There are four key points to remember when it comes to effective content marketing: educate, entertain and engage.
The fourth point? If you focus on yourself, that’s the fourth point: extremely boring.
In this segment, David Gould of Vertical Measures goes over three common content marketing mistakes, and what you can do to fix them. It’s about three minutes, and if you’re a content marketing creator, it’s worth a look.
You’re creating and publishing consistent, engaging and educating blog content for your brand or business. The articles are short, concise, shareable on social media.
But is anyone looking?
There are 2 million blog posts published daily, according to Digital Buzz Blog. That’s 2 million efforts for a writer to get noticed. For a marketing pro, the post he or she publishes becomes a needle in an enormous haystack.
As a content creator or marketing pro charged with the numerous daily posts about your product, business or brand, a blog marketing strategy helps.
Here are some suggestions, courtesy of the Content Marketing Institute, to get potential customers talking about those few hundred words for the Web.
Your blog is a key component of your content marketing strategy. It should be seen by more than a few people. Follow these tips, and get the word out.
More than a third of the workforce worldwide will be mobile by 2015, and among the tasks workers in the “bring your own device” environment will find themselves doing is printing.
They’re using smartphones and tablets to connect to wireless printers with increasing frequency. By 2015, 50 percent of smartphone users will use the devices for printing tasks, and 58 percent of tablet users will do the tasks,
This infographic by IDC explains this further.
The importance of an effective headline is key to content creation, especially when the content is created for the mobile device.
An effective, informative headline helps generate the desired content marketing results: attracting, engaging, informing and keeping the reader interested on the online article or blog post.
More readers mean more interest in the brand, and potentially more customers and exposure.
This 2012 post from Content Marketing Today offers some tips on effective content headline creation by drawing inspiration from this classic newspaper headline written three decades earlier.
To summarize, headline content must:
Be brief in the description.
Lure the reader into the story.
Don’t give away too much of the story.
Be precise and descriptive with the words, without ambiguity.
Make it memorable.
In this segment created by Vidyard, Content Marketing Institute founder Joe Pulizzi offers tips to enterprise and small businesses on how to make the most of their content marketing efforts. If you’re in charge of your brand’s strategy, and want it to be successful, these next couple of minutes will be worth a listen.
Much of content marketing is about brand storytelling. The creator’s role is to weave compelling narratives about the product that connect with the customer, and inspires brand loyalty.
The latest company to take up this approach is Wells Fargo. The financial services company last month debuted its “Wells Fargo Stories” channel that features creative content about its employees, communities and brand values. Wells Fargo calls it an online magazine that shares its stories through written content, slideshows, blogs, infographics and videos.
“Wells Fargo Stories” focuses on the people in the company, the team members who work with small businesses, volunteer in the community, and promote the company’s vision.
This is content marketing that is consistent, shareable, engages and motivates, and goes beyond Wells Fargo’s status as a banking giant.
You can see for yourself how it works in this segment here:
Putting together a content marketing strategy for your company can be a significant task. Those charged with promoting and marketing the corporate brand have to take into account how to consistently produce high-quality, informative and engaging content with the resources they have.
Unless the content is outsourced, that means the existing staff must create the narratives or blogs or video segments and identify the best platforms where the investment will best pay off. It’s a lot of work, especially when staffing and budgets are stretched.
But turning to the crowd can help.
Companies can leverage crowdsourcing in their strategy to reach a target audience. Insights and ideas can be drawn from dozens, even hundreds, of contributors. When executed properly, it can play a pivotal role in content marketing efforts in these ways:
Fluff. It’s comforting in pillows, appealing in clouds and essential in marshmallows.
But when it comes to content geared toward communicating your brand message, fluff is the unnecessary stuff that can block the purpose of what you have to present. That can cost you customers, which is the ultimate goal.
It’s always a challenge to communicate what you have to say effectively and precisely, especially when it comes to marketing a product or brand. The temptation for those creating written content is to show how much they know by producing as much as they can.
Unnecessary words creep into the narrative, clichés work their way into the presentation, concise descriptions are replaced by wordy phases.
The fluff can obfuscate the message you wish to present of your business or brand, which is not what customers seeking to be informed and educated want.
The quality of the writing and how you deliver your point is key, rather than how much of it is written. Tight, concise writing is essential to reach out to those with limited attention spans and a multitude of online distractions.
It can be a task, but the goal is getting the job done with content that connects with your consumer audience, and doing it effectively.
The search engine is proving to be the most essential tool at the disposal of smartphone users who responded to a recent survey.
It’s what 
they turn to when they want to know about what restaurant to dine at, the retailer to make a purchase, how to get from Point A to Point B. And it almost always involves accessing good, informative and searchable content for the mobile device.
Research by the advertising and technology company Local Corporation, gleaned from an online survey of 1,294 mobile shoppers in March, found that 73 percent of customers use search engines like Google in their smartphones to do their research about a product.
Search engine results are also a top influencer in purchasing decisions, with half of those customers surveyed saying it helps them make a decision, and 42 percent saying they rely on ratings and reviews.
The use of apps and other websites continues to gain traction, according to Local Corporation. Thirty-three percent of those surveyed turned to companies’ mobile specific websites, and 24 percent accessed mobile apps.
As consumers use their smartphones more for online searches, companies will need to do more than rely on keywords or search terms to attract customers. It also means a commitment on their part to high-quality content.
Video content for a camera that’s favored by the extreme activity set tops YouTube’s Brand Channel Leaderboard.
YouTube launched, with little fanfare, a list of the top 10 highest performing, most engaging and shareable brand channels. It looked at which brands have the most watch time, repeat viewership, likes and shares, and other factors to determine which have the most active fan bases.
This from Google:
“As brands continue to blur the line between advertiser and creator, we want to recognize those brands that regularly publish content—paid or otherwise—to build an engaged fan base.”
GoPro is the No. 1 brand channel for March. Customers to its official site can narrow their search for merchandise like cameras, software, mounts and accessories based on activities like skydiving, rock climbing or wakeboarding. There’s even a bundle of products for those in the military.
Six Pack Shortcuts, No. 2 on the leaderboard, offers extreme exercise advice on how to get a ripped body and six pack abs. Interestingly, YouTube at one time suspended the account of the channel’s owner, fitness specialist Mike Chang, and blocked all the content. Google now says Six Pack Shortcuts creates content “based on who is responding to its videos to drive continued engagement.”
And the one you’ve probably not familiar with, unless you’re one of its fans? Rainbow Loom, known for its colorful rubber band bracelets.
Its introductory video has been viewed 1.6 million times, and Google says the channel has built a passionate fan base through its instructional videos and user-generated content.
The others that made the list:
Recent Comments