The Cheat Sheet on Content Marketing

The Cheat Sheet on Content Marketing

Content Marketing Ace Concierge

Marketing has drastically changed over the past several decades in terms of the delivery methods but no matter how you look it, it is still content driven and always will be. It used to be solely about print media and ad space but now it is more about vying for attention from your online audience. This can be the biggest constraint but with the right content, geared toward the right market, you have an opportunity to be seen and heard.

Organizations are pumping up their online efforts to write compelling content and devour a piece of the market share, the hungry consumer. If you are not part of this bandwidth, churning out and feeding the insatiable, then you are doing a great disservice to your brand and your buyers. Content marketing offers the potential to communicate, engage and acquire new customers as well as to continue deepening relationships by adding value to your customers and prospects lives. For your efforts to be effective, your content must deliver an impact: a result to drive readership, sharing and interest. It isn’t merely finding an article and pushing it out. It should resonate with your company, your mission, your solutions and YOUR followers.

Your customers and prospects are searching for relevant data to help them in their buying decisions. You want to be that driver. You want to stay one step ahead of your competition, even industry colleagues, but to do this, you must be distributing value. Meeting pain points. Making sure your content conveys the information your audience is chasing.

When creating your content, think about some of the common questions you have been asked.

  • What problems does your product or service solve?
  • How will your product or service help them improve their career, their daily lives?
  • What makes it difficult for them to do what they need to do on a daily basis?
  • What are their obstacles to success?

Your solution based content can produce reactions and needs to your offerings. Help your readers thrive and flourish.

Content marketing is a strong leader in your social media channels. The Content Marketing Institute said:

“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

Inspire!

Don’t focus on what you have to say; understand what your target market wants to read. Your content marketing strategy should serve and deliver based upon the needs of your target market, offering solutions and viable outcomes for their greatest pain points.

Get inspired with the top 8 daily habits of some of the world’s most effective content marketers.

“Traditional marketing talks at people. Content marketing talks with them.” – Doug Kessler

In a recent study by MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute their results demonstrated that 93% of B2B organizations now use content-based tactics for their marketing promotions and 73% specified they now produce more content than the previous year.

Peg Fitzpatrick’s post: Feed the Content Monster defines the industry social terms and helps you to understand the what, where, why and how of content marketing. It answers all of your questions, providing you guidance and suggestions to jump in the content ring. Get ready. Research. Curate. Write. Share.

What is the content monster? This is the void for content marketers between content creation and content sharing. The content monster needs to be fed consistently. Content marketing is a great way for brands and small businesses to reach their clients and prospective clients. If you are creating your own media or blog content, content creation is a time-consuming and important task. Most blogs and businesses aren’t producing an original video or blog article each day. If you do have the time and talent to produce great quality content, you still need to share more than one thing per day on social media. So, how can you feed the content monster and curate amazing content to share?

Know the Erogenous Zones of Your Blog Post

Know the Erogenous Zones of Your Blog Post

Ace Concierge Anatomy of a Blog Post

 

Your business blog is an essential tool for your inbound marketing efforts in terms of SEO, generating social proof, credibility, creating a community, becoming known as a thought leader and generating visits, leads, and conversion to customers and brand ambassadors. It has to the opportunity to spin gold as if you have the Midas Touch.

It is THE most valuable piece of company real estate you own.  With a little caressing and foreplay, it should resonate with your prospective buyers, meeting their needs, pain points and answering their questions. Whatever they may be.

“Companies that blog have 55% more visitors and generate 70% more leads than companies who don’t. Hubspot

Organizations are pumping up their online efforts to write compelling content and devour a piece of the market share, the hungry consumer. If you are not part of this bandwidth, churning out and feeding the insatiable, then you miss the train. It is a strong leader in your social media channels.

You write for them.

Not yourself.

Not the search engines.

They are the ones inputting the string of keywords to find YOU! Help them.

Laboring over content and strategy can present a challenge for many.  Think about what you want to say to your readers.

Did you ever consider how much time and effort it takes to write, maintain and promote a blog? It is so overwhelming. Sometimes just coming up with the theme can be a challenge.

“Do not underestimate how vital it is to allot time to writing a post or creating an image specifically designed for each particular community. It could make the difference between comments and crickets.” Rebekah Radice.

While there are many helpful and educational posts regarding content, titles, SEO, buyer personas, best practices, tips, tools and other recommended suggestions, it can be a very large undertaking to sustain and not go insane in the process. We can also get buried in the learning process. You open one site and suddenly realize hours have gone by while you only began to research a simple topic but you sunk in the abyss of data and links.

