Content marketing is nothing new, and while it's going to evolve into new formats and platforms throughout 2016, as it always does, but it's definitely not going anywhere. If anything, more and more people will jump on board, especially as more traditional ad formats continue to fall short or become exorbitantly expensive. People don't like to be sold to, and the techniques, which used to be secrets within advertising circles are now common knowledge, meaning that most people are savvy to ad techniques and ignore them all but completely. That said, just 'doing' content marketing is not going to get you very far. In fact, the number of blogs out there with tens or even hundreds of posts but which still have zero engagement is astonishing. The reason for this is that people love to jump on the bandwagon of content marketing, but very few take the time to learn how to do it well. If you want to know how people get hundreds of shares on their blog posts and drive real traffic, well, look no further: 1) Do it better than anyone else has There's a technique in content marketing coined by Brian Dean called the Skyscraper Technique. The idea is to find a topic someone else has written a good article on and which has been shared around a lot, and then write something even better. Like, really dig into it. If they wrote 7 tips on how to market on Instagram, you article has 52. The main reason people don't take this approach is that they are lazy, or they don't feel they have the time, but here's a secret: Creating 14 daily blog posts will lose out to one blog post that took 14 days to create, every time. It's simply a matter of being honest about what is good enough to be shared. If it doesn't blow you away, it's not going to do it to anyone else, either. 2) Promote even more than you write Once you got an epic piece of content, your job is far from over. In fact, many people recommend spending as much as two times as much time on the sharing and promoting of your blog post than you do on actually writing it. All of a sudden, you're only writing one blog post per month, but it's performing better and getting you more traffic than if you'd written several fire-and-forget pieces. People don't just find great content, especially when you're starting out, so you have to do everything you can to put it in front of their face. 3) Reach out to those who care (and who matter) Once you've got your blog post out in the world, get a hold of experts and those who have a following and who might be interested, and ask if they might be willing to share with their social channels. Now, here's the kicker: Make sure there's something in it for them. Working with influencers in your market is about leverage, so if that means you have to offer some free services or skillsets in exchange for a tweet, so be it. All of this is to say that if you want to have content that performs better than average, you've got to be willing to put in better than average time and effort and that's just true of anything, isn't it?
Category Archives: Blog
Snapchat For Business – Coming To The Mainstream
A year ago, or even six months ago, Snapchat was just a tiny blip on the radar of most marketers and entreprenerus. In fact, even that might be generous; many people who weren’t in Snapchat’s hyper-engaged teen and young adult demographic may not have even heard of the platform. If you aren’t even sure what Snapchat is yourself still, now’s the day to learn.
At its core, Snapchat is a mico-messaging app in which users can send photos, videos, or text notes to each other, view them for a set number of seconds, and then those messages self-destruct and are deleted.
Unsurprisingly, the app has been largely written off by older generations as a sorry excuse for a ‘sexting’ app. Those in the know, however, have caught on to the fact that Snapchat content is extremely easy to consume for users, and both the creation and the consumption of content is quick.
People like quick. Ironically, the fact that each individual message or publication can be consumed so quickly means that many young users use the app for hours on end (“I’ll just check one more message,” “I’ll just watch one more video,” etc. and the time flies by).
The best businesses are using Snapchat as the antithesis to Youtube, or Facebook, or their business properties where posts and content are more deliberate, planned, and highly edited and targeted. On Snapchat, you can literally record a video message by holding down your thumb for six seconds – there are no fancy editing tools.
This makes Snapchat the perfect platform for letting your customers and followers in on something “behind the scenes,” which is exactly what your competitors are doing. Now more than ever, consumers expect brands to be an extension of the people running them, and getting to know those people (or at least feeling like they have) can go a long way toward building brand trust and loyalty.
Even with its off-the-cuff nature, you still should put some planning into your Snapchat strategy. First, survey your customers and find out what they want to see – this is, of course, the most direct route to content that is going to connect with them.
Often times, inside hints and tricks, or just videos from around the factory/office, which might hint at company developments or new offerings that won’t be published for some time, can help your customers feel like they’re getting something exclusive. People like exclusive.
Aim to be consistent above anything else. Uploading a Snap every few hours and adding it to your ‘story’ will mean that people see you as someone who will regularly give them something interesting to look at. If you can add 3-6 Snaps to your Snapchat story per day, you’ll be on your way to consistency, at which point you can fine-tune the content down the road.
Snapchat gives you a simple tool to see how many views your updates receive as well, so you can gauge if your followers are taking the time out of their busy days to listen to what you have to say.
