What can marketers learn from the success of publishing sensation Buzzfeed?

BuzzFeed is one of the fastest growing media businesses on the planet. In the space of four years they have transformed from a widely derided content aggregator site packed with pet memes and listicles that generated limited income into a profitable social content advertiser with over 300 staff, including a Pulitzer prize winner and a host of former broadsheet desk editors. They have an office in London, a cavernous headquarters on Fifth Avenue, their own video production studios and, perhaps most interestingly, a reporter based in Istanbul tasked with covering the conflict in Syria. In November 2013 BuzzFeed received 130 million unique visitors (a 350% increase year on year) and 30 posts received more than 1 million views. There were…

How should content marketers drive leads for B2B?

Getting a good 'lead' remains the metric that matters the most to marketers. To a Journalist, a good 'lede' is a great headline that entices readers to read the full story. As the content marketing revolution marches on, all companies will need to become, in part, media companies. Modern marketers can join the charge forward   and improve program ROI, by adopting a new CPL: the Cost per Lede.

Discussion of two biases in marketing

However, as I work with marketers around the world, I’m struck by two persistent traditional marketing biases that keep them from joining the revolution:

1. The bias in favour of director-and-above level professionals, at the expense of individual contributors; and 2. The bias in favour of opportunities and leads, at the expense of prospects and suspects. As the VP of the Global Audience Business…

Why is content marketing so popular yet so few have a content marketing strategy?

This infographic features a nice curation of  research from the Content Marketing Institute showing that content marketing is more effective when marketers follow a strategy. We agree - we saw a similar finding in our EMEA research with Hubspot and our infographic Competing on Content! While 88% of marketers in the UK are now implementing elements of content marketing only 42% actually have a documented content strategy. We though you'd find the infographic useful since it summarises the top content challenges marketers are facing and gives guidance on how to overcome them. As well as five key benefits of following a content marketing strategy.

 Source: JBH Marketing Infographics

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Visual, real-time content must move up the agenda

I said something in a meeting this week, it’s pure opinion to be honest, but I think I can back it up and wanted to post about it this week:- “brands that can leverage real-time, visual content will find themselves market leaders.” Would you agree or disagree?

A move to visual content since 2012?

Ever since Pinterest and Instagram started to get traction with consumers (2012 I'd suggest?), we’ve seen pictures literally become a 'thousand words', and savvy marketers have been quick to get visual content to the front of their social media and search marketing agendas. I also remembered a great Altimeter report, again from 2012 that revealed a deep confidence that marketers saw the importance of visual content, social and mobile. We’d have to say that was well founded as it turned out?:

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Content for social media success

Micro content, I keep hearing this term and thought it’d be useful to explore what it means; why content marketing is evolving and diversifying and what the practical applications of micro content are for marketing.

Essentially, micro content is as it sounds - short form content. Typically low cost, high value content appropriate to social channels. To all intents and purpose it’s social media content.

It’s not that detailed articles or long form, rich content are any less important, it’s simply a case of being relevant to the social media platform in question, and accessible to an ever detached consumer who’s on the move with a low attention span for your brand.

Social and mobile are leading the change

As the world shifts towards mobile devices, and accessing information via social networks on a mobile, micro content becomes a more important and…

5 SEO activities that integrate with your content marketing activities

Although SEO and content marketing are often still managed separately, there are many activities that overlap between them and some would even argue that a large part of SEO and content marketing are the same. Although I would consider SEO and content marketing to be different disciplines (at least at this stage in their respective evolutions), the lines between both activities are becoming increasingly blurred and opportunities to integrate SEO and content marketing should always be considered.

When planning content marketing activity, you should always consider the organic search benefits great content can bring if executed correctly. These are give specific techniques you can use to help ensure that SEO is supporting your content marketing efforts and vice-versa:

1. Keyword research

Whilst I firmly believe that great content should not…

4 essential steps for planning content marketing

Content marketing is now seen by many as an essential part of the overall marketing strategy of any business. Ignoring content marketing is equivalent to choosing not to engage with a large section of the customer base. This just goes to show how important content marketing can be. So much so that many companies now rely solely on content marketing and related tactics like SEO and social media marketing to get the word out.

However, there are many companies that get content marketing wrong. Months and even years of blood, sweat and tears and a lot of money gets them nowhere. Their content goes unnoticed, there are no new leads generated, there is no increase in the volume of web traffic and barely any customer interaction.

One of the main reasons why content marketing fails for many…

4 interview questions you must ask new content creators

Today, when content marketing is absolutely essential for all companies to thrive, creating the perfect writing team is absolutely essential. This is why hiring the right content creator is of the utmost importance as you do not want to be stuck with a content writer who has no idea how to write interesting, relevant and well-written articles. Some companies seem to get it so wrong that they often end up with Content Creators who don’t even have basic writing skills. Content Creators can be split into Content Writers and Designers since content can be both textual and visual. James Carson has identified other related roles such as community or outreach manager as part of his post on who you need on your content marketing team. Given content skills are important, specialist skills it makes sense to…

This post gives a summary of a webinar by Smart Insights expert commentator Stephen Bateman of Concentric Dots. Stephen started by showing the ongoing and increasing thirst for knowledge on content marketing, starting with this Google Trends data showing a large increase in each of the last 3 years since we have been advising on content marketing. You can also see the growth in popularity from this infographic showing B2B Content marketing trends for 2014 that we shared earlier in the Autumn. In Stephen's talk, he reviewed the challenges of content marketing and then suggested that a more strategic approach can give better alignment with consumer needs and business aims. You can view all 6 recordings from the Digital Marketing 2014 Summit here. The other summary posts of the trends featuring…

5 Ways to Utilize Facebook Posts for Content Marketing

Content marketing is all about creating relevant and compelling content in order to change or enhance consumer behavior that’s favorable to you. And where else to better utilize this strategy than in a billion-people social hub that is Facebook? So read carefully and jot down these important tips that will surely help your brand with content marketing.

Tips on using Facebook for your content marketing strategy

1. Content creation through Social Listening.

Probably the greatest thing about Facebook from a marketer’s perspective is that you don’t have to guess what your consumers are thinking since they’re going to post it anyway. So this is the best time to listen. Tip: Find out how people relate to your brand, how they see it and use it on a daily basis, etc. by searching hashtags:

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