Anatomy of a Blog Post

Begin by understanding your goals, strategy and tactics for your blog and content. Write them down and use an editorial calendar to help visualize and plan your content schedule. It is much simpler and easier when you see it “on paper.” It will also help to keep you accountable as well as organized with your writing, posting, sharing and analyzing of your metrics.  This is just the bare bones, the skeleton for your writing and posting process. Read and research some of the best practices, save articles to refer back to you and put in your best effort.  Guest author, Adam Connell shared some great tips and insight to help you enhance your writing and pique the interest of your audience, enticing them to share your post.

Blog

Write compelling and thought provoking content to reach your readers, answer their deepest questions and offer real solutions. That’s why you’re in business right? Not to push a product or a widget but to offer outcomes and resolutions to problems. Great content captures interest and engagement.

“Don’t focus on having a great blog. Focus on producing a blog that’s great for your readers.” Brian Clark

Why Should Your Business Blog?

Do You Make These 13 Content Marketing Mistakes?

The Benefits of Blogging: Why Businesses Do It, and You Should Too

Foolproof Formula to Incredibly Catchy Blog Titles

Keywords to Concepts: The Lazy Web Marketer’s Guide to Smart Keyword Research

Content Curation: 10 FREE Tools to Save You Time

3 Steps to Identify Blog Topics that are Relevant to Your Audience

HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator

WP Plugins

The WordPress plugins you choose should solve a specific “problem” or add key functionality and ease of use, for yourself as well as your audience. There are thousands of WordPress plugins to enhance your SEO, website speed, social sharing, curation and function of your site. Investigate and test the ones you feel will add the most benefits and features; not just because it seems like a shiny new toy.

Top 10 Social Media Plugins for WordPress

40 Experts Share Their Favorite WordPress Plugins

Content curation is now push button simple on WordPress 

8 Top Free WordPress Plugins To Speed Up Your Websites Loading Time

10 Essential WordPress Plugins to Improve SEO & Usability – Search Engine Watch

Distribution

Once you written a fabulous post, you need a strategic plan to share your content and ideas. It isn’t enough just to write a post and push it to your social platforms. Use a variety of tools and platforms to broaden your reach and your message.

“The biggest mistake that I see bloggers and marketers make is spending an incredible amount of time creating a really great piece of content but don’t put the time into promoting it.” Adam Connell

32 Experts Share Their Best Blog Post Promotion Tips

25 Smart Ways to Promote Your Latest Blog Post

Conversations

Social Media isn’t a hit it and quit it mentality. If you think like this and don’t engage or only self-promote, you will not experience the value and global reach of social media. Your blog and your voice will be lost amongst those who build their relationship and give back to their communities.

“You can’t just smash blast anymore.” Instead, you have to give them what they want and then strive to aggregate with yourself so you can control your own marketing.” Jay Leopardi.

13 Tips to Humanize Your Brand

Customer Relationships – Engage Your Audience: From Profile to Preference

3 C’s of Effective Relationship Marketing

Relationship Marketing for a Digital World

 

What about you? How do you manage your blog, content and communications?

How To Create Engaging Content That People Love To Share

How To Create Engaging Content That People Love To Share

how to get your content sharedWriting great and ‘share worthy’ content takes time.

It takes effort and isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do.

The problem is that simply writing something that is ‘great’ doesn’t mean that it’s going to get any views.

There’s a lot more to it than that.

In this post I’m going to share a number of things that I do differently when I write content. Using these tips I have been able to generate thousands of social shares on a relatively new blog.

Identify a problem and solve it

In recent years the bar has been raised thanks to the level of quality content that other writers are producing.

The easiest way to compel your audience to share your content is by identifying what problem they are experiencing and then solve it.

When people have been searching high and low to find the answer to a problem and they finally find it, they can be very appreciative.

Get the timing right

Sometimes timing can be a big factor.

A great example is when Google first announced that Google Reader was closing. The keyword ‘Google reader alternative’ became incredibly popular overnight.


Within a short amount of time there was an incredible number of blogs writing about the topic which meant that the competition went up dramatically.

Although the first few blogs to cover this would have seen significant increases in traffic, mostly from organic search.

Also, one thing that I noticed was that even the blogs that were late to cover the topic generated an above average level of social shares.

This type of thing is often referred to as news jacking because that’s essentially what you’re doing.

If you publish a blog post just before journalists are scrambling for information then you have a great opportunity.

David Meerman Scott also published a great book on the topic, learn more about it here.

Keep it easy to read

Readability is an important factor and it’s important to keep your articles at a level where everyone can understand them.

Breaking your sentences up into smaller chunks, writing clear sub headings and utilising formatting are all a good way to do that.

A very helpful tool that I found recently was the Hemingway App that grades your articles readability and offers ways to improve it.

Add value and come up with a unique angle

Before you start writing anything you need to think about how you can add value to your content.

Check out what other people have wrote about the topic in Google and find out what’s missing:

  • Do you have a unique perspective on the subject?
  • Can you add more detail and make a more comprehensive resource?
  • Is there a content type that isn’t used?

