New tools for outreach, video marketing, market segmentation and more

In the ever-evolving digital world, keeping up with the tricks of the trade is crucial. Marketing is no longer a one-way communication from brands, but a dialogue between brands, customers, influencers and various other stakeholders. To ensure that your brand is a part of this conversation, you need to stay on top of the game with your digital media strategy. Throughout this year, brands will see a confluence between traditional and digital media channels as there will be parity in the kind of messaging planned for both kinds of outlets. More brands will look for ways to share data from paid media with real-time content across channels in a similar manner. Further, there will be a greater need to generate more relevant and shareable content for all digital platforms, so that it consistently drives traffic to your landing pages and websites. Here are the…

To succeed with content marketing you have to have a well thought out strategy

Your peers have been telling you for years that you need to invest in content marketing. They tell you it’s the highest returning investment you can make and that your internet presence depends on your company’s ability to leverage high-ranking publishing platforms and specific SEO techniques. Are you ready to listen? If so, you need a plan. This blog will walk you through the basic steps of getting started with your first content marketing campaign. 

Grasping the True Value of Content Marketing

As a business owner or marketer, you probably like numbers. So let’s look at the value of content marketing from a quantifiable standpoint. And what better place to start than by seeing what your peers – who are already heavily invested in content marketing – think. 

According…

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…

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…

What kinds of post are best for building a site's traffic and reputation?

No matter what kind of site you’re running or what your online goals are, you need a strong stream of content to keep your momentum moving forward. Most website builders already encourage you to start and maintain an active blog, but you need to take it upon yourself to follow through; publishing more content (and better content) will attract more people to your site (through multiple channels, including search engines, social media, and direct visitors) and will encourage more conversions and customer retention as well. But what kinds of posts are best for building a site’s visibility and reputation?

What Makes a Blog Post “Good”?

Let’s first examine some criteria we can use to classify a blog post as “good” or “effective:” First, your post needs to grab attention. If your headlines don’t stand out, or if your topics…

Content Recommendation Engines are used by over half of all top sites 

We're all familiar with those 'around the web' sections featured at the bottom of articles in many news sites. These 'advertorial' boxes can sometimes show dubious content which hasn't been short of criticism, specially among the editorial stuff of leading publications. However, the reality is that they're a significant revenue stream for some of the biggest media sites in the web. While the proliferation of content recommendation engines as a monetization tool for sites of all sizes has been remarkable, recently Slate.com and The New Yorker decided to drop them due to links that can lead to questionable websites, run by unknown entities.

SimilarTech released new insights showing the market share of content recommendation engines to understand their popularity among the biggest US & UK media publishers online. 

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Content marketing best practices and examples for financial services

It’s important to review how content can be used effectively in your specific sector. In this article I will review content marketing approaches for financial services, a sector I'm involved with. Each industry sector has its own unique traits and idiosyncrasies and financial services is certainly no different. In fact, due to the complex nature of many financial products, the challenges of creating engaging content and an increased focus on compliance and regulation, one can argue that content marketing for financial services companies is a particularly tricky discipline to master. Nevertheless, despite the challenges that exist within financial services there are also considerable opportunities that content marketing can exploit if planned and executed effectively. I would suggest that the steps for establishing a content marketing process is very much the same as it is for any other…