Optimising your content journey is critical to content marketing success
A unique collaboration... 14 incredibly talented Dribbble designers... 52 original illustrations… the content journey never looked more appealing…
We thought to try something completely different. We wanted to create a piece of content like no other. A piece of content that is engaging and fun as much as it is informative and insightful.
Inside:
The impact of quality content
Strategizing content pre-writing
The three golden rules of content: context, data, examples
The importance of titles
Post-writing distribution
Extending your content shelf life
Personalized content recommendations
So here it is - The Content Journey, from creation to conversion, in 52 amazing illustrations. A one-of-a-kind guide for how to make the most of every piece of content you create.
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Compelling visuals are key to creating content capable of cutting through the noise
The direction of the internet will forever determine the direction of the business world. And as the internet becomes increasingly visual, businesses are being forced to turn to visualizations in everything they do. Instead of pushing against the grain, it’s time that you fully invest in visualization this year.
The Visual Nature of the Internet
If you study the history of branding, media, and the internet, you’ll notice that they’ve followed a similar path. Text and written content once served as the backbone for these specialities. Now it’s visuals – images, videos, and graphics.
Back in the spring of 2010, entrepreneur Bill Dalessandro wrote an article about the amazing transformation media had undergone from the 1950s…
The growing deluge of content means you'll need a plan to cut through the noise in 2017
In digital marketing, you've probably come across the statement "content is king" several times. Make no mistake that content is the lifeblood of every essential online marketing activity. Be it social media marketing, email marketing, SEO, or paid advertising - none of these departments will succeed without the development of quality content.
A study by Demand Metric reveals that 78% of CMOs believe that custom content is the future of digital marketing.
However, successful content marketing is an intricate process that requires a lot of research and planning. Below are the crucial steps you need to prepare your content marketing strategy for 2017:
1. Specify Your Business Objectives
In every business endeavor, you need to set specific goals and objectives that will guide your day-to-day activities and ensure you're right on track. First off, make sure you…
The number of social shares per blog post suffers from a massive 89% decline over the past five years
Mark Schaefer originally coined the term content shock 3 years ago. Since then we've seen a massive explosion in the amount of content produced - an almost seven-fold increase -but a huge crash in engagement with each post.
An October 2016 study by TrackMaven analysed over 65,000 blogs and found that the number of blogs produced increased by 800%, but the number of social shares per posts crashed by a massive 89%.
We can see this huge drop off in engagement is impacting brand's decisions - the number of articles published has plateaued since August 2015.
In an attempt to cut through, brands have been driven to creating not just more, but longer content. The average number of words in each post increased by 100 words, to 750 words per post on average. But…
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…
Agile and real-time marketing campaigns needs planning for if your going to get it right
There’s one thing that’s certain on the internet: things move fast. And those early bird online marketers, so to speak, get the worm (meaning the traffic). Staying ahead of the game is very important when it comes to standing out from the sea of content and advertising available to modern consumers.
To capture the attention of target audiences, companies need to employ a good agile marketing strategy. Agile marketing exploits topics that are trending on the internet and social media to remain relevant at any given time. Basically, agile marketing means that a company or a brand quickly produces small amounts of content tailored to whatever topic that has the public captivated at the moment.
Agile marketing is timely, flexible, and attention grabbing. Companies absolutely must invest in developing an agile brand to quickly adapt to changing…
Does your blog or site run on Wordpress? If so, use these WordPress Plugins to optimise your content marketing, SEO and more
WordPress is the most popular CMS (Content Management System) due to its ease-of-use, flexibility, and scalability; especially for entrepreneurs, aspiring bloggers, and businesses looking to expand online. But one feature of WordPress where it really stands out from other content management systems is the sheer availability of different Plugins. Some are well known, others are diamonds in the rough. Certainly, there are plenty that are more trouble than their worth. But by using Plugins selectively you can achieve better results more efficiently than without them.
Without further ado, here are 37 of the best WordPress plugins will want to consider for your business website:
Search Engine Optimization
1. Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress
The Yoast SEO plugin covers everything you need for on-page SEO. It helps you optimize ranking factors…
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…
Less than half of marketing know their ROI from Content marketing
For the past 3 years that we have been asking Smart Insights readers which is the marketing tactic which marketers that will give them the most incremental growth. In each of those 3 years, Content Marketing has been identified as the trend which will have the most impact.
Given the popularity of content marketing as an activity and increased investment in this area, using the right measures to assess return on content marketing is essential. We asked this question in our recent report on content marketing in Europe asking marketers based in Europe about the content marketing techniques they have used.
In the question on KPIs used for content marketing summarised in the infographic below we asked which measures are used for measuring content marketing effectiveness.
You…
Use these tools to find and curate quality content
Content marketing continues to grow in importance with brands investing more in both content generation and distribution. These tools help with a wide variety of tasks for content generation from ideas for headlines and blog articles to easy-to-use image and video tools and grammar checking.
Key things to consider before purchasing and using these tools:
The tools we’ve listed here are a useful starting point but there are dozens of others, with new ones appearing all the time. It’s useful to ask your content team what tasks they do on a daily basis and/or find repetitive. The chances are there is a tool to help.
Whilst many of these tools come with a small price tag, it’s easy to rack up a long list of tools that are rarely used. Consider using these tools, where appropriate, within your publishing processes to formalise their…