Avoid False Guru Status to Boost Credibility
Want to know what one of the fastest ways to kill your credibility is? To pretend to have it when you don’t.
It’s an unfortunate reality, but the landscape of online marketing has been invaded over the past decade by those claiming to be experts in things that they, to put it politely, aren’t. The ‘fake it ’til you make it’ bravado approach was actually wildly effective for a number of years, but the reality now is one in which potential customers are much more skeptical.
Not only are they wary of falling victim to people pretending to be something that they aren’t, they’re also realizing that much of the information that false gurus put behind a paywall is available free elsewhere on the web (indeed, the expertise of fakers doesn’t allow them to create much exclusivity based on genuine, helpful content that no one else is providing).
Enter: The transparency trend. Believe it or not, there are some people out there who are up and coming and have been killing it with their audiences even though they haven’t done a whole lot yet. Instead of pretending they’ve executed in one market or another before they really have, these players are instead simply sharing exactly what they’re going through at the time to their audiences. In a way, this approach levels the playing field and makes communications more genuine.
Over the past half decade, there has been an enormous shift from consumers wanting to be told what to do by brands, or at least being convinced that’s what they want, and their realizing that they can lead the discussion more than just have it fed to them. As a result, personal communications win, and honesty is an often sought but less often delivered trait when people go looking to something from someone else online.
For an example of the effectiveness of this approach, the Groove blog, the blog of a small remotely managed helpdesk software, has openly admitted that the number one driver of sales and awareness for their product has been their blog; the Groove blog epitomized transparency.
The company began under the premise of writing out everything they do to try and reach $500,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Ultimately, they’re a couple of years into their project, haven’t yet breached even half of their goal, and yet their posts are wildly popular. Why is this? Because the folks at Groove simply write about what they’ve done and a lesson they’ve learned each week, good or bad, success or failure.
They’re not pretending they have the software as a service game figured out, their not padding the numbers (or downright falsifying them), and they’re certainly not renting expensive cars for the day in order to take pictures with them in front of a mansion they don’t own – I’m looking at you, mid 2000’s internet marketing ‘gurus’.
So keep it honest, keep it open, and you might be surprised to find out that you actually end up making more with, well, less.
How To Use “Help A Reporter Out” For Your Blog Or Brand
Ever heard of popular PR and journalism tool “Help A Reporter Out”? If you’re not acquainted but you have a brand or expertise to market, this quickstart guide will give you the basics.
At its core, Help A Reporter Out, or HARO, is a platform to help connect journalists with sources. Users can register as either sources or media outlets – or both. For the purposes of this guide, we’ll be talking about using it as a source.
As a source, you’ll be able to sign up to HARO’s emails, which are sent out multiple times per day and include upwards of 100 stories that media outlets, from international news sites down to niche blogs, are working on.
The descriptions will call for specific experts or those with certain experiences to weigh in and share their advice, stories, and/or experiences. Clicking the reply link within HARO’s email will open up a new message window that, upon completion, will be sent off to the media outlet.
Responding to a call for sources is basically a pitch in which you can sell your brand’s story to someone who will publish a story about it. For example, you might find someone looking for B2B marketing experts for an interview. If you know about B2B products and write a great pitch to an outlet, they may publish your advice in their final piece. If this happens on a larger outlet, you can score some major exposure and credibility by being featured.
The great thing is that calls to action come in a number of categories, so even if you’re outside of the business and tech circles, there will be relevant lifestyle, fitness, travel, etc. prompts that you can respond to. You might not find anything in every email blast, but it’s easy to respond to a few relevant prompts per week.
A couple of tips:
1. Always be sure to deliver value in your pitch, and explain why the outlet’s readers are going to learn something from you. Never mention wanting your own exposure, instead focus on giving the journalist or outlet the best story and more useful information possible.
2. If a publication is listed as anonymous, try and feel out some details about the project in your first email to them to assess the value of being featured. That said, don’t be afraid of being featured in smaller projects, because these outlets are probably going to hustle to promote and squeeze every readership they can out of anything they publish.
The results of having your brand featured in a larger piece can be a huge boon for a small boon, and also help build credibility in your niche, as your input on a topic has now been published. Consistency is key with HARO; respond to every prompt that seems like a good fit, and eventually you’ll match up with someone who needs exactly what you have to offer.
Now get to pitching, good luck!
Using “Help A Reporter Out” To Find Experts
Help A Reporter Out, or HARO, is a PR and journalism platform. Journalists or users registered as media outlets can submit calls for sources for their story ideas, and experts and brands can pick and choose to email various prompts via an email newsletter that HARO sends out several times per day.
