Understanding Content Marketing

Content marketing involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. The goal is to drive profitable customer action by providing meaningful information that addresses the needs and interests of the audience.

The Evolution of Content Marketing

Content marketing has evolved from traditional advertising methods to a more sophisticated approach that focuses on building relationships with consumers. Today, it encompasses various formats, including blog posts, videos, infographics, and more, each designed to engage audiences in different ways.

Benefits of Content Marketing

Boosting Engagement

One of the primary benefits of content marketing is its ability to boost engagement. By providing content that resonates with your audience, you can encourage more interactions, shares, and comments, fostering a sense of community and loyalty.

Building Trust with Your Audience

Trust is a crucial component of any successful marketing strategy. Content marketing allows you to build trust by consistently delivering valuable information, demonstrating your expertise, and addressing your audience’s pain points. Over time, this builds credibility and encourages long-term customer relationships.

Driving Conversions

Effective content marketing doesn’t just engage and build trust; it also drives conversions. By guiding your audience through the buyer’s journey with targeted content, you can convert prospects into customers and customers into repeat buyers.

Types of Content Marketing

Blog Posts

Blogs are a staple of content marketing. They provide a platform to share in-depth information, tips, and insights on various topics relevant to your audience. Regularly updated blogs can also improve your website’s SEO and drive organic traffic.

Videos

Video content is incredibly engaging and can convey complex information in an easily digestible format. From tutorials and product demos to customer testimonials and behind-the-scenes looks, videos can capture attention and drive engagement.

Infographics

Infographics combine visuals with data to tell a story or explain a concept. They’re highly shareable and can simplify complex information, making it more accessible to your audience.

Social Media Content

Social media platforms are perfect for sharing content and interacting with your audience in real-time. Whether it’s a tweet, a Facebook post, or an Instagram story, social media content can drive engagement and expand your reach.

E-books and Whitepapers

E-books and whitepapers offer in-depth information on specific topics. They’re excellent for generating leads, as users often provide their contact information in exchange for these valuable resources.

Creating an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

Setting Clear Goals

Before diving into content creation, it’s essential to set clear, measurable goals. Whether you aim to increase website traffic, generate leads, or boost brand awareness, having defined objectives will guide your strategy and help you measure success.

Identifying Your Target Audience

Understanding your audience is crucial for creating content that resonates. Identify your target audience’s demographics, interests, and pain points to tailor your content to their needs and preferences.

Content Planning and Scheduling

A well-organized content calendar helps ensure consistent content creation and distribution. Plan your content around key dates, events, and themes relevant to your audience, and schedule regular updates to maintain engagement.

Content Creation Tips

Writing Compelling Headlines

Your headline is the first thing readers see, so make it count. Craft headlines that are intriguing, clear, and promise value to entice readers to click and read more.

Crafting High-Quality Content

High-quality content is informative, well-researched, and engaging. Focus on providing value, using a conversational tone, and breaking up text with headings, bullet points, and visuals to enhance readability.

Using Visuals Effectively

Visuals can significantly enhance your content by making it more engaging and easier to understand. Use images, videos, infographics, and charts to complement your written content and keep readers interested.

SEO and Content Marketing

Importance of SEO in Content Marketing

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is vital for ensuring your content reaches a broader audience. By optimizing your content for search engines, you can improve its visibility and drive more organic traffic to your site.

On-Page SEO Techniques

On-page SEO involves optimizing individual pages on your website. This includes using relevant keywords, creating meta descriptions, optimizing images, and ensuring your content is easy to read and navigate.

Off-Page SEO Strategies

Off-page SEO focuses on activities outside your website that impact your search engine rankings. This includes building backlinks, engaging in social media marketing, and collaborating with influencers to expand your reach.

Leveraging Social Media for Content Marketing

Choosing the Right Platforms

Not all social media platforms are created equal. Choose platforms that align with your audience’s preferences and your content style. For instance, Instagram is great for visual content, while LinkedIn is ideal for professional articles and networking.

