Five Mistakes That are Holding Your Content Marketing Back

Content marketing can be an extremely effective and powerful marketing tool when it’s used right. But for many businesses, content marketing ends up draining marketing funds without producing any measurable results. If you’ve started content marketing and have yet to see results from it, chances are you’re making at least a few of the following mistakes.

You’re not using the right tools

If you have a smaller business and you or an employee is trying to create and share content all alone, you’re not going to be as effective as you could be without the right tools. Platforms like HootSuite, Zoho, Buffer, Active Campaign, MailChimp and BuzzSumo are easy to use and can help content marketers automate some of the processes involved in creating and sharing content. They can also give additional insight into the effectiveness of various content channels and what competitors are doing.

You’re not promoting it

The disembodied voice in Field of Dreams that tells Kevin Costner’s character “If you build it, they will come” clearly didn’t have any experience in marketing. Business owners of all people should know that simply having a great product or service doesn’t guarantee success. The same goes for content marketing. First-time content marketers often think that if they’re publishing good content, people will come seeking it. While some might accidentally stumble across it while searching for keywords that are in a particular blog article or YouTube video, most potential content consumers will never see your content if you don’t promote it. Your existing customer base is a great place to start. Use existing marketing channels like SMS or email that you’re already using to stay in touch with your most loyal customers and encourage them to check out your company blog or your YouTube channel or your Facebook page or any other platforms you’re using to share content. They in turn can share your content with their friends and family that they think might be interested and they can be excellent (and free) advocates for your content.

You’re not testing and adjusting

If your content marketing efforts aren’t working in their current form, it’s not the end of the world. You can make adjustments. But you won’t know which adjustments are working and which ones aren’t if you aren’t keeping a close eye on the metrics as you experiment. Create multiple landing pages and see which ones lead to the best conversion rates. Do some A/B split testing with different headlines to see which ones attract the most clicks.

Write up a few different versions of opt-in forms to see which ones get you the most SMS or email subscriptions. Getting permission to text or email people directly gives you another channel for sharing content with those people. Never stop testing and adjusting; your content strategy can always improve.

You’re not striving for high quality content

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that people aren’t going to keep reading/viewing the content you’re sharing if it’s not particularly good. Every single minute, another 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.

Every day millions of new blog posts are published online. Most of that content is mediocre or flat-out terrible. You can greatly increase your chances of people following your content channels if you take a lot of pride in the creation of content. Promotion of content may get you a lot of unique visitors but it won’t get you a following unless you’re publishing content that is high quality. High quality is a difficult term to define but the easiest way to put it is that your content should be offering real value to people who view or read it.

You’re not studying the competition

The effectiveness of your content marketing will depend in large part on what your competition is doing, and more specifically, what you’re doing to differentiate yourself from the competition. However niche your industry, there are other companies that are in it and doing content marketing and their audience and your target audience probably have a lot of overlap. Keeping an eye on your competition can help you see what they’re doing content marketing-wise to be successful and it may give you some insight into something they’re not doing that you can do to entice some of their audience to follow your brand.

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Source: entrepreneur.com/article/293197

Seven Elements Every Inbound Marketing Campaign Needs

In recent years, outbound marketing (when businesses tried to cold call or reach out in some other way to potential customers) has taken a back set to inbound marketing (where businesses focus on offering value and letting customers come to them). Part of it is that consumers today are savvier and inherently suspicious of people trying to sell them something. Today’s average consumer prefers to seek out the product or service they need themselves. The following seven elements are all things your business’s inbound marketing strategy will need to succeed.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Long gone are the days of flipping through phonebooks to find local businesses. Search engines are the new gatekeepers in the world of business and your success will directly correlate to how far up or down the search results page your business is. It should be every company’s goal to be at the very top of the search results page. One option is to target specific keywords and pay to make sure your website is listed in the sponsored search results at the very top. But the most important way is to have a solid understanding of how these search engines’ algorithms work to prioritize certain websites over others so that you can increase the odds of being at the top of the list.

Social Media presence

After search engines like Google, social media platforms are the next place people go to find local businesses. Social media is no longer just for friends and family to stay connected. It’s a great way for businesses to stay in the public eye and interact with customers on a daily basis. You need to make it easy for customers to find you across all of the relevant social media platforms.

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing

Though PPC could be considered outbound marketing since you’re paying to place ads, it has some overlap with inbound marketing since you’re usually trying to place those ads on influencer blogs where your ideal customers are already looking for info relating to your business’s industry.

Excellent landing pages

Whether they’re clicking on a link in an email or text message, clicking on a link from an affiliate site, or finding you on Google, when they click on that link to get on your website, the landing page needs to keep them from leaving. A good landing page will be rather minimalistic usually containing just one key call to action that you need to get them started on the path to eventually purchase and become a customer.

A good content strategy

A good content strategy is at the heart of an inbound marketing campaign because it’s where you’re offering value to your potential customers and asking for nothing in return. The goal of content marketing is to take the time to produce high quality, relevant, and valuable content that people will want to seek out and see more of in the future. You want people to subscribe to your blog and newsletters, and to go to you when they want an opinion from good authority about a given subject.

Email marketing

Through email marketing, businesses can compile a database of loyal customers who have given their permission to receive regular correspondence with a business. It’s a great alternative to printed mailers and newsletters and can be a great content marketing channel and coupon distribution method.

SMS (text message) marketing

Like email marketing, text message marketing (or SMS marketing) allows businesses to build up a loyal customer base. While it’s more expensive per message than email, it’s also much more effective because of the significantly higher open and click-through rates. SMS can be used to distribute mobile coupons as well as micro content, order status updates, appointment reminders, and any time sensitive information that a business might want to communicate with their most loyal customers.

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Source: forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/09/13/six-key-elements-of-an-effective-inbound-marketing-strategy/#131bdc88326f

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.

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