The platform is a powerful tool for journalists, but often ignored is its enormous potential for up and coming bloggers and content producers. For example, instead of faking your expertise on a topic and risking losing credibility, you can submit a call for sources to HARO’s newsletter and have external experts weigh in with their advice and stories.
Not only can you use this to write engaging profiles of one particular brand, you can also aggregate many responses to create a large, varied, content-rich posts that offer a range of perspectives and information that would be hard to replicate with your own knowledge or independent research.
If that’s not enough of a reason to convince you to reach out to sources via HARO for your next post, consider this: Recruiting just one source to be part of your story doubles your promotion team. Get another source involved? Boom, your promotional force just went up again.
Most of the time, anyone reaching out to be featured in a story will be looking for exposure, which means they will also be happy to tweet, share, and shout out about your post once it goes live and you send them a follow-up email with a link to it.
Sounds pretty great, right?
To get started, you’ll need to make an account on HARO and register as a media outlet. At this point, you’ll be able to submit a request for sources through their online form. In this form, you’ll be able to put your contact information, along with a title and description of the project, where you can list out any special requirements, exclusions of what types of pitches you do not want, etc. Be detailed here, so that you can pre-filter the responses you receive and not have to worry about being flooded with irrelevant information.
At the same time, leave your request open and general enough that people won’t be afraid to get ahold of you if they think they can offer an interesting twist on your topic – you never know what great story you might get the exclusive scoop on.
Above, be polite to those you interact with, and always follow up with requests. If you are known to ignore incoming pitches, people might start to ignore your requests when they see them in the HARO newsletter email, effectively shutting you out of sources who may not have been right for one post, but have something great to offer down the road.
When following up with offers that you are interested in using, make sure you’re clear in your expectations and ask for any clarifications or details that may have been left out of someone’s original pitch. Other than that, enjoy your newfound blogging resource!
Why You Should Break Away From Title Conventions In 2016
How many times have you read a lame “5 Ways to Improve Your Bottom Line!” title, clicked through, and the been disappointed to find the same old generic, rehashed information on the other side?
If you roll your eyes whenever these titles come up in your Facebook feed or from some marketer’s Twitter account, you’re not alone. Unfortunately for marketers looking to take the easy way out, millions of other people are feeling the same way and are becoming immune to the type of clickbait titles that have dominated marketing communications for way too long now.
In the near future (actually, now), no one is going to be clicking on cheesy, cringe-worthy headlines that mask lackluster, uninspired content. Instead, you should be working to standout with your titles in other ways to help draw people in without misleading them. Of course, step one is to make sure your content is up to par; no great title or thumbnail image can lead to the conversions you’re after if you don’t have great words waiting for readers on the other side. Be valuable, be useful.
Next, consider tossing out additional hyped up adjectives and adverbs for statistics. Many of the most successful content marketing triumphs to pop up in 2015 were case study types which could boast a specific change in a variable in their title.
For example, the popular Groove blog wrote an article with a title along the lines of “How we raised our traffic by 12,267% with zero advertising.” It’s just about as enticing as a marketing blog post title could possibly be because it gives you an exact statistic that you can hold the author to.
By the way, that blog post really is excellent and outlines a bunch of free traffic generation methods that the company used to, no kidding, give an insane multiple-thousand percent increase to their traffic numbers in an impressive amount of time.
You should consider also making your titles platform specific. For example, WordPress has plugins which allow you to display different title and description tags for certain social networks. For example, if you know that Facebook shows only the first 70 characters of a link title and LinkedIn shows 110, you can create custom titles that fit those exact lengths and make the most of you allotted characters on each platform.
Titles which are native (made for) a platform will without a doubt perform better in terms of clickthrough and reader interest. Futhermore, platform specific titles can help you create clever synergies between the titles and preview images shown on each network, which can go a long way toward making your homegrown marketing efforts look more professional and thought out – and that’s never a bad thing!
Basically, titles still need to deliver clickthroughs and intrigue readers, but the way in which they accomplish these goals is going to need to be more genuine and helpful going forward. Working together to eliminate crappy content and titling is just one way to make audiences less skeptical of content marketing, which makes things easier on the rest of us, doesn’t it?
The Elements Of A Successful Content Marketing Piece
Content marketing: The creation of written, video, audio, or other content by a brand with the goal of garnering an audience or attention and establishing authority within a market.
