Aaron Agius is an experienced search, content and social marketer. He has worked with some of the world’s largest and most recognized brands to build their online presence. See more from Aaron at Louder Online.
Planning your annual content audit is something most marketers are hard pushed to get excited about. Audits take time, they’re tedious and, frankly, they’re dull as ditchwater.
They’re also extremely important. Given how integral content is to the health of your brand, your visibility online. and your overall sales and marketing, you owe it to your business to keep your content in good working order.
If you don’t distribute your content smartly, you’ll never achieve your brand’s content marketing goals.
But how do you know what are the best channels? This succinct guide outlines which distribution options work well based on your goals and audience.
First, though, you must know two things – who the content is for and what it’s intended to achieve. Knowing your audience members’ intent allows you to craft content that will resonate with them. Knowing the goals of the content lets you identify the purpose of the content (i.e., call to action) for your company as well as for the audience. Both are essential to selecting an appropriate distribution method.
In July 2017, I wrote Hacking Your Buyer Personas: The Only 3 Questions You Need to Ask. In it, I shared a stat from IBM’s THINK Marketing blog – “63% of consumers say they would think more positively about a brand if it gave them content that was more valuable, interesting, or relevant.” I think that thinking still stands strong.
Persona-based marketing is key to success in many industries.
What was most interesting about that 2017 post were the comments.
I still believe the original article is valid and useful, but it isn’t appropriate for all audiences or situations. One size does not fit all.
Continue Reading
There’s a crisis in consumer trust. At least that’s the word in the research.
The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer revealed that only 48% of the U.S. population trusts business as an institution (a 10-point drop from 2017).
Yet, brand trust is one of the biggest factors in consumers’ purchasing decisions.
According to PwC’s Consumer Insights Survey (2018), 14% of respondents put trust as their No. 1 reason for choosing a retailer. “Trust in brand” was the second most frequently cited reason for purchase decision-making.
Over 80% of people say they prefer to watch a live video than read social media posts, and four in five say they prefer to view a video from a brand than to read a blog, according to a survey from Livestream and New York Magazine.
Rapid advances in AI technologies mean marketing automation is no longer optional. It’s a mainstay of modern marketing.
Not all content marketing tasks can or should be automated. No matter how far AI advances go, software will never replace a human for crafting an insightful and meaningful blog post.
But as you go through your daily content tasks, it’s worth asking, “Can this be automated?” Chances are, many of them can.
User-generated content is powerful because it taps into people’s inherent desire to be recognized and appreciated.
When your brand shares something a customer or fan created, that external recognition not only strengthens the customer or fan’s affinity with the brand, it encourages that person to share the content further with his or her friends (and your brand benefits vicariously).
Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing yet produces almost three times as many leads. It’s easy to see why 89% of B2B marketers use content marketing as part of their strategies.
However, executing an effective content marketing program is no simple task. It requires a skilled team and a well-run process. To help you build and operate an elite team of editors, strategists, writers, videographers, and designers, follow these tips curated from 13 marketing experts.
Most companies that are successful with content marketing typically employ a skilled team of strategists, editors, writers, and designers. You can achieve a lot with a small team but as it grows you may benefit by making a developer your next hire.
For more complex projects, you need someone with technical knowledge, which often has meant leaning on your IT department. However, content production becomes far more streamlined when you have a developer on hand at all times.
A good developer is passionate about testing and understands conversion rate optimization, which is essential if you’re serious about creating content that not only engages but also improves the company’s profits.
There’s something to be said for thorough, extensively researched buyer personas.
When you’ve taken the time to answer 150 questions about your target customers, there’s no way the content written for them and the way you market to them won’t resonate.
The data backs this up. Katie Sweet, writing for IBM’s THINK Marketing blog, shares some insight that proves how important understanding your customers is to your marketing campaign’s success, including this statistic: 63% of consumers say they would think more positively about a brand if it gave them content that was more valuable, interesting, or relevant.Continue Reading
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