There are plenty of things to think about but what you need to identify in most cases is the content gap.

By finding what’s missing you can make sure that your content fills the gap and becomes what people have been wanting.

Mention influencers and tell them about it

There is a form of marketing that is trending right now.

It’s known as influencer marketing.

The idea is marketing directly to those that influence your target audience rather than directly marketing to your target audience.

I’ve found it to be very effective but another thing it can really help with is content distribution.

By mentioning influencers in your content and letting them know (using Twitter, Google+ or email works fine) you can skyrocket the amount of social shares for your content.

People love it when other people say awesome stuff about them.

Finding influencers

There are a lot of tools on the market that can help you, but as a starting point I’d recommend giving BuzzSumo a try. It’s free to get started while the tool is in beta and it’s very straight forward to use.

Contacting influencers works best from a personal account even if you’re working on behalf of a brand – the personal touch works best. Something Jennifer Hanford covered here.

How to incorporate influencers into your content

Simply linking out to influencers can work great and for a lot of people it does.

There is a way to get more influencers to share your content.

That is to involve them directly in the creation of the content – you may have seen this referred to as group interviews or crowd sourced content.

The end result is the same – a group of influencers contributing content and because of that they are more willing to share the content.

Here are a few examples that have generated an impressive number of social shares:

The reality of influencer marketing

Instead of my websites or my clients starting out and having no audience whatsoever we have used this to put tap into the established audience of market influencers to put their content, their brand and their message directly in front of their target audience.

It’s not an overnight strategy, it does take time and there are more steps involved, but that’s the same in any form of real marketing.

Clicking publish doesn’t mean the job is done

The biggest mistake that I see bloggers and marketers make is spending an incredible amount of time creating a really great piece of content but don’t put the time into promoting it.

The truth is that clicking publish maybe all you’ll need to do if you are Tech Crunch or Mashable but most of us have got a fair distance to go until we reach that point.

I’d recommend checking this post out because it goes into a lot more detail (and it’s a very large topic) but ultimately after every post is published you need to spend as much time promoting it as you have done creating it.

Think about your target audience and where they hang out online. Then put your content directly in front of them.

Don’t do it in a spammy way or just drop the link in online communities but actually engage with your audience and start building a discussion.

Engage with your audience, be present and help them.

Soon enough you will develop your own influence.

Summary

There are plenty of ways to help get your content shared, this isn’t an exhaustive list by any means.

Now I’ll put the question to you – what do you do to help make sure people share your content?

We would love to hear more in the comments below.

Guest Author Blog Post:
Adam Connell Blogging WizardAdam Connell is the Marketing Manager for a UK based marketing agency; UK Linkology. In his spare time Adam trains people to get better results out of content and social media.

Connect with Adam:

Twitter
Google+
Triberr

 

Photo Credit: giulia.forsythe via Compfight cc

47 Content Marketing Tools To Help You Save Time And Get Better Results

Content Marketing

Marketing has drastically changed over the past several decades in terms of the delivery methods but no matter how you look it, it is still content driven and always will be. Remarkable content is written for your buyers and their needs; providing solutions to their questions and problems. You have the opportunity to attract your audience with compelling content and images through your blog posts, website, e-newsletters and online discussions.

Organizations are pumping up their online efforts to write compelling content and devour a piece of the market share, the hungry consumer. If you are not part of this bandwidth, churning out and feeding the insatiable, then you miss the train. It is a strong leader in your social media channels.

Adam Connell of the Blogging Wizard wrote this dynamic post full of marketing tools to help you find, organize, post  and promote your content.

Content is one of the most powerful ways to get more traffic to your blog and sell more products. To put things into perspective, $43.9 billion was spent on the production and distribution of content in 2013. That’s a crazy amount of money but illustrates the extent to which companies are investing in content right now, and that figure is set to increase. And the beauty of it is that over 60% of that is outsourced putting the power back into the hands of bloggers, freelance writers and professional copywriters.

Image courtesy of bloggingwizard.com  @adamjayc

Content Curation:  10 FREE Tools to Save You Time

Content Curation: 10 FREE Tools to Save You Time

Ace Concierge FREE Content Curation  Tools

Social media tools and platforms to help you manage, curate and post are developed at such a furious pace that it is almost impossible to keep up and test each one, all the while operating your business. Implementing a few of the platforms are sure to save you some time and a few headaches. As a business with an online presence, managing your social media is a full time job, not a hobby. It does require goals, strategy, tools, time, and manpower or womanpower. Just creating a few social profiles and a blog page are not enough. You should be actively engaging consistently and frequently to build your following, credibility, community and reputation.