Content marketing has proven, over the last couple of years, to be outpacing its more traditional media buy and advertising counterparts in terms of engagement with audiences and, ultimately, conversions. That said, not everyone gets it right, and some people have yet to start actually creating a content marketing plan for their brand.
Today, we’re going to go over a few ways you can audit any content marketing piece before you put it out in order to give it the best chance of success.
Make sure your target audience really, truly cares.
One of the biggest mistakes that brands make with content marketing is that they use their content as an extended ad for their product or service. The content itself delivers little value to the reader and doesn’t actually set them up to be any more knowledgeable on a topic or in a better position to solve their problems than before they read it.
Content marketing is about giving, and as such you should always place yourself in your target market’s shoes while writing. Ask yourself questions like:
– If I was in this market, would this content be useful to me, or does it just sound like someone trying to convince me to buy something?
– Is this genuinely interesting?
– Is this written like it’s honest and coming from someone who is knowledgeable on the topic?
Can it make it big?
Take into considerations the elements that make a piece of content go viral or stand out from the rest in terms of how much it gets shared around with others. In content marketing, learning to leverage your existing audience to spread your work exponentially to their own contacts and followers is key. In general, a few key items will help you achieve this with a piece of content:
– A title that is intriguing and clicky, but stays true to the content that’s on the other side.
– A piece that shows so much work, care, and time that it stands out as a resource above all others. For example, this is why list articles super high counts (i.e. “120 ways to share your content!”) often get shared 1,000’s of times – hard work shows.
– Have you designed imagery for promotion? Posts with images catch attention and perform substantially better, so you’ll want to design thumbnail images for social sharing even if your content itself is not visual (a written piece, etc.).
Can you hustle?
Content marketing is a numbers game, and those numbers are, largely, hours. Not only will you put in hours to create content that resonates and delivers, you’ll need to think about your distribution strategy.
This means manually posting to Facebook groups, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc. Develop a distribution plan by starting broad and then narrowing in on the channels that are delivering results after a few releases. Most likely, this is a multiple month long process, but content marketing in general is playing the long game. Good luck!
4 Free Internet Marketing Tools You Should Already Be Using
Software tools that help marketers pop up every single year, and now at a far more rapid pace than ever before. Luckily more and more of these tools are taking on a freemium approach, meaning that marketers have access to better tools without spending much (or anything at all!).
Let’s take a look at some of the tools you can be using for free, right now, to boost your business.
Canva – an incredible free design software that purports to make anyone a designer. To be fair, it’s not far from the truth; Canva is a drag and drop editor filled with thousands of free images, backgrounds, and elements that you can piece together, resize, and recolor, along with text elements, in order to make some seriously snazzy logos, content images, and more.
You can use premium elements for $1 each in any design, but it’s fairly easy to create professional looking images without ever using a paid element. Plus, Canva allows you to upload your own photos and incorporate them into your designs, further eliminating the need to pony up any cash for your design needs.
Unsplash.com – In need of stock images? This site is one of the best royalty free, no BS sites you can find for stock images that are actually free to be used for any purpose – even commercial! Unsplash uploads a limited number of new images each week, but it’s been around for a while so there’s a healthy batch of material up there at this point.
Unsplash doesn’t have everything, however, and you might have trouble finding images of people in various scenarios (though there are many useable office/work environment type photos). Where Unsplash really shines is in environmental, landscape, and architectural images, so if those will work into your material, you’re definitely in luck!
Infogr.am – Inforgram allows you to quickly and easily create infographics for your business. You’ll be able to create a number of free infographics per account, and then you have to pay to create more. If you’re really strapped for cash, you could theoretically create more than one account to garner more free creations.
Infographics are a hugely popular information consumption format right now, and it’s no wonder why: Infographics are able to quickly and easily demonstrate complex concepts and figures visually. Because so much of the world learns well from visual input, and infographics keep people from having to skim through writing and research to pull out statistics and talking points, infographics can get shared like crazy.
Buffer – For many delving into social media for the first time for their brands, their barrier to entry is either not wanting to pay for software to manage many platforms, or for not having the time to even manage a couple on their own. Buffer is a platform that allows you to schedule social media posts across multiple channels at once, and you’ll be able to do it all for free if you’re only managing a few different platform. If you’re looking to manage a whole bunch of channels at once, however, you’ll need to pay a monthly subscription.
