Quality vs. Quantity? Content Marketing Pros Pick Sides While attending Content Marketing World (#CMWorld) in Cleveland this week, we had the opportunity to attend an all-star panel discussion called, Quality vs Quantity: How Much Content is Enough? How Good Does it Have to Be? The content marketing pro panelists included: The panel, (and this was no shy panel), was moderated by Michael Brenner from SAP. They passionately, and at times, heatedly debated content marketing topics including the hot topic as to whether quality vs. quantity is most important. Quantity vs. Joe: Quantity. Marcus: Quantity. Heather: Quality. Rob: Quality. What is the main objective of content marketing? Rob: We recently surveyed 200 marketers, and they replied that engagement, then brand awareness followed by lead generation are the main objectives. Heather: The power of content marketing is lead generation. Joe: Marketing’s job is to get the sales team enough leads and let them sell. Should Content Marketing Be Forced to Prove ROI (Return on Investment)? Marcus: Yes.
Social Sharing, How to Inspire Fans to Share Your Stories Do you use stories to market your business? Are you wondering how you can get people to share your content? To learn how to inspire your fans and followers to share your stories via social media, I interview Simon Mainwaring for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing. The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting). In this episode, I interview Simon Mainwaring, author of We First: How Brands and Consumers Use Social Media to Build a Better World. Simon shares the importance of tapping into the power of your fans to share your story. You’ll learn how you can create a story and the kind of content you need to use to succeed. Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below! Listen Now Social Sharing Why did you start your company?
Pinterest Promoted Pins, This Week in Social Media Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week? Pinterest Tests Promoted Pins: Pinterest experiments with ads as its traffic moves from the web to mobile and will be ”promoting certain pins from a select group of businesses.” Pinterest says promoted pins will be tasteful, transparent, relevant and improved based on your feedback. Pinterest Makes Pinning Smarter: “Now when you click the Pin It button for browsers, you’ll see the images look a lot closer to how actual pins appear on Pinterest. Check out the new features for the Pin It button. Facebook Tests Easier Way to Watch Video: “Now when you see a video in your news feed, it comes to life and starts playing. Videos on mobile will also be easier to watch in the coming weeks. "To control which ones you see, go to the Account tab and tap Settings." Here’s some upcoming news to follow: inShare236
6 Creative Ways to Use Embedded Facebook Posts Would you like more people to see your Facebook posts? Have you used Facebook’s new feature to embed posts on your website or blog? Embedding Facebook updates on your website can help you increase visibility and engagement. How can you creatively use embedded posts as a part of your Facebook marketing strategy? Let’s find out! Here’s How It Works Twitter isn’t the only embeddable social media. You can embed most public posts from a personal profile or a page. Locating the Facebook embed post option. When you click on this, you’ll get a popup showing how the post will look and the code to use. Example of embed code. The result? As of now, you can only embed public posts from profiles and pages. Unfortunately, you can’t embed public posts from within groups or comments on a Facebook post. And your ability to embed posts depends on the privacy settings used by the person who created the post. Here are six easy ways marketers can use Facebook’s embedded posts. #1: Demonstrate Social Proof . . . .
120 Marketing Tactics for New Blogs [Infographic] Millions of brands are now incorporating their traditional plans in their online marketing campaigns. The need to further reach out to their potential customers is the motivation of modern marketers to look for effective ways on how they can connect and engage with their targeted audience. Blogging is one of these cost-efficient, proven and tested ways for a successful online marketing campaign. It offers several benefits such as user interaction (comments, shares), customer acquisition and higher rankings on SERPs given that search engines favor fresh over old content. However, one of the biggest challenges of aspiring bloggers today is how they can promote a blog that is new or doesn’t get any traction since they launch their websites. Today, I want to share with you an infographic that covers the basic and advance tips on how to promote your blog.
How to Use Google+ for Social Media Contests Is Google+ part of your marketing strategy? Are you looking for creative ways to run contests and giveaways on Google+? Although there are restrictions on using Google+ for contests, there are ways for you to promote your contests successfully on Google+. Interestingly, most brands and businesses on Google+ aren’t taking advantage of this opportunity, and they’re missing out. In this article, you’ll discover how three brands leverage Google+ as a core component of their social contest strategy and the keys to their success. Google+ Contest Rules Running contests, giveaways, promotional offers, etc., has become a staple part of online strategy for business owners and marketers. They’re used to stimulate engagement, build community, encourage user-generated content, create a unique experience and increase brand awareness. First let’s look at the rules. Be sure to carefully read Google+ Policies & Principles. For many people, that’s a show-stopper right there. #1: Ask for Compelling Experiences
5 Ways to Sell With Social Media Do you want to convert your fans and followers into paying customers? Are your social activities working? In this article I’ll show you 5 simple ways to tweak your social media updates for better sales conversion. Some social media updates can go further toward bringing in sales than others. And they can do this without detracting from the spirit of social media. Some social media updates can help with sales more than others. #1: Incorporate a Clear Call to Action Your customers and fans visit your social media pages for a variety of reasons, but generally speaking, they want to do something or learn something. Some people are looking for information about your company, some are looking for details about products and services, some want access to special deals and coupons, some want to see if you have any contests or promotions running and some may be looking for expert tips and how-to tricks. If you don’t give them what they’re after, they won’t return. #2: Convey a Sense of Urgency
Amp Up Your Content Marketing (21 Tricks You Need) Your content marketing must be able to break through the almost 4 zetabytes (or a billion gigabytes) of digital information that, according to IDC via KPCB, will be created and shared in 2013 and is expected to almost double by 2015! The average person consumes 10.7 hours per day of content. To cope with this information explosion people select high value information from their family, friends, bosses, co-workers, social media connections and other sources including you. Your competition is no longer just other businesses selling the same product. It’s everything competing for your prospect’s attention coming from a variety of different sources including mobile devices and real life. 21 Content marketing tips and tricks But fret not, here are 21 tips and tricks guaranteed to rock your content marketing by breaking through the clutter to grab your audience’s attention. Set content marketing goals. Offer useful content at every purchase step. Don’t wing content creation! Related Articles
Content Marketing and Personal Branding An online personal branding strategy should include a content marketing component because it allows you to show your expertise. However, many people question how to effectively use content marketing for personal branding. Here are six tips that can help: #1: Answer your audience’s questions You don’t want to produce content marketing for the sake of content marketing. Instead, you want to produce content marketing that positions you as a problem solver – answering your audience’s biggest questions. Keep a running list of these questions, and use these topics as the basis for your content marketing strategy. #2: Don’t use content marketing to sell to your audience The whole idea of content marketing is to produce high-quality content for your audience without selling to them. Content marketing is a lead generation tool. #3: Consistently use content marketing Content marketing can be hard work, and that’s why many people abandon it after a while. #4: Vary your content marketing efforts
The Ultimate Guide for Blog Post Promotion If you have been blogging for a little while or have been involved in any type of content marketing, you know Content is not king if nobody can see it. If you surf around the blogosphere a little, you’ve probably noticed 2 types of bloggers, one that believes in publishing content everyday and one that believes in spending less time producing and more time promoting. Well, I know very successful bloggers on both sides of the spectrum (so I’m not going to start a debate on that), but you can always count on one thing: they promote the hell out of each piece of content. But what exactly does that mean? Bloggers usually ask these questions: How do I get attention? We often talk about content promotion but, what does that mean exactly? Say hello to Kristi Hines… I don’t exaggerate when I say that I stumble into Kristi’s content every week, not always from her own blog, but I always do. Hear me out! Why Kristi I never met Kristi in person but I’ve been following her for a few years.