Orientate content around people at different stages of purchase intent
Since I'm always pushing the importance of content marketing and creating infographics about how to use content marketing, it's interesting to see the questions marketers ask about them. This week a client asked me a great and simple question this week...
"I understand creating content, but where do I put all this content… what kind of content goes where"?
That's a fair question that I think many will have.
The short answer is there are no rules, but there is some common sense if you can step back and look at your marketing process ended to end. Here's how we'd recommend that you approach it… plan your content rather than just creating it en masse, orientate your content around people at different buyer stages, simplify it by focussing on what matters to them at those…
Customer over corporate-led communications
We're currently hiring at First 10. A friend asked me what kind of roles we're looking to fill. My response was, "two brand journalists". She was puzzled, "do you mean PRs", she said? "...aren't there loads of people in marketing who can write?" My response: "Not really, it's a different blend of skill-sets and a totally different motivation."
I embraced the whole idea of "brand journalism" via a book by David Meerman-Scott, I read 3-4 years ago, it's made increasing sense since. The way a journalist approaches an article is simply different from the way that somebody who is good at writing approaches an article. A brand journalist works inside the company across all content formats, writing and producing videos, blog posts, photos, webinars, articles, e-books and podcasts. It's about producing the content that is relevant to, that engages prospects and customers, which is something that Marketing Profs…
5 ideas for creating effective content on your website
We talk a lot in our posts about the importance of content and inbound marketing, that being central to success and a how blog is the key for building a central repository of useful, insightful or entertaining content for your website visitors.
A blog really does have the potential to be 'the hub' in regards to content marketing. But what are the other options on your site, assuming that you have a blog section already and you feel that you're doing it well enough, what's next?
Well, a question in my inbox this morning from a Smart Insights Expert member got me thinking on this. Subject to the realities of your website, its flexibility, ability to scale and of course your access to people or budget resources, there's tonnes that you can now consider beyond a blog.
Our 5 ideas: Think sales first
Think of the…
An infographic showing how to use content marketing to grow your business
What do you do at a time when paid-for media is neither reliable nor scalable, earned media is super-competitve and owned media properties require constant investment to engage your visitors? We believe you should do one thing, first and foremost; invest in the very best branded content that you can afford to create, seed and syndicate. This is particularly true if you're a small business or startup who can't afford substantial media investment, but many large brands are also profiting from content marketing.
I've written before about marketing with using content to add the human factor to your brand, and Chris Soames post last week showed the contuining rise of content marketing.
Spurred by the feedback and popularity of our inbound and content marketing blueprint, we wanted to share our ideas on using content with specific stages of the buyer process…
A new infographic to help you create content people want to share
Content marketing facts from the infographic
26% + of B2B marketing budgets are invested in content
79% of marketers use article publication as a tactic
52% use video
62% of companies outsource their content marketing
Brand awareness and customer acquisition are the two main goals of content marketing
Blueglass Interactive's new infographic combines tips on the type of content that works and features examples from brands who are making it work.
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An infographic explaining how inbound marketing works together with content marketing
Whether you call it inbound marketing, social media marketing or content marketing, we're broadly referring to the same thing; at least that's how we see it.
Dave and I believe that inbound marketing starts with considered, quality content, well published and promoted that, in turn, drives the inbound benefit through sharing and search.
The 'free bonus' is that you're link-building and gaining social signals for search engine optimisation as well creating great content - something so often over-looked and under-valued.
The Content Marketing model infographic
This Content Marketing model was developed at First 10 Digital when working with a client who wanted to understand the full process for her team. We hope our infographic will help you plot your success too.
Content marketing blueprint
People liked it so much we thought it deserved a more polished design…
How to promote your company blog to reach a larger audience
Writing a blog doesn't end when you hit the publish button. Far from it. In this third part of our series on business blogging, René Power reviews the best approaches to seeding and distributing your blog content - giving it the best chance of being seen by the people you're targeting.
1. Promote it on your website
Add a snippet to your home page. It provides a sign post for visitors and also offers some additional search engine optimisation benefits if you have considered your keywords carefully.
2. Index your blog with major blog directories
Ensure your blog is listed in as many blog directories as possible, particularly those with specialist sections. Why? Backlinks to your blog are still one of the most important factors in determining how visible your blog (and…
8 key issues to review to make sure your blog supports company goals
This is the second in a series of blog posts aimed at helping business bloggers. The first post explored getting started and avoiding writer's block, sometimes an issue at this time of year. In this post, René Power examines the key elements of a successful business blog.
If you're running a business targeting other businesses in 2012, it is likely you have either read about or been advised to introduce a blog to your website. The benefits of business blogging are much chronicled - Dave and Chris both covered it from a commercial and SEO viewpoint.
But with a bewildering choice of over 250 million websites and 130 million blogs (with five million new ones coming online every year), your customers don't have a lot of time or attention. How does a corporate blog attract and retain readers? (Statistics…
Core skills for non-media companies
Not long ago, everyone was talking about the power of “Like” and nothing seemed easier for a brand than building a tribe of followers; people who declared they liked your company, its brand or product.
This lazy approach to digital marketing led brands into thinking, falsely, that they had found a cheap and easy way to build a network of brand advocates online, the type of people who would enthusiastically follow a brand’s daily posts and pass these on, regardless of how dull or self-centered the updates were, to their friends and followers.
Then came the social break-up
Recent research in a paper entitled “The Social Break-up”, shows that people are more fickle than that. The paper from ExactTarget demonstrates that social marketing with Tweets and updates that resemble press releases or ad copy (broadcast messages) doesn’t build tribes and that lazy, sloppy social media marketing turns people…
Where social media marketing misses the content opportunity
I've been thinking about the key elements of ongoing inbound marketing activities - with the goal of driving sustainable interactions beyond one campaign.
Our agency, First 10, played a part in a small and successful campaign this week to help promote a local, Leeds based homeless charity called Simon on the Streets, and it's this that got me thinking.
Largely promoted via Twitter, the campaign has been great for the charity - and done with zero budget and no media spend. The content was creative images from a promotional campaign run by their creative agency, McGrath O'Toole. Aside from zero spend, the approach to the campaign echoes questions and enquiries that we get asked regarding digital media marketing campaigns - the requests tend to follow a familiar line:
Create a digital campaign to leverage a piece of existing content that already exists
Optimise that content, help make it…
