Five Ways To Make Your Content Marketing Stand Out from The Rest

The sheer amount of digital content that we create collectively each day is staggering. Approximately 2.5 quintillion (that’s a million trillions) bytes of data are created every single day. In any given day, Facebook users will share 2.2 million pieces of content, Twitter users will send more than a quarter of a million tweets, and Instagram users will upload 216,000 photos. To say that the internet is a crowded place is a huge understatement. With such a vast amount of content being created and shared online every day, how can you expect your business’s content to get noticed by the right  people? It is possible, but you’re going to have to work hard to make sure your content stands out from the rest. Here are five ways to accomplish that.

Be concise and be yourself

Much of the content that is created for the purpose of marketing sounds stilted or unnatural. Content writers mistakenly believe that they need to adopt a certain formal tone in order to sound knowledgeable and credible.

But this kind of writing is uninteresting and it blends in with everything else that’s written in the exact same way. Feel free to use humor. Break grammatical rules with the situation calls for it. Use fresh and interesting language and never include any words that don’t need to be there or your writing will be overly wordy.

Don’t neglect visual content

The saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words” is not only cliche, it’s a huge understatement. A great image can communicate emotions in a way that no amount of words can. Posts that include an image are forty times as likely to be shared on social media as posts that don’t include one. Just as you want to avoid cliche or boring writing, you want to avoid stock photos. Infographics are an underutilized visual element that you may also want to consider.

Try creating some video content

Even more underutilized than images is video content. You may feel that you don’t have the expertise to create high quality video content. You don’t need a high end video camera, lighting, and other special equipment, although that might help. The occasional live stream or even simple how-to videos or interviews with influencers is usually enough to make you stand out from the majority of your competitors.

Get your content out there

If you’re relying solely on your website’s blog or your social media pages to publish content, you’re not casting as wide a net as you could be. Make it a goal to get published outside of these places. Submit guest posts to online magazines and newspapers that your audience is likely to encounter. Build relationships with influencers who can mention your brand in their blog posts or YouTube videos.

Be willing to experiment

Finally, find ways to experiment with your content creation. Not everything will work but some of your ideas will. One trend in content marketing that you can get ahead of is micro content marketing. Think one or two sentences sent via text as opposed to a several hundred word blog article or social media post. Micro content is a great way to offer your SMS subscribers value beyond the mobile coupons they’re accustomed to getting.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: netimperative.com/2017/08/cutting-clutter-creating-engaging-social-media-content/

Six Digital Marketing Trends Small Business Owners Need To Be Aware Of

As a small business owner, you know that on any given day, you will wear several different hats. Small business owners don’t have the luxury of hiring an in-house IT specialist or a human resources team. You often have to fill in for sick employees so you might be a cashier or an assembly line worker or a customer service agent all in the same day. It can be hard to manage your small business’s marketing needs when you can’t afford a content strategist, a social media marketer, and a website designer. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of six digital marketing trends you should be aware of since you probably don’t have time to stay on top of the ever-changing world of digital marketing yourself.

Mobile

Mobile devices are becoming an increasingly important part of our day-to-day lives and it’s the single most important channel into a prospective customer’s life. You need a mobile optimized website at the very least and you may want to invest in some in-app marketing as well since the average person spends several hours a day on mobile apps.

SMS

SMS is really just a subcategory of mobile marketing but it’s important enough to deserve a separate mention. It’s the cheapest and most effective mobile marketing channel thanks to SMS’s 98% open rate so it’s really a no-brainer.

Social media/video

Almost all social media platforms today have some kind of integrated video playback feature and nowadays, posts that are just words or pictures no longer cut it. You don’t need a huge, expensive video production team, but the occasional live stream can go a long way it boosting social media presence.

Influencers

As a small business owner, you probably can’t afford to hire Beyonce for a 30 second TV spot, you probably couldn’t even afford to pay her to mention your brand in a tweet. But that doesn’t mean you can’t pay for influencers. It may be a niche blogger or Youtuber who regularly reviews the kinds of products you sell. You may even be able to pay him/her with free products in exchange for a fair assessment of those products that will be posted in places where prospective customers will see it.

Personalization

It’s not enough to start of a mass email with your customer’s first name. You need to be gathering data on customer’s online behavior and segmenting your audience to provide a more relevant and personalized advertising experience.

Metrics

Finally, you need to have access to the metrics that can clue you into how effective or ineffective your various marketing efforts are. These metrics are often built into the platform itself whether it’s your business’s Facebook page or your bulk SMS provider so you can see how many people are seeing your posts, opening your texts, clicking on embedded links, and redeeming special offers.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: huffingtonpost.com/entry/5-digital-marketing-trends-for-busy-small-business_us_598b5e95e4b030f0e267c97a

A Closer Look at the Evolution of Chatbots

Chatbots are predicted to change the way business and customers interact. But what exactly are chatbots? They’re computer programs designed to simulate conversation with a human. Chatbots can speak with an actual voice, or they can be entirely text-based. Most of today’s chatbots are text-based programs that people can chat with on various messaging platforms like SMS (texting) or Facebook Messenger. To better get a sense for what chatbots are, what they can do, and what they will be able to do, it’s helpful to look at their evolution.

ELIZA: The first chatbot

The first computer program that could be termed a chatbot was ELIZA. ELIZA was created by MIT professor, Joseph Weizenbaum to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between man and machine. Ironically, ELIZA ended up demonstrating the exact opposite. Though ELIZA was fed scripts in order to “learn” how to form intelligent responses to statements or questions, ELIZA was not communicating from actual intelligence. Despite Weizenbaum’s insistence that ELIZA was not intelligent, the people who spoke with the computer program came to believe it was and often attributed emotions to the program.

Mobile digital assistants

Today’s mobile digital assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa are simply advanced versions of ELIZA. Like ELIZA, these digital assistants can simulate human intelligence and can even come across as having personality and emotions but they are only selecting set responses drawn from information stored online or within mobile applications. They are also programmed to give a number of humorous responses to questions that their developers predicted they would be asked by curious users. Like ELIZA, they are not truly intelligent.

Task-specific bots

We are now living in a time when the popularity of chatbots is exploding. The majority of chatbots being deployed across messaging platforms today are more advanced in some ways, and less advanced in others as compared to earlier chatbots. Today’s chatbots are more specialized to do a specific task such as booking travel, making dinner reservations, ordering pizza, or managing a person’s calendar.

Chatbots as digital friends

As artificial intelligence researchers discover the secrets of machine learning, natural language processing, and machine learning, they will be able to create more incredible chatbots that are capable of learning and developing intelligence. These chatbots of the future may be capable of building rapport with humans even forming emotional bonds. Businesses that can develop and use such tools will have a huge step up when it comes to customer service and all other business-customer interactions.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: entrepreneur.com/article/293439