Repurposing content is an easy, often time-saving practice, that brings a plethora of benefits
Are you making the most of your content? Repurposing content – i.e. finding new ways to re-use your content – is an easy, often time-saving practice that brings a plethora of benefits.
From reaching a new audience to saving time creating new content and improving your search engine optimization (SEO), repurposing content is all about using data and insights to make your job as a marketer easier!
In this short guide, I’m going to show you how exactly you too can repurpose your content.
Set marketing objectives that align your content marketing with your company's business vision
There are so many components in a marketing strategy, it can be easy to lose track. But, to make the most of your content marketing, marketers know that integrating your content strategy with your existing marketing activity goals is a sensible way to strengthen the…
A simple process for weighting your content prioritization
The rise of always-on content marketing has led to a content tsunami, making cut-through more difficult, so teams need tools and approaches to balance their content priorities. In this post, I'll share our 'ABC process' which we use to simplify the process of content marketing prioritization and planning the most effective content to meet our clients' goals.
Marketing common sense ≠ common practice
It’s easy to get immersed in the joy of creating content and lose sight of the bigger picture. (I’ve been there too). The challenge is that when we as marketers put our heart into the job (and as much as we may know the truth is different) it’s easy to lose our heads and act as if our target customers are eagerly searching for what we have to offer.
The inconvenient truths…
Learn the 4 steps to creating a content marketing plan, with our content planning template and the RACE Framework
To help you develop a content marketing plan or review existing methods, I thought it could be helpful to share some of the planning techniques applied in our Content Marketing Learning Path. Take these 4 steps to create a content marketing plan today:
Step 1 Review current use of content marketing. This is a classic SWOT analysis where we have given examples of problems with content marketing programs that are often forgotten.
Step 2 Content marketing objectives and KPIs This uses an efficient planning table I have developed for summarising digital plans on one page. Here, as the example shows, it links objectives, strategies, and KPIs across the customer lifecycle shown as the RACE Planning approach.
Step 3 Content Gap analysis…
How to write briefs that deliver great design work
In an increasingly crowded world, design work is key for businesses as they fight for mental availability through distinctiveness and clear branding. As businesses put design at the heart of their processes, there is a growing need to deliver great design briefs that work. In over fifteen years of writing design briefs, great ones, average ones, and bad ones, I can unilaterally state that if a design brief is rubbish, packed full of non-essential information, with gaps in critical parts and devoid of emotional hooks, even the best designers are going to struggle to do great work.
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No one starts to…
Five steps to creating an effective process that generates results
It’s difficult to argue with the benefits that good content marketing can deliver for businesses. We have talked regularly here on Smart Insights about the opportunities provided by great content and how it fuels many inbound marketing techniques, including:
SEO
Paid search marketing
Social media marketing
Email marketing
Conversion rate optimization
However, once the overall strategy and approach have been agreed, the next step is execution. Unfortunately, creating and maintaining good quality content is not straightforward. There are often many stakeholders and dependencies across businesses, including marketing, PR, creative and legal/compliance. If you work for an agency you will also need to consider the client’s point of view, too.
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One of the trickiest elements of the…
Increase leads and sales by using our full range of recommended tools and techniques to audit your content marketing effectiveness
Many content audits are limited by just reviewing SEO or making an inventory of existing content. These are both important, but to improve your content to make it more valuable to your business AND your audience, we recommend a complete 360-degree content audit covering all aspects of content effectiveness.
Our content audit is different since it helps you get more value from your content by improving each of these crucial elements of content effectiveness:
SEO – increase rankings and technical quality of content for SEO
Content coverage – a traditional inventory of types of content to identify new content needed.
Impact of content on leads and sales by integrating Google Analytics data and reviewing UX to make improvements to calls-to-action.
Content mapping to personas through the customer journey.
Audience opinions and feedback…
In order to drive commitment levels, your content marketing campaigns need to be successful
Research from The Content Marketing Institute found that 26% of companies’ content marketing services are in the adolescent phase and 34% are in the first steps phase.
Only 50% of respondents described their organization’s commitment levels to content marketing as very or extremely committed.
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In order to drive commitment levels, your content marketing campaigns need to be successful. The problem is, it can be easy to make mistakes during the process, which can cost you links, shares, traffic and conversions.
Here, we’ll discuss the five main mistakes made in the content marketing process, the impact those mistakes…
The big mistakes that content marketers need to avoid when planning their campaigns
While many are aware of the benefits and importance of content marketing in the interaction-driven online universe, some of us still forget the countless dangers that can cause your campaign to fail before it starts generating meaningful results.
Content marketing works on a premise of building a relationship through value and intellectual or emotional connection. However, relationships need time and commitment which can render content marketing campaigns complex and messy. Tasks start piling up; team members lose sight of the goal and the initial infatuation with the project evaporates.
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To avoid going down the wrong path when planning your content marketing campaign, it’s essential you keep an eye on these risky areas:
1.…
Content marketing should explicitly be about promoting the right content to the right audience at the right time in order to achieve your marketing goals
Whether you're creating content from scratch or refurbishing existing content, your goal should be to engage and entice your target audience effectively on different platforms and, ultimately, prompt action.
Your blog posts, videos, infographics, contests and ads all need to be perfectly aligned with the buyer’s journey. This means you need to understand the awareness, consideration and decision stages.
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However, it’s quite difficult - if not entirely impossible - to do this without having a documented plan that covers effective distribution of your content. At the same time, your content marketing campaigns may end up…
Anything that affects the performance of content should be a content creator’s business (even if not directly)
Content makes the digital world go around. It helps drive greater traffic to businesses, generate lead growth, and improve conversion rates.
But content that can achieve all that requires great planning and strategizing. En route content creators run into several roadblocks.
By content creator, I mean anyone who creates content. That could be a dedicated team, a freelancer, or a new business owner who does all the digital marketing themselves, of which content creation is a part.
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With that in mind, I’m presenting a wide variety of challenges that content creators face. Some are specific to content creation, while others may…
