How to: Create a Content Strategy (only 652 steps!) By Ian Lurie This is a really, really, really long piece. There's no TL;DR version. That's because a content audit has a lot of steps. I've tried to break them down and explain each one, so that a writer who knows their way around a computer or a marketing geek who knows how to write can take this and do a complete audit. First, a content strategy is not an inventory or an audit. An inventory is a simple list. Inventories existing contentAnalyzes the competitionDraws conclusionsLays out a strategy based on those conclusions #1 is the most mechanically-involved task, because you have to grab a lot of data and mush it all together. #2 is the shortest. #3 and 4 are the most demanding (for me, anyway) because I have to suss out impossible-to-automate marketing stuff that's essential to success.
Before you start A few basic assumptions, and some sacred cows to slay: What you're auditing One of the team here at Portent read a draft of this and said, "This is actually a conversation audit! " Yikes. Editorial Content Calendar. 4 ways to optimize your web pages to increase conversions. At BoostSuite, I help passionate small business owners and web marketers like you with your digital marketing strategies every day. I’ve seen it all. I’m no stranger to the good, the bad, and the ugly. First off, what is a conversion? A conversion is the most important factor to the success of your online marketing strategy and goals. Second, what is a conversion funnel? It’s the process of getting visitors to your site and then using various marketing techniques to convert them into leads and/or customers.
Here’s a nice graphic from HubSpot: Whenever I first talk to any of our new users and try to get them on the path to web marketing success, I immediately take a look at their website to see if their pages have a couple of items that are crucial for increasing conversions. Immediately I check to see if they have a content management system (CMS) that allows them to add/edit content on their website. 1. Raleigh Produce Delivery Service | Company Name Produce Delivery 3) Use Calls-to-action. Visual Content Marketing: Capture and Engage Your Audience. Five big B2B content marketing mistakes. In 2011, marketers began saying that "content marketing is more important than advertising" and given the growth of content marketing in 2012, it would appear that they meant what they said. And not just in the consumer space. Although selling content marketing to leadership has been a challenge for some B2B marketers, the use of content marketing at B2B organizations is growing rapidly.
As B2B marketers become more familiar with content marketing specifically, best practices are emerging. But that doesn't mean that mistakes aren't being made. Here are five of the biggest. #1: Overemphasizing external distribution channels Distribution is crucial to any successful content marketing effort and for an obvious reason: great content can't deliver great results unless it finds its way into the hands of the right people. Unfortunately, many companies overemphasize external distribution channels. . #2: Not segmenting Segmentation is a big part of B2B content marketing. . #3: Dumbing the content down. Marketing Basics: 7 B2B content marketing tactics. 14 Tips To Source and Create Great Content For Social Media. A question I often hear is how do you create great unique content? What most people and companies don’t realise is that they have great content it just happens to be offline in Silos, files on computers that are waiting to be repurposed for online.
It can be interviews or press releases that can be edited, summarized or combined. There are presentations you have used for clients, articles you have sent to clients, information from your suppliers that is sitting on your computer, there are training videos that could be edited for YouTube, videos taken at conferences. The core foundation for your content should be initially a blog as part of your own website’s domain, this will help with creating links that will improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to help you “get found online”. A good part of this article is devoted to the best ways to utilize your content from outside your website. 5 Tips For Repurposing Off-line Content To On-line Content 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Use Inbound Marketing to Bring In More Qualified Sales Leads | Vab Media. An excerpt from a content marketing blog written for Honduran Joe, a coffee fundraising company, is a good example of these benefits. The blog isn’t about coffee fundraising at all; rather, it’s about the difference between two major types of coffee.
Content marketing involves providing useful and/or entertaining content. Posting to blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other sources several times per week might sound overwhelming. How can you maintain a constant stream of ideas for content creation? Here we describe four strategies that foster inspiration: Imagine your standard customers. Develop several detailed customer profiles and use them to create niche campaigns of content marketing. When creating a customer profile, ask yourself questions that identify needs and interests: Where do they spend time online? Want to learn more about your audience? You Need to Start Creating your Customer Persona What are their Pain or Problem Points? Align Content to the Sales Cycles 1. 2. 3. Beg, Buy & Borrow. 20 Ideas for Social Media Content That Engages. The cry of “Content is King” has been a rallying call for bloggers and on-line publishers for years. Creating and marketing your content is now as easy as typing text and uploading images and videos and then hitting the publishing button.
This has been facilitated by the advent of social networks and blogging software that facilitate fast efficient multi-media publishing. The reality is that everyone is now a publisher as social media has provided easy to use tools which has put a personal printing press in everyone’s hand. We are not only creating but sharing this content on desktops, laptops, ipads and smart phones to our Facebook and Twitter streams. The mobility of the smart phones has accelerated this publishing revolution that allows us to share anytime and anywhere as the impulse takes us. The more engaging the content whether it be video or text the more likely it is to be shared. The “Content” Explosion InformsEducatesSolves problemsEntertains The Thirst for Knowledge 1.Videos 2. 3. 4.
Content Marketing Checklist: 13 Things You Must Do Before You Publish Content. Www.toprankblog.com/pdf/29-content-marketing-secrets-ebook.pdf. Back to Basics: Defining Your SEO Strategy. Hey-oh! Rhea here and guess what? I’m supposed to leave for vacation in about six hours. I know I’m a business owner, what am I doing taking vacation?! Maintaining sanity, that’s what. We all need a break from our technology loop: Before I go I want to follow-up on several questions left in the comments of last week’s Whiteboard Friday. Frame a Purpose Statement We start with the most basic question.
