Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

But then there’s the whole obsession now with tying content to revenues—in other words, tracking whether people who are consuming your content will eventually buy something from you, and putting a hard number on each piece of content you create. Do you think that’s misguided? Oh, I think there’s no question it’s misguided. It’s been shown over and over again to be misguided—that in a world of zero marginal cost, being trusted is the single most urgent way to build a business. You don’t get trusted if you’re constantly measuring and tweaking and manipulating so that someone will buy from you.

I don’t have any problem with measurements, per se; I’m just saying that most of the time when organizations start to measure stuff, they then seek to industrialize it, to poke it into a piece of software, to hire ever cheaper people to do it.

There are constantly trends and fads on the Internet, and people make a good living amplifying them. But I think that industrialized content marketing is one of those fads, and it will end up where they all do: petered out because human beings are too smart to fall for its appeal.

Most of your content is getting lost in the shuffle. Recycle it! Let the customer’s social activity tell you what they prefer. Engagement in social is good, but not if that’s all you get. Some top brands have made the transition to acting like publishers with dedicated internal and external teams cranking out content.

Top tactics used by savvy publishing brands are: Storytelling – high quality engaging content on an going basis Infographic Creation – relevant lists and how to’s Visual content Marketing – compelling visuals eBook Creation – great for lead generation eMailer Personalization – targeting with relevance and being the information / education source content Curation within an Industry – keep people coming to you because you find what’s hot and important to your customers, making it easy for them to keep current Webinars / Pod Casts / Google Hangouts – establishes authority Slide Share Presos – extends your corporate social graph and thought leadership Case Studies – SEO value and high share currency Videos to Motion Infographics – video is growing

Brands have a need for smart content routing and unique displays which enable them to maximize customer engagement and experience at every touch point, increasing site participation, and garnering higher social share just begs to get fracked.

Research from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs indicates Content marketers with a documented strategy are: Much more likely to consider themselves effective at Content marketing Far less challenged with the many aspects of Content marketing Able to justify why a higher percentage of the marketing budget should be spent on Content marketin

Consider documenting one or more of the following goals as a starting point for your strategy: Improve brand awareness Increase engagement Generate more website traffic Expand the email list Increase marketing ROI Achieve higher customer retention, loyalty and referrals

A buyer persona reveals what prospective customers are thinking and doing as they weigh their options to solve a problem.

A solid lead generation strategy does both, Craig Rosenberg, author of the blog Funnelholic, told me. The appetite for content online is insatiable so marketers would be wise to indulge the public with registration-free content, Craig says. “I do believe that if people are addicted to content without the reg-path and you path stuff, it better be remarkable.” Rosenberg says the “vast majority” of your marketing funnel should be free without asking potential clients for personal info. Save the registration forms for further down the funnel where more research-heavy content like whitepapers resides.

Chris Jablonski, author Emerging Tech blog on ZDNet, who provided the following formula: 10% to 20% fully gated content, 20% to 30% name and email only, and 50% to 70% completely free.

As might be expected in a difficult economy, lead generation topped all digital budget categories with almost 27% followed by display/banner at just under 20% and search at almost 19%.   As to what is driving digital media investments in 2012, audience composition, ROI and measurement capabilities, audience reach, and data targeting were selected by more than three-quarters of the respondents.By a wide margin, click through rate is the most important factor in campaign success with cost-per-engagement and interaction rate almost equal in importance.

Content marketing, which includes white papers, case studies, videos, custom websites, video and white papers, is among tech marketers’ top five spending priorities for 2012.  Led by collateral at 71%, followed by webcasts/virtual events at 61%, videos at 59%, research at 55%, and articles/features at 54%, marketers are investing in a wide variety of Content marketing or custom programs.  Agencies are much mo

s for social media, YouTube and Facebook lead all platforms with LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter not as popular. Among BtoB respondents, 53% found social extremely/very valuable for finding relevant technology content on the Web, which is double the 2010 figure.  Not surprisingly, 18- to 34-year-olds are most active with social media.  According to all users in the IDG survey, 60% rely most on tech sites, 46% peers or colleagues, and 43% independent tech journalists/bloggers.

Google +1s are more highly correlated with search rankings than any other social factor, including Facebook likes/shares and Tweets.

“We have a lot of our clients whose titles are actually changing from SEO Manager to Content Strategist,” Dotterer said. “Search engine optimization sounds like you’re doing something to the engines themselves, but what you’re really doing is optimizing online Content. You optimize it by changing the Content you’ve already created to better fit the voice of the consumer. You also optimize by finding the gaps in the Content so we can create more.”

The importance of content creation has encouraged more companies to get their SEO, social and creative teams more involved in content strategy,

The single-most engaging, and simple, content marketing strategy is to create a reason and method for your audience members to supply content. Whether you ask them to submit photos using your product or you’re posting an engaging question of the week and aggregating answers for a roundup blog post, you’re building in the emotional trigger: they are the content. When someone sees their own photo, their name and contribution, they share like a proud parent. It’s like your own “easy button” for creating engaging content.

“How Much Do You Open the Kimono: Does “Thought Leadership” Cannibalize Your Ability to Monetize What You Know?”

hey create content for the (estimated by Eloqua) 85% of the market that doesn’t know who they are, instead of the 15% that do. This is a key finding, as most content is targeted to mid and late funnel thinking and objection overcoming, rather than top of the funnel awareness building. To that end, Eloqua often invests in content that’s not particularly related to their actual business.

