A planned approach to make better use of video marketing
Video has now become a staple part of many business’ marketing toolkits, but there are still plenty out there who are yet to jump on the horse.
This guide is designed to help you get on that (still pretty young and frisky) horse and quickly. It is not an exhaustive guide instead we will point you to the resources you need to get your first video out there.
1. Work out how video will support your goals
Don't use video marketing because everybody else is. Instead, start with what are you trying to achieve as a business in 2012?
Your video marketing efforts should part of your marketing plan - an engagement tactic to support your goals. You should not be creating a video just because others are. Of course take a look at what your competitors are doing as well as…
Six post ideas which work for any business blog
Following on from the recent Smart Insights post on 30 ideas to get more visitors to your blog, I thought I'd follow-up with some more specific ideas for B2B blogs. I believe blogs are the foundation of any respectable BB content marketing strategy and the place where issues can be explored, trends discussed, communities created and prospects identified. So in the first in a series of posts on business blogging, I'll discuss how to avoid a common challenge - what to write about!
A company blog can, over time, significantly increase a website’s presence in search engine results and be a valuable source of inbound inquiries for a business. It is crucial that to be successful, your business has to tap into the needs of your target audience, and provides useful, usable and relevant content.
For me, the trick to effective business blog…
30 ways to get more targeted visitors to your blog
A few years ago Seth Godin wrote a great post on how to get traffic for your blog. Seth listed a number of excellent ideas and techniques that any blogger can use to generate interest, attention and advocacy for their blog.
Six years on and many of Seth's practical traffic-generating tips are still very relevant today, so Dave Chaffey and I thought it was worth sharing for those who missed it first time around. However, a few things have moved on, so I thought I’d re-visit the post and pick out some of the best tips (30 of the original 56) for getting more targeted visitors to your blog: (more…)…
A case study showing how the power of digital media can help small charities engage a passionate following
Many not-for-profit organisations have developed a compelling, inspirational web presence for their cause that has helped create a passionate social media-led community and strong interaction. When discussing good practice in digital marketing for charities, Amnesty, Cancer Research, NSPCC, Oxfam and PDSA are the usual suspects. My case study looks at how a campaigning site against Knife Crime was created from a standing start with minimal budget, but created fantastic engagement. In my post, I'll say a little about the background to the site and how it's doing and then look at how we used blogging, SEO and social media to gain awareness and engagement. I hope you find it inspiring.
The site was started after I was in a McDonalds fast food restaurant with my family one Saturday lunch time when a former…
How can B2B companies use video to attract, engage and improve conversion without falling into the gimmick trap?
Integrating video into a website and sharing through video sites has great potential to build awareness and establish trust before a transaction. We're now seeing many more marketers using video as discussed in my previous post on inbound B2B marketing. In this post I'll use examples to review different approaches B2B companies can use video to really bring their offering to life.
Using video to help with visibility in search
At the last check, it was estimated that approximately 48 hours of video were being uploaded to YouTube every minute. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how valuable is a video when video search dominates internet search?
This data from YouTube is further supported by a recent survey which confirmed that B2B marketers need to focus on videos and images as part of their SEO…
Many of us happily spend many hours editing text in our favourite blogging platform or CMS. In my case, and for many others this is Wordpress. I love Wordpress, but there was one big step backwards compared to my previous Plone CMS; the lack of a built-in markup language to make it easy to enter text without using HTML or fiddling around selecting formating and linking with the buttons using a mouse. I did check a couple years ago, but there were no suitable plugins for a multi-author blog.
But my problem is solved thanks to a tweet from Paul Boag (@Boagworld). Now I can edit without any distractions, without using the mouse!
What is a markup language?
Byword, the editor I’m using uses a syntax called Markdown. You can see it’s easy…
My experience with clients, is that businesses that produce high quality blogs produce positive results. But what is 'high quality"? Well, the great tips in this infographic from SEOMoz certainly help show how the functional aspects of blog design and layout can help improve blog quality. But as my other tips and links below show, it's the content quality that matters far more than these functional aspects.
Click image to see full size
My tips on creating Quality blogs
It's not just the functional aspects that are important though, so here is a short checklist of my recommendations on creating successful blogging sites / sections:
Use Wordpress if possible - In my opinion it is the easiest to use & has such a large following & library of plugins
Submit Sitemap(s) (if the blog is a section of your site include it as a…
A reference of major Google updates we think marketers involved in SEO, Pay Per Click or Social media need to know about
Each day Google makes many changes and updates to its different tools and it does a great job of announcing them through all its blogs and feeds, but it can be difficult to keep on top of what matters and what doesn't, particularly if you're a generalist marketer or digital marketer rather than a search marketing specialists.
So on this page we try to help by being selective for you to update you on Google's algorithm updates, new tools, policies and changes to Google makes we think everyone working in digital marketing or marketing needs to know about, even if they're not a search specialist!
Hopefully SEO or Adwords specialists will find it useful too and can let us know what we're missing!
June 2011 Google updates
June 29th: Google+1 recommendations buttons live…
Which approaches work best to take your traffic to the next level?
What should you do once you have your inbound marketing up and running? The scenario is that you're creating or maybe curating great new material on your corporate, brand or business blog, you're in the content marketing curve and all's well in the world, the content feels right and peer feedback is generally great too.
Yet traffic from your blog seems to be a tad slow, or simply not growing like you thought it might based on the size of your market and the blogging competition, maybe you're getting the wrong traffic and the page bounce rate seems high? Most of us have been here, are currently here, and will be here again - so don't worry!
Whether you're improving SEO, social media marketing or content creation and content marketing, it's a process and so improvement never stops, neither does the…
Google has updated two of it's main sources. I thought I'd alert readers to them since I often find that people reach for their pens to make a note of these on training courses.
Google Agency Toolkit
Many readers will know the many great tools Google provide to encourage marketers to spend more with advertisers. The ones we've written about before and recommend are most useful are:
The Google Keyword Tool - for seeing the number of searches on a topic
Google Keyword Planner - a new tool supplementing the keyword tool
Google Ad Preview tool - shows marketplace players in different countries
Google Trends - for spotting search trends by country
Google Ad Planner - for finding site popularity and audience composition for media sites/publishers
But I find many don't know about the Google Agency Toolkit which groups these together and provides many others - check it out!
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