Blog - Page 12 of 22 - Michael Dillon

February 13, 2017

A Marketer’s Guide to Selecting the Best Images for Your Content

If you’re creating content without images, you’re missing a huge opportunity to increase engagement, reach a wider audience, and maximize conversions. We’re visual people, inherently drawn to content that contains rich, attractive images. Adding images to an online article can nearly double its views , and 67 percent of consumers say images are more important than product descriptions when making a purchase decision. Of course, just throwing any image into your content won’t catapult it to the top of the search results. Images need to be carefully selected and high quality and they need to add true value to your content . They should be visually appealing, relevant, and appropriate for your company and the marketing channel. The following guide will help you choose the right image for your next project. How Do You Choose the Right Images? When picking an image for your blog or online marketing effort, […]

How Data-Driven Insights Build Strong Brand Community

As humans, we like to feel like a community member. We strive to connect with others who share common interests, beliefs, and passions, both in person and online. We engage with the content that aligns with our interests and beliefs, and we ignore the rest. We share or follow what we believe to be valuable and hold meaning. Brands also want to feel like a community member and want to build meaningful connections with their customers. They know that today, consumers choose to purchase from the brands that align with their cultural identity and provide value beyond their purchases. “A strong brand community increases customer loyalty, lowers marketing costs, authenticates brand meanings, and yields an influx of ideas to grow the business.” – Harvard Business Review As explained in an article by 12/ahead, “Having the best or cheapest product on the market is not enough, if you can build […]

8 Old School Off-Page Optimization Techniques You Could be Penalized For

Search engine optimization never stands still. It must evolve quickly to stay on top of the algorithm updates released by Google’s never-resting R&D team. Neither digital marketers nor SEO professionals are machines who can easily upload and process dozens of GBs of data. We are humans, and it takes us time to research, learn, and adapt new promotion and optimization techniques to our everyday processes. It is difficult, so many prefer to stay inside their comfort zones until Google hits really hard. In this article, I’m not going to challenge you to leave your safe SEO waters. What I’m going to do, though, is dig deeper into the history of search engine optimization and cover old school off-page optimization methods, which will definitely get your site penalized by Google today. So, let’s start our time machine and get going! #1 Link Building with “Rented” Paid Links Nowadays, paid links […]

Live Content is Rising in Popularity

At the beginning of 2016, everybody was talking about how big video will be and how important it will become for every small, medium business or even enterprise. And as we can see, the video has become a big challenge for many brands out there that try to get some results with their content marketing strategy. But what the specialist didn’t say is what type of video will rise. We can have documentary videos, movie videos, ad videos, presentation videos, review videos or vlogs. Social media cannot be compared to the television or radio. People use social media because they want something different from this platform. They are tired of prepared shows and videos. They are tired of directed shows that they can’t pause whenever they want. The consumer wants to have the power of getting into the conversation and wants to be part of the experience. This is […]

Do You Have a Plan to Scale Content Creation?

< All Articles    Content marketing seems simple enough…at first. You write content, then you publish it. I can’t help but be reminded of this scene from Mrs. Doubtfire : Daniel : What do I do? Tony : Well you take all these cans, you box ’em, you ship ’em. Then you box those cans over there, ship them, then more will come in. You box those, you ship those. Any questions? Daniel : After you box them…? Tony : You ship ’em. Lotsa luck, smartass For small marketing teams with one or two people, the content creation process can seem just as straightforward. Everyone is on the same page. You what’s being published and when. There are few points of failure. But what happens when the amount of content increases tenfold? What happens when you have 5, 10, or even 20 people contributing content on a […]

9 (More) Lessons From the World’s Best Content Marketing Brands

I write for CMI regularly, and each year the post that garners the most interest shows content marketing examples from brands who are killing it from around the web (you can also see the posts from 2015 and 2016 ). Of course, brands are continually impressing me with lessons both big and small. Combined with an advanced knowledge of content marketing , these nine inspiring brands will help to skyrocket your own content marketing campaign. 1. Surprise your audience like GE GE’s tagline of “Imagination at Work” couldn’t possibly ring more true. The 125-year-old brand consistently comes up with new ways of employing content marketing and is known for successful strategies on every medium imaginable. Consider the company’s foray into science-fiction comic books. In the mid-1950s, GE began publishing a series of comic books to get children interested in science. In 2015, it partnered with Wattpad to reimagine the […]

Read More contentmarketinginstitute.com

February 8, 2017February 8, 2017

7 Productivity Killers for Marketers and How to Fix Them

If there is one thing on my mind this year, it’s how we, as marketers, are getting our work done. Not to mince words, but how we work seems broken. I see the issues with the way I work. All. The. Time. I want dedicated time in my schedule to create, but I get interrupted or – when I do have time – I can’t seem to focus. Here are just a few common scenarios. I have an organized list of blog post ideas – and many half-finished articles – but I still scramble to meet deadlines. My days are filled with scheduled and unplanned phone conversations that result in more ideas – but the more I talk, the less time I have to act. When I do sit down to do actual work, I am interrupted with pings from IMs or phone calls. When I struggle with something […]

Read More contentmarketinginstitute.com

February 7, 2017February 7, 2017

One Thing is Killing Content Marketing and Everyone Is Ignoring It

Editor’s note: Most marketers are searching for the answers on how to make their content marketing more successful. This update of a previously published post shares one answer. In 2016, I led a workshop on content marketing for about 50 small-business CEOs and operations managers. They came from all different industries. Some were consultants. There was a plumber and also a representative from an HVAC company present. Pest management? Check. A few small manufacturing companies , a nonprofit , and a jewelry store rounded it out. In other words, it was a diverse group of companies. What wasn’t diverse was the way they were marketing their companies. Most had e-newsletters. All of them had Facebook pages. Every one of these senior leaders was concerned about search engine rankings. Another consistent characteristic? Not one of them was happy with their marketing. This is not unusual. It’s predictable that senior leaders […]

Read More contentmarketinginstitute.com

February 6, 2017

9 Digital Marketing Trends to Invest in This Year

As content marketing—and specifically video marketing—continues to shape the B2B marketing landscape, marketers are beginning to loosen their purse strings to make more room for the new year. A report from PulsePoint and Digiday found that by next year, content marketing, as an industry, will grow by 59 percent from last year. This kind of authentic, real-time marketing is positioning content marketing to outpace search and social budget . Take a look at a few must-haves in our digital marketing budget. Each of these trends are helping us to bolster reporting, close the loop between marketing and sales, prove ROI, and bring human-to-human marketing to the forefront . 1. Video and Live Streams It doesn’t take Chewbacca Mom to show us how important visual storytelling has become. Consumers like to watch video—as many as four times as many consumers prefer to watch a video over reading text . But […]

Working on Your Content Marketing Plan? 9 Components to Consider

Building an overall brand story is essential to effective marketing, and doing so online can be achieved by mixing a little business operations with journalistic procedures. Documenting a content marketing plan can be simple, and it must be done. Here are nine essential components to consider. 1. Set a tiered goal Every successful business plan starts with a set of tiered goals . Set quantifiable annual, quarterly, and monthly progress goals so everyone knows what to aim for. One article per day is the minimum goal you want to meet, in addition to at least three posts on each social media platform. These posts are meant to build on the story of the daily article – think of them as the special features on a Blu-ray disc. When the article is automatically promoted on each social media channel, three posts of conversational subject matter are necessary to keep the […]

Read More contentmarketinginstitute.com