45% of B2C marketers have a dedicated content marketing group in their organization. 69% are creating more content now than they did one year ago. The use of blogs dropped from 72% last year to 67% this year; the biggest increase in tactic usage has been for branded content tools (from 37% to 47%). B2C marketers are using, on average, 7 social media platforms this year, compared with 6 last year. 71% of B2C marketers use print or other offline promotion, making it the paid method they use most frequently to promote/distribute content; yet only 46% of them say it’s effective. The method they find most effective is search engine marketing (57%).

90% of consumers said that authenticity is important when deciding which brands they like and support - up from 86% in 2017. And marketers understand how much authenticity matters, with 83% saying authenticity is very important to their brands, and 61% believing authenticity is the most important component of impactful content.

92% of marketers believe that most or all of the content they create resonates as authentic with consumers. Yet the majority of consumers disagree, with 51% saying less than half of brands create content that resonates as authentic.

While consumers are 2.4x more likely to say UGC is most authentic, when compared to brand-created content, marketers are 2.1x more likely to say brand-created content is most authentic in comparison to UGC.

Having Google Authorship allows the original author to claim dibs on original content; however, according to Mark Traphagen the acclaimed Google+ guru (he really is), there is nothing in place with Google + right now that protects any writer from content scraping.

it doesn’t prevent someone from copying your content, just wouldn’t allow them to outrank you for it. I suspect we will have to wait for implementation of Author Rank for that to be fully in effect,” said Mark in a Google+ thread with Neal, Frank Strong, and me.

Neal said in a recent G+ thread, ” I still recommend every blogger to at least include one internal link in each of their blog posts so that if their content does get copied, and it’s often copied as part of blogs automatically importing content through RSS feed manipulation, that at least you get a back link.“

Many platforms and tools (Buzzsumo, Traackr, LittleBird, Tracx, Klout, etc.) try to identify and quantify influencer metrics such as: Relevance Reach/Audience Quality Engagement Activity

when a brand is working with an influencer the perceived potential (“I have 18 million followers!!!”, etc…) of the influencer to create great content and move an audience has surprisingly little to do with how well they perform at attracting an audience to their branded content.

We have found the most under-appreciated relationship is the third leg of the triangle: the relationship between the author and the brand, which are driven by both tangible rewards (fairness, upside) and intangible motivations (autonomy, reputation, and mastery).

Another way to get shared by influencers in your field is to research which sites they visit frequently. Then either guest post for one of the sites or pitch an article about your company to people who already write for it.

Involve influencers in the creation of a piece of content, and they have a vested interest to help promote it. Do an interview with a targeted expert, request a guest post for your blog or get a quote for an article you’re already writing.

Take time to research, write, edit and fact-check articles. Shift your thinking away from quick fixes and ideas that have probably already been done. Instead, come up with unique concepts and strive for more ambitious projects.

what are some of the things you can A/B test with your influencer marketing campaigns? All the same things you test in your other channels…

xperiment with different types of content and track which resonates best with their audience for your goal. For example, images may drive better social engagement, while videos are better for leads and signups. Alternately, you may find certain content performs better on some channels over others.

Don’t forget all the types of content you have at your disposal – podcasts, live stream videos, tweets, Instagram Stories, webinars, long-form blog posts, short-form blog posts, and much, much more.

By 2014, “Facebook the big news machine” was in full swing with Trending, hashtags and news outlets pouring resources into growing their Pages. Emphasizing the “news” in News Feed retrained users to wait for the big world-changing headlines to come to them rather than crisscrossing the home pages of various publishers. Many don’t even click-through, getting the gist of the news just from the headline and preview blurb. Advertisers followed the eyeballs, moving their spend from the publisher sites to Facebook.

In 2015, Facebook realized users hated waiting for slow mobile websites to load, so it launched Instant Articles to host publisher content within its own app. Instant Articles trained users not to even visit news sites when they clicked their links, instead only having the patience for a fast-loading native page stripped of the publisher’s identity and many of their recirculation and monetization opportunities. Advertisers followed, as publishers allowed Facebook to sell the ads on Instant Articles for them and thereby surrendered their advertiser relationships at the same time as their reader relationships.

This is how Facebook turns publishers into ghostwriters, a problem I blew the whistle on in 2015. Publishers are pitted against each other as they make interchangeable “dumb content” for Facebook’s “smart pipes.”

After Facebook Watch, Lasso, and IGTV failed to become hits with teens, the company has been quietly developing another youthful video product. Multiple sources confirm that Facebook has spent months building LOL, a special feed of funny videos and GIF-like clips.

LOL is currently in private beta with around 100 high school students who signed non-disclosure agreements with parental consent to do focus groups and one-on-one testing with Facebook staff.

Facebook confirmed it is privately testing LOL as a home for funny meme content with a very small number of US users. While those testers experience LOL as a replacement for their Watch tab, Facebook says there’s no plans to roll out LOL in Watch and the team is still finalizing whether it will become a separate feature in one of Facebook’s main app or a standalone app. Facebook declined to give a formal statement but told us the details we had were accurate.With teens increasingly turning to ephemeral Stories for sharing and content consumption, Facebook is desperate to lure them back to its easily-monetizable feeds.

if you want to rank for the queries that those pieces of content aim to rank for. He said on Twitter "if your goal is that only your site ranks for those queries, then syndicating / republishing is a bad idea."However, if that is not your goal, John said "if you goal is to reach a broader audience, go for it." But the syndicating or republishing content is the definition of duplicate content, John said "if you're republishing, then it *is* duplicate content."