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March 2, 2017
Multiple channels has led to a 'siloing' of marketing processes which is detrimental to your brand
As the number of channels used by customers has proliferated, so organisations have felt the pressure to keep in step with their customers. But although the need to adapt to customer preferences is vital, it has become increasingly apparent that many channels are being bolted on with little or no consideration for how they are integrated with the rest of the organisation.
In many cases, there is double trouble, as this sub-optimal channel support is also the action of a department that has decided to bypass the rest of the organisation in a bid to fast-track channel support. This means that we’re not just seeing evidence of the all-too-common operational silos, but are also witnessing channel silos being built on top.
Channel silos can take the form of:
Siloed marketing channels. Customers receive marketing messages across…
How to boost the effectiveness of your content marketing with properly mapped buyer personas
If you want to maximise results from your content marketing strategy, it is essential to map your buyer personas to the buying cycle. This is executed by delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time.
If your business is B2B, your content marketing strategy is crucial to your success because 64 percent of B2B customers will engage in upwards of five blogs prior to purchase. However, a mere five percent of marketers believe their content marketing strategy is moving in the right direction, according to Top Rank Marketing.
Blogs, videos, ebooks, case studies, and infographics are all invaluable content marketing assets. And you want these content marketing assets represented in each stage of the buying cycle.
To make the absolute most of your content marketing strategy, you need to develop your buyer’s journey. This allows…
Content marketing works, but measuring content marketing ROI is challenging
In the Smart Insights-Hubspot research into content marketing in Europe, 44.4% of marketing managers who responded to the survey, say they struggle to measure the return on their content marketing investment.
[caption id="attachment_34135" align="aligncenter" width="550"] 44.4% of marketing managers struggle to measure content ROI[/caption]
This inability to measure the ROI of content marketing confirms a need for more guidance on how to calculate the cost of content marketing and measure the return on investment.
In this post I want to walk you through a simple but effective costing model, and show you how, by breaking out the component costs of content into labour, production and distribution, you can work out your content marketing cost, which provides the basis for evaluating your content marketing…
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February 28, 2017
How to build your content marketing strategy?
When the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) recently surveyed businesses about the state of their content marketing strategies, the findings were revealing – nearly two-thirds reported that their organisations did not have a documented strategy. However, for those working in the industry, this statistic wasn’t a great shock.
'I continue to look at that number and shake my head!' says Joe Pulizzi, Founder of the Content Marketing Institute. 'It doesn’t surprise me, though. I do speeches every week and I’ll ask them that question: how many of you have a documented content marketing strategy? And I’ve never gotten more than 40% of the audience responding ‘yes’, even in what I would call advanced audiences.'
Yet with the CMI study also revealing that those with a documented strategy were more effective in nearly all…
Tie your audience down with Anchor content
As the Smart Insights - HubSpot Content Marketing 2016 research shows, content now forms an essential element of nearly everything we do as marketers. Planning, creating and distributing great quality content is not just the domain of content marketers; it covers email, advertising, CRM and just about anything else we’re involved in. Content excellence is now so crucial to how we communicate and gain traction with consumers that it’s become an important priority for many marketers in 2016 and beyond.
Yet, despite its importance, gaining consumers' attention is becoming more and more difficult. In an attention economy, that’s become increasingly competitive, ‘content shock’ the incessant deluge of mediocre content that is blinding audiences to brands’ content efforts - means that content has to have genuine quality and relevance to achieve cut-through.
The rise of ad blocking software, the decrease in organic reach on…
How to use a B2B blog to generate leads
Our last post on business blogging looked at seeding and distribution and how to get people to your blog.
However, the end goal of a business blog (or any customer facing content asset) must be to stimulate demand and generate enquiries.
In this final post of this business blogging series we look at how companies can use blogs to drive demand generation. For more information you can see our demand generation definition.
Create a compelling call-to-action
There needs to be a compelling call to action to take a visitor's fledgling interest in your business to the next level.
It is commonly accepted that it takes time to build traffic to a blog, and even longer for people to interact with it. So, assuming it is almost impossible to encourage blog visitors to engage with a corporate blog, how can you keep them there and get…
3rd party sites can give your content marketing a boost
The industry buzz that greets Content Marketing continues at pace as the tactic that can help brands redefine their proposition and differentiate their position from the competition. Indeed it’s very definition has changed, been re-purposed and continues to be re-interpreted but it’s safe to say Content Marketing provides a foundation for your digital marketing tactics to be used in a more joined up, strategic way to help drive the company objectives and in turn it’s digital strategy.
But what about maximising the reach and engagement of your content and how do you continue to justify budget spent on your content marketing through analytics measures? Distribution of your content efforts is crucial and your branded digital marketing communications channels will be the natural route for engagement to customers and prospects. However, if your own branded channels lack the digital footprint to drive incremental…
How to keep your content strategy cutting edge
We’re entering a new era of content marketing, and if you’re like the majority of content marketers out there, you probably haven’t adapted. Competition is fierce, and if you want to remain relevant and visible for your target audience, you have to reimagine your strategy for the new challenges and opportunities that exist. Influential forces like Google and basic consumer preferences are beginning to weed out the slow adapters, so now’s the time to adjust your campaign and forge a course for the future of content marketing.
The New Era of Content Marketing
What is this new era of content marketing and why is it important? There aren’t many landmark changes that have spurred this shift; instead, it’s the result of a number of gradually evolving technologies and shifting market trends coming together to establish new content marketing norms. Some of the biggest influencers include:
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5 Questions to help set, manage and review your content marketing effectiveness
As we accept that our consumers are learning about, and navigating through, more and more information about our brand, organisation, industries or topic areas as they research online, we're needing to deploy more sophisticated strategies in order we can earn attention, and importantly trust. This is what sits behind the drive of content marketing's rise to the forefront of the digital marketing agenda.
Content marketing is starting to mature, too. More and more reports, such as this from the Aberdeen Group, illustrate this, here too.
An easy start-point
Below is a simple matrix of ideas to help you set the KPIs or metrics based on what we've used on different projects. We're not saying "this is the way you must do it" or that you need to use all of these KPIs. Instead, we hope this is a useful framework…
A new report by renowned digital marketing analyst Rebecca Lieb points to the decline of banner ads and the opportunity it represents for content marketers.
Advertising effectiveness is declining. Savvy web users are installing ad-blockers in droves with Adblock use in Europe over 30% in some countries, whilst everyone is developing 'banner blindness' with their own internal ad-blockers, which is also known by its more common name, the human brain. The move to mobile makes it harder to deliver effective ads without being obtrusive and increasing concerns about data privacy mean some consumers are in no mood to hand over their details.
This might sound like bad news for digital marketers, but it actually opens up a whole world of opportunities for doing things differently and reaching customers more effectively. For content marketers specifically, it means budgets will continue to tilt in their favor, and greater demands will be put on content marketing departments, as…