Engaging with Your Audience

Social media is all about interaction. Respond to comments, engage in conversations, and encourage user-generated content to build a vibrant and engaged community around your brand.

Measuring Social Media Success

Track metrics like engagement rates, shares, and follower growth to gauge the effectiveness of your social media efforts. Use this data to refine your strategy and improve future content.

Email Marketing and Content Marketing Integration

Building an Email List

An email list is a valuable asset for content marketers. Offer incentives like exclusive content, discounts, or free resources to encourage sign-ups and grow your list.

Creating Engaging Newsletters

Newsletters are a great way to keep your audience informed and engaged. Share your latest content, updates, and special offers in a visually appealing and easy-to-read format.

Analyzing Email Campaign Performance

Use email marketing tools to track metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. Analyze this data to understand what works and what doesn’t, and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Measuring the Success of Your Content Marketing Efforts

Key Metrics to Track

Track metrics like website traffic, engagement rates, lead generation, and conversion rates to measure your content marketing success. These metrics provide insights into how well your content resonates with your audience and contributes to your goals.

Tools for Measuring Performance

Tools like Google Analytics, social media insights, and email marketing software can help you track and analyze your content marketing performance. Use these tools to gather data and make informed decisions.

Adjusting Your Strategy Based on Data

Content marketing is an ongoing process. Regularly review your performance data and adjust your strategy to ensure continuous improvement and better results.

Common Content Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Focusing Too Much on Sales

While the ultimate goal is to drive conversions, focusing too much on sales can turn off your audience. Instead, aim to provide value and build relationships through informative and engaging content.

Neglecting SEO

Ignoring SEO can limit your content’s reach. Ensure your content is optimized for search engines to attract organic traffic and improve visibility.

Ignoring Data and Analytics

Data and analytics are crucial for understanding what works and what doesn’t. Regularly review your performance metrics and use this information to refine your strategy and improve your content.

Future Trends in Content Marketing

AI is becoming increasingly prevalent in content marketing. From generating ideas to creating personalized content, AI tools can help streamline your content creation process and enhance efficiency.

Increased Personalization

Personalization is key to engaging your audience. Use data to create tailored content that addresses individual preferences and needs, making your audience feel valued and understood.

Interactive Content

Interactive content, such as quizzes, polls, and interactive infographics, is gaining popularity. This type of content engages users in a fun and immersive way, encouraging more interaction and sharing.

Conclusion

Content marketing is a powerful tool for boosting engagement, building trust, and driving conversions. By understanding its potential and implementing effective strategies, you can create meaningful connections with your audience and achieve your marketing goals. Stay adaptable, keep learning, and continue to refine your approach to stay ahead in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

The post Power of Content Marketing: Enhance Engagement, Build Trust, and Boost Conversions appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

After reading 6 Layers of Social Media Content Strategy by Jeffrey Cohen over at Radian6, I was inspired to create a visual metaphor that assembles all these content marketing ingredients.

Although I agree with the layers discussed in Jeffrey’s post, I have a slightly different view about what makes up the ‘meat’ of an effective content strategy. Check out the inforgraphic and read the Radian6 post.

Which strategic components do you think are most important? The comments are yours.

The post The Content Strategy Burger [Infographic] appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Unless of course you treat them like crap. But let’s assume you don’t for a moment.

GaggleAMP is a platform custom made for brand managers and marketers looking to build advocacy through employee, vendor and even customer networks. The concept is to build a network of people who will amplify your message — post links to your blog, retweet your messages, share your links on Facebook or LinkedIn. It’s not much different than the old school Digg vote networks and you-scratch-my-back circles of the social news gaming of old. Only this tool makes it easier for that to happen and is predicated on the notion that employees or other stakeholder groups may voluntarily participate in a company’s social love.

