Amanda Milligan is the marketing director at Fractl. Throughout her career, she’s managed the creation of 200+ content campaigns, led strategy for 20+ clients, and run a 30-episode podcast, "Ask Amanda About Marketing." She spoke at 2019 SMX Advanced and served as the keynote speaker at Danaher’s 2018 Digital Marketing Summit. Her content marketing advice has appeared in Forbes, Content Marketing Institute, MarketingProfs’ Marketing Smarts Podcast, CMO, and more. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Many marketers talk about creating valuable content.
What does it mean for a piece of content to have value? If your content offers value, is it guaranteed to succeed?
The short answer to the latter question is: No. A lot of factors play into success. But you’re more likely to reach your goals if you first vet your content ideas.
Use this checklist to confirm which ideas are worth pursuing.Continue Reading
Topical content has advantages, but it also can trip you up.
With content focused on trending topics, you can have an audience primed to find the subject matter valuable, which will more quickly lead to higher views and shares. But the trade-off is investing your time to create content that could more quickly become irrelevant.
Great ideas can lead to successful content marketing.
But from what I hear from many of my peers, getting management support for their great ideas can be tough.
That’s why I ask the same question of every guest at the end of their interview for Fractl’s podcast: What are the biggest mistakes people make when pitching for content marketing buy-in?
You’re staring at a blank document. It’s an intimidating moment because you have a beast of a piece to execute.
How you do write something to make it comprehensive and compelling?
It’s an age-old question, but based on my content marketing experience, you should ask another question first.
As you know, a lot of content exists about content marketing. It’s not uncommon for people to wonder how to distill everything they see and hear into action.
That’s why Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, recommends that people jot down one key takeaway from every presentation they see. You can apply the same tip to every article, infographic, webinar, video you consume to advance your knowledge and expertise in content marketing.
We are in the era of the “silence, brand” meme. And rightfully so.
This shoddy-looking, brand-mocking meme gained traction as more brands launched cause marketing campaigns on social media around topics they’ve never spoken on. People are seeing this less-than-authentic content as a stunt to pander to the masses and make more money.
People on social media are creating content, like the “silence, brand” memes, to tell brands to stop talking about topics outside of their scope of knowledge or relevance.
Earlier this year, Matt Cutts announced that guest blogging has, essentially, gone to the dogs. This condemnation was a big step toward filtering out low-quality marketing efforts in our industry, but for content marketers who are already focused on doing things the right way, this announcement should have little effect on their strategies.
That’s because real, credible content marketing revolves around creating high-quality content and building relationships with publishers who can benefit from that content — it’s not about being spammy, spinning articles, or doing anything and everything possible to get links. Still, sometimes even creating quality content simply isn’t enough. With the content explosion occurring online right now, what you produce can’t just be great, it has to be epic content — the right information, placed in the right publication to target the right audience at the right time.Continue Reading
