marketing Archives - Page 13 of 15

February 1, 2017February 1, 2017

Why Design and Coding Academies Need to Get in on Inbound Marketing

Supermodels may have ruled the world in the 1990s, but today it’s the creatives . Everyone wants in on disruptive, viral, [insert your own buzz word here] intersecting worlds of design and technology. Especially the savvy students who are looking for challenging, fun, and economically rewarding professions. Design and coding academies are rising to meet these opportunities, but there’s a lot of noise swirling around. If you want your academy’s message to shout out and reach your prospective students, you need to be using inbound and content marketing. Fortunately, your creative natures and enterprises are great fits to achieve great results with content marketing and inbound. You’re Already Flush with Content For a lot of marketing teams, creating quality content on a consistent basis is a big challenge. Not so for design and coding academies. Your faculty and students already create amazing content daily. Student projects, faculty lectures, and […]

How to Write a Case Study: The Ultimate Guide & Template

To help you arm your prospects with information they can trust, we’ve put together a step-by-step guide on how to create effective case studies for your business — as well as free case study templates for creating your own. How to Write a Business Case Study: The Ultimate Guide 1) Find the Right Case Study Candidate Writing about your previous projects requires more than picking a client and telling a story. You need permission, quotes, and a plan. To start, here are a few things to look for in potential candidates. Product Knowledge It helps to select a customer who’s well-versed in the logistics of your product or service. That way, he or she can better speak to the value of what you offer in a way that makes sense for future customers. Remarkable Results Clients that have seen the best results are going to make the strongest case […]

How to avoid a common content strategy pitfall

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 $User Intent: It\'s the Future of SEO$ 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.

A System for Easily Publishing Consistently Great Content – A Pamela Wilson Series

This five-part series is a guest contribution from Pamela Wilson of Big Brand System . Content marketing works — you know that. It’s one big reason you read ProBlogger! You like the content here and you want to learn more about how to create it yourself. It’s all well and good to talk about how to write content effectively, of course. But at some point, you’ve got to actually do it. Regularly. Content marketing works best when it’s done consistently over time. One single piece of well-written content won’t turn your business around. It’s the act of creating and publishing useful content over time that creates business results. Prospects and customers begin to trust you when you show up and are helpful week after week. You become like a wise friend who’s always there to lend a hand. Which, of course, can seem like an incredibly daunting task and […]

How Virtual Reality Could Change Content Marketing

No longer the domains of ultra-early adopters and video gamers, virtual reality and augmented reality are poised to take off in the coming 24 months. “We see qualities in VR/AR technology that can take this from niche-use case to a device as ubiquitous as the smartphone,” Goldman Sachs Research wrote in its Virtual and Augmented Reality report. More consumers are expecting to see the power of virtual reality too. According to Greenlight Insights 62% of consumers say they would feel more engaged with a brand that sponsors a VR experience and 71% of consumers think a brand is forward-thinking if it uses virtual reality. Expert insight Sarah Hill is the CEO and chief storyteller for StoryUP, one of the early pioneers in virtual reality for brands. She explains why VR is finally gaining a foothold, and what marketers should understand before they dive in. CCO: Describe what virtual reality […]

The 7 Traits of Successful Content Marketers

One of the most influential authors of my personal and career journey is Napoleon Hill. Napoleon Hill’s classic Think and Grow Rich was first published in 1937. Now, in its 80th anniversary year, Mr. Hill’s lessons are still extremely relevant and valuable. I had the opportunity to dust off my copy of Think and Grow Rich (from 1960, with dog-eared and coffee-stained pages) a few weeks back during the holiday break. In its relation to content marketing, I noticed some clear takeaways that most corporate marketers simply do not embrace. In the book, 15 powerful chapters are helpful to all individuals, but seven chapters were spot-on relevant to content marketing . Here are quotes from the seven chapters with my notes for each one. Caution from Joe: The book is extremely chauvinistic. If you read it, just prepare yourself for that. 1. Desire “Whatever the mind can conceive and […]

How to Diagnose Your Traffic Issues with These SEO Tools

Believe it or not, SEO is not a rocket science. In most cases, it comes down to the most obvious common sense things, like easy-to-understand website structure, well-written relevant copy, carefully picked descriptive page titles, etc. Some more complicated problems may occur (those that require professional help) from time to time, but in most cases, you can identify and fix things with tools. Here are 5 SEO issues preventing your site from getting more traffic and tools that can handle those: 1. Broken Links and Redirects It’s the most widespread problem, for both big and small websites. The Internet never stops growing: Many pages go down in redesigns, website moving or selling, outdated or sold-out product page, etc. There are plenty of reasons why a page may cease to exist. An estimated 37,000 websites are hacked every day which results in hundreds of thousands of non-existent pages and broken […]