Get a group of stakeholders who agree to promote your stuff. Sign them up for a “Gaggle” on GaggleAMP and start posting messages. Those stakeholders get emails telling them they have a message to share. They can elect to share it, not share it, or even not share it and provide feedback as to why not, but anonymously. Stakeholders can elect to automatically repost your messages on their networks, which has brought some criticism from the purists out there. But the employee controls it and if the purists made all the rules, we’d all go out of business at some point. Heh.

Another neat feature of the tool is that it tracks points based on the stakeholder’s participation. If the company doesn’t pay attention to these points, no harm, no foul. But if they want to do so, they can assign those points to rewards or recognition programs to incentivize participation from the employees or stakeholder groups. You could reward employees who share the most or have the biggest network to share posts with. You could also incentivize vendor or partner participation and offer budget considerations to the partners who amplify your message most.

Granted, the whole notion of a company pushing their corporate messages out through employees is a bit weird. But GaggleAMP’s founder and president Glenn Gaudet assured me they only advocate for user control and would not advise companies force anything. In fact the tool is not built to do that.

“There’s nothing in our technology that allows a company to force that,” he told me. “That goes against the whole concept of it being an opt-in service. We believe in permission-based marketing.”

Further, GaggleAMP has built user privacies into the tool. For the rewards points system, a company can certainly tell which individual has the biggest reach, highest point totals, etc. But when pulling analytics or participation reports, the data is anonymized at the user level.

“We don’t betray the user’s privacy,” he affirmed. “We are taking aggregated information.”

The analytics reports show companies how many have shared, where and to how many people. Click-thrus and traffic can be extrapolated from the data as well, giving brands a more realistic look at how their stakeholders are helping the cause.

My Take

GaggleAMP offers a neat platform that makes it easy to build an opt-in network of employees, partners or even customers willing to share your social messages with their network. It’s a simple system for message distribution with some nice metrics to help you quantify your sharing a bit. So long as it remains opt-in and controlled at the user level, it’s a service that could not only serve companies but also content promoters who in years past have had to rely on the clunkiness of Google Groups, IM and Twitter DMs to pimp their wares.

But the temptation, as GaggleAMP deals with more brands, will be to take their money in exchange for a brand-centric management model. Sorry to say, but there are simply too many companies out there looking for an easy button, a fast way out and willing to take advantage of employees to find them. Hopefully GaggleAMP can remain true to what Gaudet says it is.

The use of the tool with our Social Media Explorer authors proved useful, too. We found some inherent flaws in what we would have liked from the platform. The end user doesn’t have the ability to edit the message, so it’s straight retweet, repost or nothing. And a couple of us were not able to easily see a check list of what we had shared versus what we had not. While that functionality proved to be present, a few of us couldn’t figure out how to see it. Minor issues, both, in the grand scheme of things, but certainly worth noting if you’re considering using GaggleAMP.

We found one similar competitor out there, but not one based on the notion of a company/corporate use. TellMyCircle.com offers friend-to-group link sharing, much like GaggleAmp. But it doesn’t appear to be built for enterprise or corporate management. Existing competition from the Yammers, Chatters and other internal collaboration platforms of the world certainly exists as well. While those are not positioned to be share-first platforms, it’s not a stretch to run the same type of “Share Our Content” groups and feeds with those tools.

For usage-based pricing, $25 per month will get you a few Gaggles. Unlimited use starts at $150 per month for a 25-person Gaggle and goes up from there. So, the pricing may make it attractive to some companies as a supplement to their collaboration software, or if they’re really focused on promotion and not as concerned with collaboration, GaggleAMP makes a lot of sense.

You can try GaggleAMP for free at their website.

What say you? Is a tool like this just temptation for corporate control freaks to take advantage of employees or a legit approach for building internal and external referral networks in the social sphere? The comments, as always, are yours.

The post GaggleAMP Offers Social Message Distribution For Companies appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Content Marketing still is one of the better tools in your bag of tricks, however getting folks to read your stuff gets harder every day as more and more things garnish our customers and prospects attention.

