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?:

…

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…

How the Met Office plans and evaluates its content marketing

The weather is always a talking point in our daily lives, especially since many have experienced floods and extreme weather recently. Events like this attract even more visitors to the Met Office website - the site has anywhere from 6 million to more than 24 million unique users per week, depending on external influences such as severe weather conditions and even astronomical events. As we will see, other types of events can also generate interest in the weather.

Digital marketing at the Met Office

In 2009, a dedicated digital team was introduced to manage the organization’s online portfolio,  Simon Swan, is head of digital marketing at the Metoffice. You may also recognise Simon's name as a Smart Insights Expert commentator on digital and content marketing strategy. A key part of the digital strategy for the Metoffice today is to use content to give site visitors an enhanced…

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…

5 content governance tips to keep your web experience relevant

When discussing website relaunches and redesigns, a common refrain I hear among the reasons for the relaunches is: 'our old website had grown organically over the years'.

Usually this is a euphemism for navigation becoming more confusing as it is amended and 'content creep'. To tackle these issues in preparation for relaunch, often some customer research is done, some content culled, card sorting exercises undertaken. The new website launches with a cutting-edge design; slimmed down, well written content and a breezy navigation. Big success!

Yet after a while content creep sets in again - the navigation is getting inconsistent and complaints come in about information being inaccurate or hard to find. Sound familiar? What lies behind it, and what can be done to stem the re-emergence of content creep and messy navigation?

Web maintenance, just like…

And avoid boring brand content

One of the key challenges in content marketing is being able to create enough great content. Great? OK, maybe that’s vague, I mean relevant, engaging and it works. Great means different things to a financial services company than say, a BBQ grill manufacturer, a basmati rice brand or sports clothing manufacturer.

The truth is we all have the same challenge when it come to content creation and content marketing - creating dull content is a choice, it’s your choice.

“If people aren’t talking about you, they’re not talking about you for a reason. And the reason isn’t that they dislike you. They’re not talking about you because you’re boring.” ~ Seth Godin

People first...

Use your imagination, take a step back and think about your target audience, not your brand. What your audience needs over what you want to promote. It’s this return to people where it get’s so much…

Recommendations on improving your content marketing capabilities

In our recent Smart Insights - Hubspot research on Managing Content Marketing, we asked five industry experts for their views on how content marketing can be successfully managed. Here they go into more detail of approaches to improve the effectiveness of content marketing. You can learn more ideas on how to better manage content marketing in this free webinar from Dave Chaffey showing examples and 10 techniques and examples to make content marketing more effective (recording available). 10 practical content marketing techniques from Smart Insights

The challenges of managing content marketing

The research showed that there were a common set of challenges of managing content marketing that companies need to manage. …

5 key issues to consider to make your content marketing more effective

I recently recorded a short series of short videos for TFM&A Insights where I selected just five factors to focus on to improve key digital marketing techniques. 

In the first video I cover Content Marketing. If you were picking just 5 factors to help make content marketing successful which would you choose?

[youtubevideoembedder id="fvRSE8Jp3o8" parameters="start=2"]

The five practical success factors I cover in the video are:

Success Factor 1. Set goals and KPIs so you can prove the commercial contribution of Content Marketing. For ideas on KPI selection, see Dan Bosomworth's post on KPIs for content marketing and Stephen Bateman's Content Marketing Evaluation guide.Success Factor 2. Prioritise content for different audience needs using the content marketing matrix. See the Content Marketing infographic for how you can audit and brainstorm content ideas and the persona toolkit for how to create…

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…