Many marketers and businesses don’t really put together a detailed strategy to outline their blogging objectives
Content marketing is well-known as one of the most effective forms of business promotion; and out of all content marketing tactics, blogging is arguably the best-performing and most cost-effective tactic.
In my latest Quick Win for Smart Insights, I show you how to develop a blogging strategy from start to finish. You’ll learn:
Why blogging is such an effective form of content marketing
How to set quality objectives for your blogging strategy
How to perform content and keyword research to improve your content
How to put together an editorial calendar and come up with great headlines and topics for your blog
How to create a promotional strategy for your blog to improve your overall results
As well as how to measure your results from blogging so you can improve your blogging strategy and…
Content marketing is a complex, highly competitive marketing practice, so it’s important to be strategic if you want to succeed
Over years of blogging and working with content marketing, I’ve learned a lot of lessons. Important lessons that I definitely wished I knew about when I started. In this blog post, I’m going to share top essential content marketing practices that you might not be leveraging:
Strategize and plan your content marketing
Research your content and perform keyword research
Focus more on evergreen content
The future is in personalization: create audience personas
Use your analytics to optimise your content
Strategize and plan your content marketing
How much thought do you really put into your strategy? Are you:
Setting objectives for your content?
Creating content with your objectives in mind?
Creating content based on market research?
Using an editorial calendar to plan and strategize your content?
Creating a content marketing strategy helps in several ways:…
Chart of the day: Original research drives traffic but marketers aren't promoting it to its full potential.
Original research produced by b2B marketers drives traffic and social shares - but are marketers making the most of their excellent research? The short answer, according to research by Buzzsumo and Mantis Research is pretty much a "no".
The research found the main benefits of producing original research (research reports which involve conducting a survey of real people e.g. marketers) drives traffic and social shares, success!
Website traffic, social shares, PR and influencer mentions, as well as leads were reported by half or more respondents. This proves the value of conducting original research and shows why it's so popular as a content marketing methods.
When asked how marketers then promoted the research, this is what they found:
Most marketers promote…
Benchmarks, budgets, and trends to help you streamline your content marketing strategy in 2018
Every year we ask what marketing activity will be in most important for our readers' businesses or clients. In our trends polls for the last 3-4 years content marketing has always been the top topic with 20% of the vote this year.
The annual report by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) describes, for the eighth year, the implications of content marketing and how it can be utilized to provide better results and engagement. Content marketing is an important part of any business and fuels all forms of inbound techniques (email, social, paid and organic search). Having a clear and defined content marketing strategy will not only help you create content but audit and set goals, improve content distribution and help evaluate and measure ROI. Findings…
Quora can be an incredibly valuable content marketing tool
In fact, Quora can help with multiple common content marketing goals, such as getting more traffic or boosting your industry authority – plus, it’s an extremely tool for research. But, more on that in a bit. In this blog post, I’m going to show you how to use Quora as part of your content marketing strategy.
What is Quora and why should you be bothered?
Quora is, as they put it, “a place to share knowledge and better understand the world”. In other words, it’s a place where anyone can ask and answer questions about pretty much any topic you can think of.
People use Quora to ask for advice for their personal and professional lives, to get recommendations for products and services, to ask for strangers’ opinions on different subjects (both personal and professional), and much more.
And, of course, people also use Quora…
Chart of the day: Time is the biggest challenge when it comes to content marketing
Marketers have revealed time and quality are their biggest content marketing challenges according to research by Clearvoice.
Time, content quality and creating content were the top three challenges, which suggest a perception of the number of resource marketers feel content needs. And right they are! Quality and effective content takes time, needs to be good quality and needs the appropriate resource to put aside this time and make sure it's great quality. Marketers recognise that it's quality over quantity and understand quality is the most important aspect.
Production is also a big challenge for marketers, the resource involved in making it happen and getting it live and as someone who works full time in the production of content, it certainly is harder than you may think.
…
Data isn’t the sole property of a data analyst; content marketers should be using it to build a strong, results-focused content strategy targeted to buyer personas
When we say the word “data”, you might think it’s a bunch of information used only by technical marketers.
CROs, SEOs, and email analysts are no stranger to an Excel sheet, but what about content marketers – the people who work with the power of words, instead of math?
Content marketers – including strategists, editors and your team of writers – should be using data to drive your marketing strategy forwards this year.
Why? Because content is how we connect with our audience and convince them to complete our marketing goals. Conversions are going to be a struggle if we’re not creating content that’s backed (with data) to prove what you’re creating works for them.
In this post, we’re diving deep into data analysis for content marketers, allowing you…
Chart of the day: Research with almost 1,000 content marketers reveals how important content marketing is to marketing teams.
Most people say content marketing is at the core of the marketing team.
Please note that the research is split into visionaries and leaders, those who are experts in content marketing or leaders. Most marketers also use an editorial calendar.
If you're looking for an editorial calendar, Smart Insights have one right here.
Content marketing is a huge part of marketing, it works with SEO, email marketing, and social media. Quality content drives traffic and conversions.
The research also found that most content is produced by the marketing team or freelancers, marketing have control of the content that goes out and agencies are used by just 10% of respondents. This suggests that marketing as a whole are…
For humans, seemingly, current attention span is no more than eight seconds. That’s less than that of a goldfish!
Marketers have felt the effects of this change considerably, and audiences’ shrinking attention span presents several challenges.
Earlier, all brands needed to do was capture the interest of their audience for a couple of seconds, and they would get half the job done.
Now, they would have to evolve if they wanted their businesses to succeed. And it was this drive for survival that led to the creation of ephemeral content marketing.
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Never Heard of “Ephemeral Content Marketing”?
This might be the first time you’ve come across this term, but it surely won’t be your last.
One of the biggest…
A new type of content discovery platform which allows professionals to improve their knowledge and keep track of quality content in a single feed via a Google Chrome new-tab extension
It’s Monday. Your inbox shows a gazillion emails and most are from blogs you’re subscribed to. You already know that about 90% of them aren’t that relevant to you and that some 9% of them are lack of added value.
You pick up your mobile and scroll through the Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter feeds. While scrolling, you see a post about the latest content marketing technique. This post already has 400+ likes, some are your colleagues, but while you skim through the article you say to yourself “why have all these professionals liked this article? It’s full of basic fluff”.
These days we are consuming our content mainly through blog subscription and social media. We…