Why does the business exist? The usual answer is—to make money! Yeah, we get it, we all want money, but there’s no difference between a bakery and a car insurance company if we look at business in such simplistic terms. So, step back and really think about this. At Outspoken Media, our answer looked like this: Our purpose is to help grow and protect businesses. Using the aforementioned examples, the bakery’s purpose may be to provide fresh, local artisan bread to their community. Set Website Goals Why does the website exist? Let’s look at that bakery again.
Awesome! It’s time to ask: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 10 Must-Have Templates for Content Marketers. Content Marketing Success: Developing a Broadcasting Strategy. More and more businesses today concentrate on content marketing in their efforts to convert prospects and deliver sales. And why shouldn’t they? Publishing helpful information online has several advantages that traditional advertising is missing: it offers the chance to explore new marketing methods that people don’t surf away from, it educates prospects in different niches, and (most important) it provides new interaction opportunities.
In this article, I will focus on choosing the channels where you can cast your content, and preparing the actual publishing process. Along the way, I will point out some online resources that I find helpful in implementing broadcasting strategies for content marketing. Play the Broadcasting Manager I confess I really love this game! What’s a broadcasting manager? A broadcasting strategy in a TV network contains three key elements: The ChannelsThe PlaylistThe Automation Machine Let’s go over them one by one and see how they fit in content marketing: Blogs.
Web Sites - How to Create a Successful Blog Editorial Strategy in Just Six Steps. Blogs are one of the most valuable content marketing tools that businesses have to engage with and educate their prospects and customers. But many businesses still aren't taking advantage of what is a great opportunity to directly share information and expertise. At my company, we encounter that issue all the time. Companies either don't blog at all or they don't create enough of the right kind of content in their blog. Why? Usually because they don't have a blog editorial strategy. A solid blog strategy will help you create relevant content on a regular basis to attract the people you are trying to reach and help your business convert those readers into customers. Here are six steps to creating a successful blog strategy that delivers results for your business. 1. Though this first step may seem obvious, many businesses cannot define their exact audience. 2.
Just as you have a reason for being in business, you have to have a reason for starting a blog. 3. 4. 5. 6. 20 Content Marketing Ideas for 2012. I know — just the idea of coming up with content marketing ideas is enough to instill fear in many small business owners. But why? As SMBs, we’re pros at using content as a way to attract customers and build word of mouth. We’ve been doing it our whole entrepreneurial careers! But we seem to forget this when the “content marketing” term is brought into the discussion. However, the idea of leveraging content marketing as a lead generation strategy doesn’t have to intimidate you. There are virtually an endless supply of content marketing strategies at SMBs’ fingertips. Here, I’ll start you off with 20. Below is just a handful (OK, a few handfuls) of content marketing ideas your business can implement and profit from: Create a free course on a topic related to your business and invite people in your neighborhood to attend.
See how easy that was? Www.copyhackers.com/downloads/samples/Copy-Hackers-Book-1-Sample-FREE.pdf. Content Marketing for Professional Services: Does It Cannibalize Your Business? | Content Marketing. March 27th, 2012 Guest post by Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute Joe evangelizes content marketing around the world through keynotes, articles, tweets and his books, Managing Content Marketing and Get Content Get Customers. If you want to get on his good side, send him something orange. In my second trip down to SXSW, I had the distinct pleasure of presenting with Jay Baer, my good friend, a CMI consultant, and one of the best social media minds in the game. The title of our session was, “Does Free Content Cannibalize Your Paid Consulting?
,” and it focused on content marketing strategies and tactics for professional services companies. As a good content marketing best practice, we’ve put together the highlights of the presentation below, along with the downloadable SlideShare version. Is Content Marketing Required for Professional Services Companies? “Technology is shifting the power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. How to Conduct Competitive Analysis to Step Up Your Content Strategy. When you ask marketers who their competitors are, they can rattle off a list quite quickly, and perhaps a few anecdotes about notable differentiators like product features, sales techniques, and site structure.
Maybe they'd like to know more information about them (say, their marketing techniques?) But that information is all kept pretty hush hush. Right? If you're looking to compete on inbound marketing techniques, you can actually find out quite a lot about your competitors by performing competitive content analysis. And if you're setting up or revamping your content strategy, doing a deep dive of this nature is important to not only orient yourself in your market, but to also determine what opportunities you have to easily outperform your competitors with content -- and where you need to put in more effort and resources. Step 1: Find Where Content Lives Begin by performing a website audit of your competitors with the aim of determining where content is housed on their site.
101 Web Content Ideas, Tips and Resources. Sensational Shortcuts and Tips from a Copywriting Expert It used to be that we could usefully add content to our sites simply by writing a large volume of articles, each optimized for the keywords of our choice. Not any more. In a post-Panda world, in addition to applying our optimization and link building skills, we now have to focus more on quality, and a little less on quantity. As if that weren’t enough of a shift, we also have to factor in the fast-growing influence of social media. Our new content needs to be highly shareable. Shareable content not only gets us in front of new readers, but also helps generate strong social signals to improve our search engine results.
This means taking a whole new look at how we create and publish our web content pages. For years, businesses have been using free content to drive traffic to their websites and put money in their pockets. Yet, you don’t want to bombard your readers with a bunch of fluff. “But I don’t know what to write about!” Right away. Six Weapons to Create Credible Content - Fathom Online Marketing Blog. What separates a good salesman from a bad salesman? How about credibility? If a salesman lacks credibility, you will not consider buying from him. Right? Well, the same is true when it comes to the content on your website. The truth is that there is no such thing as a natural-born salesman. Sound a little overwhelming? Reciprocity: The concept is simple enough. And it is that simple. About Robert Hosler Robert Hosler is an SEM Copywriter at Fathom.