The 10 Ways Marketing Will Change In 2016: Part 2
In part one of this series, we took a look at the first five predictions for changes to marketing trends in 2016. Many of our first half of the list focused on changes in tone of voice and public perception approach, let’s check out some other angles in the next five:
6) Managing your entire marketing cycle will be cheaper and simpler
As so many new companies have sprung up on online, the demand for awesome business to business software as a service (B2B SaaS) products has skyrocketed. Platforms like Hubspot, Kissmetrics, Intercom, and more have sprouted up to help manage campaigns, test conversions, schedule content, and more.
This innovation will only get more competitive and result in better platforms and tools for brands. More than a few brands in 2015 likely saved themselves a boatload of money by using such tools to bring their marketing efforts in-house.
7) Advertising and branding agencies will change
Let’s be honest, this one has been happening for a few years, but we’re really going to start seeing the dinosaurs die out in 2016. Agencies who are still only working with legacy brands, betting on them not bringing in fresh blood who want to expand beyond traditional advertising, or who want to simply ‘service’ social media and new communication platforms to appease clients rather than to actually innovate, are going to have trouble.
8) Consultants will have to get more clever
In the same way that agencies will have to adapt or die, those proclaiming to be experts or gurus who can do branding on a freelance basis will have to expand their skillset. For the most part, such people are driven to stay up to date and won’t have a problem with this.
That said, there will no doubt be those who struggle to adapt and want to keep on writing the same types of sales pages and pitching the same type of creative to their clients. As these wane in effectiveness, so will their businesses.
9) Wearable format
In 2016, wearable devices like the Apple Watch (and whatever gets rolled out in the next few months) will probably move from fringe and toward mainstream. With mass adoption comes mass opportunity, so brands will need to look into how they can get themselves in front of users of these devices in a native format.
Native means working within screen size restrictions, limited app offerings, and forming partnerships with companies who have some hold in relevant markets.
10) Smart automation
As time saving and automation tools become more prevalent, brands will develop best practices for automating their marketing process. Please note: this does not necessarily mean automating everything you can.
In fact, some of the strongest brands are able to pick out situations where automation can still be genuine while saving time, and then also hone in on areas where interaction should be kept more authentic and manual. Perhaps even a new meta market of products who help brands identify which parts of their process they should automate will even arise.
The 10 Ways Marketing Will Change In 2016 : Part 1
Much like the rest of the world, marketing as an industry has seen massive year over year changes over the past half decade or so. As technology and communication take mega-leaps in shorter amounts of time than ever imagined, we have to adapt quickly to stay ahead of the effective marketing curve.
To help facilitate that, here are some of the biggest ways in which marketing will likely change in 2016.
1) Content marketing will eclipse paid acquisition
Already a prominent trend, content marketing is something smart brands have latched onto over the past year or two (and some even longer). The basic premise is that content, in the form of writing, video, audio, etc., should be put out by brands.
This content veers from traditional paid advertising by making sure that it actually delivers some value or utility to the reader, rather than just being an extension of an advertisement. Brands that practice content marketing are continually seen as in-touch and willing to help prospects, even before they hand over their money.
2) Live-streaming
If you’re not already on Periscope or Facebook’s live video streaming platform, look into it. It is now easier than ever to incorporate live streaming events into your marketing wheelhouse, and these can be excellent ways to stay connected with customers and come across as more authentic and human as a brand.
For example, many popular figures host Q&A’s. Consider bringing on well known figures or celebrities in your market as guests for live interviews, or starting a daily series to keep followers updated on what your office is cooking up, etc.
3) The “I” will die
Simply put: communication has long been two-way, and is now all but consumer controlled. That means that switching to another brand is as easy as a couple of taps on a screen, and that leaving a hilariously tarnishing review of a company that gets retweeted 13,000 times is a reality of the landscape we live in.
For this reason, brands who aren’t on board yet will need to catch up by getting comfortable with talking with their prospects, not at them. It’s a concept that some from the old school have trouble grasping, but it will have a huge impact on how relevant your brand is perceived as.
4) Tone of voice will experience a shift
As an extension of number 3, you’ll likely witness many brands trying to come across as more ‘fun’ or ‘playful’ in their social media and public communications. Some will miss the mark awkwardly, while others will score big wins through their community interactions.
In any event, look out for a shift in what is considered appropriate for
a corporate voice.
5) Advertising costs will fall
Alright, to be honest, this still might be a year or two away, but think about this: Ad networks like Google Adwords have hit a critical mass of competition, or are approaching it in many markets, where prohibitively expensive bids of $10+ per click are a reality in many industries. As such, people are getting more creative: They’re taking their dollars to social, or to content.
Eventually, older networks that have fallen out of favor will have lower bids, and those clever enough to use them and not look desperate might have an opportunity.