The Content Marketing Umbrella

Content marketing is a term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases. Content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action.

The idea of sharing content as a means of persuading decision-making has driven content marketers to make their once-proprietary informational assets available to selected audiences. Marketers may use content marketing as a means of achieving a variety of business goals.

Connect Your Digital Marketing with Your Customers

As we marketers started creating more and more content, we relied heavily on crafting great articles. Today the digital highway is pretty congested and we need to be much more diverse.

We recently experienced a significant surge in web traffic, over 35% by “Entertaining the Prospect.” A local festival was coming to our town for the Labor Day Holiday. We reached out on behalf of one of the online magazines we publish to support leads to our apartment rental business and were selected as a Media Partner. The festival, known as, “Arts, Beats and Eats,” drew over a half a million people and featured over (250) bands.

We put a writer on interviewing as many of those bands as we could, and we added a music player to feature songs from each band we interviewed along with a rudimentary voting mechanism. Our site became a “go-to resource” for the scoop on local bands and music for the festival. The overall cost was pretty small and we connected to a whole new group of prospects that we never knew before. The net result: A significant surge in web traffic, and, yes, a corresponding surge in physical traffic, in the door leasing prospects!

The Marketing Takeaway for us included a couple of things. First, don’t be afraid to hitch onto someone else’s wagon. Second, content is not created equal.

Content Comes in All Shapes and Sizes 

The folks over at the Content Marketing Institute crafted a great article titled 5 Steps to Creating Great Content Mix;

Finding the best content mix is all about proportions. Although the foundation of your content marketing efforts may be based on educating your audience through informative articles, you may also want to entertain them through infographics and cartoons so that they have something fun to share. Remember, all content should fall within your area of expertise and reinforce your brand.

Once you’ve identified your ideal content mix, include it with your editorial calendar and present it in a way that’s easy to communicate.

 Content Purposes

CMI also has a great visual to help you think through mixing up your content, even suggesting some frequency for that content:

The post Content Is Not Created Equal appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

If I ran out of content ideas today, I want three, five, 10 weeks worth built up until inspiration hits me again.

Certainly, that’s an ideal world scenario and isn’t always feasible. But keeping three or four blog posts in the can for when your brain isn’t working isn’t a bad idea.

But think beyond that to your Facebook content, your Tweets, your YouTube videos, etc. The content on those networks is different because the communities are different. Are you building up an arsenal of content there, too.

As you know, I’m working a bit with Expion, a social media management solution for franchise and multiple-location or multiple account need businesses. (Think restaurant chains, colleges or universities with multiple department accounts to manage or even advertising agencies who want to manage social presences for multiple clients.) They’ve got a neat feature that speaks to this notion of content arsenal I find really appealing.

Their platform allows the corporate marketing team to build a content library for all the various locations to pull from. This helps ensure consistent messaging, branding and the like. But it also empowers the not-quite-hip-to-social-media store manager who wants to post good stuff on Facebook to promote his or her location, but doesn’t get it. The content library can be built to provide turnkey messages that work at anytime for any store or location in the organization.

Take that a step further and look at all the content posted by both the corporation, but then also locally driven content that active store manager post, and analyze each piece of content to see what’s the most engaging. Then take the most engaging content, regardless of its source, and pump that into your stockpile so other stores can benefit from one manager’s brilliant Facebook post.

Sure, Expion has the platform that does all that automatically, but even if you don’t use an enterprise content or social media management system, you could take the same thinking and apply it to your business.

Have a team of bloggers but a few who don’t quite produce the same amount or quality of posts? Use the successful ones to teach or inspire them. Have a couple of employees with bigger and better Twitter accounts than the company’s? Ask them to share some ideas on what would make the company’s better.

And take what’s working for one of your accounts and see if you can apply it to others. Building a content arsenal then begins to seem a lot easier than you think.

