing? If the 2016 presidential election was any indicator, it’s your […]
Think Mobile-First for Your Mobile Content
“Think Mobile First” was a popular catchphrase a few years ago when the responsive web-site became popular and important; micro-displays of your website wouldn’t cut it anymore – users needed to have a whole new experience on their mobile device. Now that responsive layout is pretty well established, we as digital marketers need to begin thinking of a new mobile-first: content. Not just how your mobile content is laid out on the site, but rather is the content you are delivering appropriate for consumption on a mobile version of your site? Even though 77 percent of mobile searches were initiated at home or at work – where desktops are readily available , we are still stuck on mobile content in terms of layout; can you scroll, is it easy to click the CTA’s, is the alignment the same in horizontal as well as vertical. However, not much thought is […]
5 Writing Principles That Will Make Your Content Go Viral
Cast the first stone in me, those of you unwilling to create viral content that gets well shared! And cast the second stone in me, those of you unwilling to create and publish content that gets well shared and… linked! Eric Enge at Stone Temple claims we still need links to enhance traffic. And in the world of content shock , we have to outdo ourselves for creating something truly magical that would bring those links and shares. In 2015, BuzzSumo analyzed one million posts and shocked us with the results: 50% of those posts got less than 8 shares, and 70% of them didn’t get links at all! Sounds not inspiring enough, huh ? This year, they teamed up with Majestic and conducted new research to identify content types with a high potential to go viral. That’s all very fine, but… With all those articles on the one-works-for-all […]
8 Content Marketing Tricks That Helped Dollar Shave Club Go Viral
Ask any North-American male aged 17-30 whether he’s heard of Dollar Shave Club (DSC). He’ll probably say, “Yeah.” And it’s not just dudes who know about DSC. A lot of women know about it too because they’ve bought subscriptions for the men in their lives. Dollar Shave Club is a classic example of startup that blew up—in a good way. What was one of the first signs of their success? A video. A viral video. If you haven’t seen it, you ought to check it out: The company’s launch video, casually titled “Our Blades Are F**king Great,” quickly became a sensation on the web. With punchlines and gags to suit a variety of tastes, the video racked up nearly 5 million views within the first 90 days. The company’s founder, Michael Dubin, had a few aces up his sleeve to help create a professionally cut video. The CEO studied […]