Digital marketing tools to support your content marketing
The importance of content marketing in a business cannot be overlooked especially since we have to work hard to engage our audiences rather than pushing messages to them. Long gone are the days where creating billboard ads and radio spots were enough to get your business to the next level. Today, consumers want more and they like to have content they can relate to in order to feel a part of your business.
Content can help you to craft a story about your business to help you connect further with your customers and to share your unique values, showcasing the personality of your brand.
It's not easy to get started with your content marketing strategy. Before any success story can be realized, a business needs to have the right tools in place to be in a better position to…
Examples showing how to increase reach and engagement with visually compelling content
Content shared on social media tends to be more visual due to high engagement levels and amplification when it includes photos, videos, memes and infographics. According to a Citrix Report and associated infographic, nearly two thirds of the posts on social media use visual content, since it ignites viewers’ imagination and enables brands to provide a positive experience, and social media users are more likely to micro and visual content.
7 Tips to creating visual content
Here are 7 tips you can use to create powerful visual content and instantly connect with your audience.
Tip 1: Personalize your message
Identify your audience, their problems, and showcase the special features and capabilities offered by your product or service.
Create visual content which cover specific themes for website personalisation, appealing to particular demographics/personas, key stakeholders and consider where they are in the sales…
Key marketing tactics which come before your content marketing
Content marketing is the buzzword on everyones lips right now. For some, it's becoming an increasingly big part of the marketing mix. For others, particularly small businesses, it shouldn't necessarily be at the top of the list of priorities.
The theory of content marketing is an attractive one – produce interesting and engaging content which will be shared by your audience, and wait for the leads to roll in. Done well, it's a very effective channel, however, it takes time, effort and even the most brilliant pieces can be hit and miss in terms of uptake.
Sign up for Hubspot, Kapost, Marketo, or any one of the hundreds of content marketing platforms that are available, and you'll have all of the tools at your disposal for implementing content marketing.…
Learning blog publishing best practices from the top 10 UK marketing blogs
Creating remarkable content is one of the core components of inbound marketing, and one of the best ways to generate a steady flow of fresh content is by publishing a business blog.
HubSpot research indicates companies that blog generate 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links, and have 434% more indexed pages than companies that don’t blog.
Whether you’ve only just decided to launch a blog for your business or you’ve been blogging for a while, this post will help prevent you from falling victim to some of the most common business blogging mistakes and teach you how to fix the blogging mistakes you might already be making.
1. Not having editorial/style guidelines
Mistake: Not having a documented style guide for all contributors to your blog. Your blog has a different look and feel for every writer, both internal and external to…
Sharing 9 tips on engaging staff within an organisation to create content
We find there is great enthusiasm for content marketing, but when we talk to marketers at companies and agencies, we find there are two common content marketing management challenges (amongst many). First, how do you make the business case for content marketing and prove its value post campaign and second, how to encourage colleagues with the specialist insights to create great content given limited time or inclination.
We are all busy, with our own priorities and responsibilities and it can be difficult to engage colleagues to understand the importance of relevant, interesting and up-to-date information to share with customers, prospects and stakeholders who can influence the sales or company brand.
This post was originally based around a discussion on our Digital Marketing Optimization LinkedIn Group. We still often get this question which we posed. The question was simply...
How do…
How free whitepapers create customer obligation
Sometimes it helps to take a step back from the everyday tactics employed in digital marketing, and look at your customers from a different perspective. Take reports and whitepapers for instance. As digital marketers, we know that value adding free content works for customer engagement and for our search rankings. Google loves good quality, relevant content – and your customers and prospects gain great value from reading engaging reports and whitepapers (just take a look at Smart Insight’s own free range of reports and how to guides).
But let’s take that step back.
Let’s move away from viewing the world through our digital lens, and try and see it from a behavioural perspective instead.
Tactically, we know free content is a great customer acquisition tool, but could there be more to it…
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March 3, 2015
Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Marketing Institute gives his take on the state of content marketing
Whether videos, blogs, infographics or ebooks, content is now being consumed on an unprecedented scale. And in our multichannel, multi-device, always-on world, that means content represents an exciting opportunity for brands to make an impression on the customer during the product purchasing process. Little wonder, then, that content marketing has become such big news.
In fact, the buzz for content marketing reached such extraordinary levels in 2014, that it led some to question whether interest in the discipline had reached its peak. Nonetheless, evidence suggests that there could still be plenty of growth left yet.
The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) recently conducted a research on content marketing in the UK, and found that 85% of respondents use content marketing, with 45% reporting they…
5 core elements for your content marketing strategy and best practices for content outsourcing
According to Content Marketing Institute, more than 80% of B2B marketers and more than 70% of B2C marketers used content marketing for their online businesses last year. The results of this investigation have been published in B2B Content Marketing: 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends ? North America and proved the fact content marketing tactics become a significant part of successful marketing strategy.
More than 50% of B2B marketers plan to increase content marketing spending in 2015; they are ready to accept the challenge and start awesome content creation, distribution, optimization, analyzing and managing. It often happens that content creation and development is not a core skill for a marketer, and it can be quite difficult to cope with. The…
Content marketing planning and effective marketing tactics
In our recent post on the latest marketing trends, we polled readers to ask for their opinion on the single digital marketing tool they thought would have the greatest impact to drive results for their business in 2015. No surprise it was content marketing - it was in the previous year too!
So, what is the latest thinking on content marketing? In our new infographic we've partnered with Jane Hunt, along with her team at JBH Marketing to summarise the key issues and give examples of what's working and what isn't.
The infographic blends stats with advice including the 7 content marketing planning tactics that are crucial to your business and where to invest your budget.
Did you know that...
Content marketing drives inbound traffic, proven by successes with Kissmetrics whose blog accounts for 70%…
Dealing with the 3 Major Challenges Your Content Marketing Team Will Encounter this year
Initially we thought we should write about marketing predictions for the year 2525, as the song goes. But people are generally poor in forecasting long term, so we settled for the 'here and now' - more relevant since these are three problems you will definitely encounter when practicing content marketing.
Challenge 1. Lack of time
We all know this problem, as marketers already work long hours on a never ending list of projects and in most cases use dozens of technologies on a daily basis: we don’t have time to properly do anything new, but we have to and are expected to.
Invest in automation. Start by investing with…