Your thoughts? How can you build up a content arsenal using your current staff, ideas from the personal realm or even what your competition is doing? The comments are yours.

Related articles

• Franchise Social Media Tools: The Customer’s Perspective (socialmediaexp.wpengine.com)
• What Content Strategy Is and Isn’t (tc.eserver.org)
• Content Marketing infographic: The Content Grid to help you with your Content Strategy (socialwayne.com)
• An Introduction to Content Strategy (verticalmeasures.com)
• Challenges in Content Strategy for the Coming Year (conversationagent.com)

The post Is An Arsenal In Your Content Strategy appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Today, I have my fire-starters. Twelve new authors join Social Media Explorer now, each with a unique perspective, experiences, insights and attitude. (Yeah, I dig attitude.) I’ve asked them to challenge themselves, me and each of you, too. It’s a challenge to raise the level of conversation and discourse here, to make Social Media Explorer an intellectual stimulus for conversations around social media marketing, public relations, digital marketing, online communications, advertising and branding and more.

My challenge to you is to hold us accountable. Sure, there will be posts or topics that don’t stir the pot or challenge our thinking as well as the day before, but what I think we all want is content that doesn’t follow the crowd a chow time but still delivers smart insights to running your business or serving your clients or organization. We want to be helpful, but thought-provoking. Insightful but pot-stirrers. I think that’s what I’ve delivered in the last three years and what you expect of me. My new colleagues will have to be held to that standard.

And those colleagues are stellar. Each was chosen carefully. There are no social media gurus here. They’re all experienced and proven in business, not just blogging. They’ve served their companies, clients or passions with great thinking, smart doing and even smarter questioning over the years. We have category expertise in everything from strategic planning to humor writing, from design to coding. But more importantly, we have 13 people with a passion for learning as well as teaching. More on how they were identified in a moment.

First, and in no particular order other than ladies first (because that’s how my mother raised me) and without me, here are your new contributing authors for Social Media Explorer:

Angela Maiers @AngelaMaiers Angela Maiers	Heather Rast @heatherrast Insights and Ingenuity	Stephanie Schwab @socialologist Socialologist	Eric Brown @Eric_Urbane The Urbane Way	Jordan Cooper @notaproblog Not A Pro Blog	Mark Dykeman @MarkDykeman Thought Wrestling Broadcasting Brain
Andrew Hanelly @hanelly Engage (TMG Custom Media) Really Bad Parenting Advice	Adam Helweh @secretsushi Secret Sushi	Jeff Larche @TheLarch Digital Solid	Ike Pigott @ikepigott Occam’s Razr	Mark Smiciklas @intersection1 Intersection Consulting	Tom Webster @webby2001 Brand Savant

And Helweh has already compiled an SME Author Twitter list for those interested: http://twitter.com/secretsushi/socialmediaexplorer-team

The authors were chosen carefully. I published the call-for-authors because I wanted people who read SME and authors who wanted to write for me. I didn’t want to go begging people to contribute. I established some expectations in the post and reviewed each applicant (I wound up with over 50) for those qualities. Some of the ones I chose I was familiar with (and thrilled they raised their hands). A couple of them I didn’t know well but quickly discovered they had the qualities and experience I was hoping for. I would humbly submit that I will push them to be better than they are. They, in turn, will push me. Each of you, however, will push all of us.

And as an aside, I am not going to stop blogging. No, I won’t write every day in addition to these fine folks. My blogging will be more sporadic, but I’m not going to stop or even slow down. Having more authors means I can focus on diving deeper into some subjects and not worry that missing 2-3 days of posting will affect your expectations. What I’m doing is finding a way to provide you with more excellent content from smart people.

Thank you for continuing to count on Social Media Explorer. Hopefully these new colleagues will further your confidence in us and help you continue to learn and grow as a communicator.

The post Starting Fires appeared first on Social Media Explorer.