Gamification can potentially revolutionize your content marketing strategy – examples and tips to show how to apply it
Content marketing is predicted to continue to be a key strategy in digital marketing and marketers will soon start looking for new solutions to create fun and engaging content. Many of them are already interested in gamification – analyst Gartner expects that by 2016, gamified strategies will become standard practice for driving brand engagement and fostering consumer loyalty. Here are a few tips to help you realize the potential gamification holds for revolutionizing your content marketing strategy.
The basics
First of all, what is gamification? It's basically application of game mechanisms to non-gaming activities and contexts. Gamification is of great use to areas of business which depend on engagement and motivation – for instance training, project management, recruitment or marketing.
Rewarding players with points and badges or…
Marketers think people have short attention spans - TV shows us they don't
It’s often said that we are living in a new “Golden Age of TV”. There literally seems to be too much great television to watch... Whether you like gritty crime stories, or historical dramas or comedy series, there are inventive, compelling, “binge-worthy” TV shows coming out all the time – and not just on “television,” but now on streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Today, TV is driving the cultural conversation more than movies or music or any other art forms: people identify by what types of shows they watch and they create a sense of community by comparing notes on social media about which latest developments happened during their latest session of binge watching. With all of the critical, cultural and financial attention going to TV shows today, companies like Netflix and Amazon and other online companies…
How to make content marketing generate results for your business by focusing on 5 success factors
Traditional marketing is self-centered. More often than not, it offers little more than a seductive image or a brief statement of your product’s qualities. On top of that, after decades of similar campaigns, consumers have grown adept at tuning out the noise.
Content marketing offers something different from traditional advertising. It requires marketers to step outside of their self-centered mindset and think about consumers’ needs. Content breaks through the marketing noise to create a relationship, offering knowledge and substance instead of fluff. It’s one of the reasons why content marketing is three times more effective than digital marketing in generating sales.
Where most ads are disposable, content is an asset that pays long-term dividends. Once an ad is gone, so is the opportunity. Content typically has a much longer shelf life. There’s certainly a cost…
How to keep web content costs down without compromising quality
As the person in charge of the numbers, you probably have very little interest in the creative side of content. It’s a cost.
What you probably are interested in is how you can lower that cost.
The answer is not simply to negotiate harder with the writers to get the price down. In fact, that can have the opposite effect by limiting your sources of copy only to inferior writers who deliver poor copy that sells fewer products.
It’s more about looking at what your content requirements are and how you manage them. Done well, this can bring you huge time savings, both internal and external. Rigour in this area also allows you to identify when you can use lower-priced junior copywriters and when it’s worth spending the money on higher priced heavyweight writers.
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An example of using an infographic to explain a proposition
We feature a lot of infographics which share insight or best practice related to digital marketing. We thought we'd share this one as a nice piece of content marketing, perhaps of interest and inspiration to B2B marketers.
If we think about the purpose of infographics in content marketing in the context of our Content Marketing Matrix, they can and most often are aimed at raising awareness at the top of the funnel where they encourage sharing through a viral effect (either emotional - top-left in the matrix) or rational (bottom-left). But they can also be used further down the funnel (right-side) funnel to educate contacts about the benefits of a product category or service and explain a company's service. That's the purpose of this example which we received by email rather than social media (these type of infographics are…
Measuring the effectiveness of your Content Marketing Strategy
Our recent research with HubSpot on Competing on Content Marketing in 2015 identified that measurement of content marketing ROI was one of the main challenges of managing Content Marketing today - rated as a challenge by 51% of respondents.
Our Expert member guide on Measuring Content Marketing ROI by Stephen Bateman gives the full technical detail on how to calculate the profitability of content marketing using analytics. In this post, we share the advice of five content marketing specialists.
According to Daniel Rowles, from Target Internet, one of the greatest opportunities and advantages of content marketing is that we can create, deploy, measure and improve quickly and easily. Daniel explains that 'having well defined online objectives means that then our content marketing can be measured and ROI calculated relatively easily.…
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August 11, 2015
Produce your content as part of a well-planned strategy to get the best results as shown by this hypothetical case study
Content has been a big buzzword for the last 12 months, and still drives a lot of conversation today. This has only been encouraged with Google’s updated algorithm last year. Content now plays a more pivotal role in search engine optimisation (SEO), as link based metrics are decreasingly used as the main ranking signal.
So yes, everyone’s churning out content, more and more – how many server farms will we need in 2030 to accommodate it all?! So what can brands do to make their content strategy work across channels and align with customer needs?
To really leverage the power of content, publishers and brands should employ carefully thought out strategies, as this will ensure maximum returns. Given the vast breadth of the topic I will primarily focus on social and digital…
Evergreen content is key to boosting your organic SEO
What is evergreen content?
Content creation is essential in any marketing strategy. It takes time and effort to create good content. If you invest in creating content you want to maximise the return on your investment. You want to see a boost in: traffic to your website, shares on social media, subscriptions to your mailing list and enquires to your sales team. Great content can do all of these and ultimately drive more sales.
Some content will only attract traffic for a brief spurt. For example: an article about a new development in your industry. Such an article can drive a spike in traffic that might diminish in a matter of days.
source: moz.com
However some content can continue to attract…
To increase conversions with content marketing, you must get both quality and distribution right
No marketing strategy is effective anymore without good content. It’s the cornerstone of engaging with customers on social media channels, ranking in search and your vehicle to demonstrate your brand and values as a business.
Image credit: Startbloggingonline
With 50% of B2C marketers expecting to increase their budget spend on content marketing in 2015 according to this research infographic from Smart Insights, it’s abundantly clear that good content has become a major e-commerce marketing priority.
Approaching a content strategy in digital commerce has some significant challenges, however. Naturally, your digital commerce site is built to sell, and your content will likely take a softer approach, as it won’t be of value to your potential customers if it just contains promotional messages. Your content needs to entertain, educate,…
Techniques to create a more customer-focused content plan
As marketers, we know the value of a good online presence. We often talk about the importance of Google and of understanding the algorithms that govern the way businesses appear and are ranked in the Google search results. But we rarely talk about the rules that govern the algorithms themselves.
Since it’s inception in 1997, Google has strived to ‘organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. From Panda (content) to Penguin (links) and Hummingbird (semantics), algorithm updates are intended to help Google to identify those pieces of content which are most likely to meet the searcher’s needs.
All of this culminates in a simple lesson for us all:
If you want to be successful online, you need to provide the highest quality, most useful, most relevant content to suit your target audience’s needs.
Online…