It is important to humanize your brand and personally engage versus 100% automation. THAT isn’t social at all. You are not a robot and neither is your audience. Social media is relationship marketing to reinforce and support your brand image and establish long term connections.

In order to make your time most useful, investigate which tools work best for your needs, as well as which ones you will actually commit to using on a daily basis. They do help to simplify the process and minimize some of your valuable time online.

“Marketers are under pressure to find more cost and time effective ways to meet the increased demand for content marketing. The way to meet this need effectively is to add content curation into the content marketing mix.” Heidi Cohen, Content Curation In the Content Marketing Mix 

Content Curation: Find, organize and share relevant, enriching content for your audience. Your curated content should focus on educating your readers and helping them to solve their greatest business issues.

Finding educational and newsworthy content takes time and effort. It isn’t just a matter of a quick search and click of a share button. There is such a surplus of data and intelligence flying through the airwaves that you should be particular about what you share.

“Content curation should be part of every content marketing strategy. There is no need to create all the content ourselves.” Joe Pulizzi, Content Marketing Institute

Content Curation

OneIMS

Follow your industry favorites, add their RSS feeds to your aggregator of choice, sign up their newsletters, listen to their podcasts and monitor their social networks.  This will help you to filter the noise and receive only the content you want.  

You can take a step beyond your standard social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and LinkedIn and try some of these other aggregators to reach further into the quagmire of content on the web. People consume hundreds of thousands of bits and bytes of data all day so filter your sources, provide something to tempt their palate and become a trusted, sought after resource. Many of the available curation tools are FREE!!  Simply sign in with your Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn account and you are good to go.

Using some of the tools below, you can curate content based upon your interests, industry, keywords, hashtags and even user names in a few of the platforms. Some of them can be utilized for social search, analytics and real-time trending topics as well as having a multipurpose of posting and scheduling. THAT is a bonus as it saves a few steps in sharing your trusted content.

  1. Prismatic
  2. Tagboard
  3. Scoop.it
  4. everPOST
  5. Paper.li
  6. Flipboard
  7. Zite
  8. Topsy
  9. Listly
  10. Content Gems

Word to the wise: Just because you see something populated, doesn’t necessarily mean it is enriching and valuable for your followers. Make sure you click on each post and read it too, putting your trusted name behind your content.

Be selective and have a laser focus. Don’t simply share “just because.” Each piece of content you post, share and annotate is a representation of you and your online brand image; become the go-to source in your industry. A thought leader.

“I think curation is usually something people lean on when they are looking for something they can put together quickly. But if you’re doing curation right, you actually have to put a lot of time into researching things so you can serve the best content possible. Do not underestimate the amount of time it takes to curate content properly.” Corey Eridon, Hubspot

Image Credit: OneIMS

Content Marketing: Not Just a Buzz Word

Content Marketing: Not Just a Buzz Word

Content Marketing2014 Buzzword? Not in the least. Just do a search. Google shared about 1,010,000,000 results (1.21 seconds). Organizations are pumping up their online efforts to write compelling content and devour a piece of the market share, the hungry consumer. If you are not part of this bandwidth, churning out and feeding the insatiable, then you miss the train. It is a strong leader in your social media channels. The Content Marketing Institute said:

“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

Content marketing is sharing without selling but eventually, you do experience lead conversion because you have been feeding your audience rich, educational and valuable content. You are the person or company they turn to! Since most have turned away from traditional forms of media, elicit a response from your online audience, similar to Pavlov’s dogs. Don’t focus on what you have to say; understand what your target market wants to read. Convey your passion for their needed solutions and service, don’t just try and push a widget. Everyone has widgets.

What makes you different? Better? Worth the investment?

“The single most significant trend is the continued emergence of content marketing as a standalone discipline. Content, in all its shapes and forms, is core to everything we do as marketers.” Econsultancy.

Content marketing is NOT just for your website! It is daily curation and sharing of content within your social media network. Quality content. A little cotton candy fluff only starves the bears.

“Spending energy to understand the audience and carefully crafting a message that resonates with them means making a commitment of time and discipline to the process.” – Nancy Duarte

  • Make your content newsworthy and enriching
  • Attract and retain attention!
  • Curate from a variety of sources
  • Follow industry leaders
  • Sign up for the RSS feeds
  • READ everything before you curate
  • Engage with your favorite bloggers
  • Ask questions
  • Monitor trending CM hashtags
  • Use social media tools to follow and find conversations
  • Save and digest the content
  • WRITE!!
Content Marketing Considerations:
  1. Goals
  2. Strategy
  3. Editorial calendar
  4. Content
  5. An understanding of your buyer personas
  6. Where does your audience hang out
  7. What are their greatest pain points?
  8. What drives them to purchase?
  9. What are they searching for?
  10. Appeal to their logical mind as well as their emotions
  11. Write for them. To them….. not the search engines.
  12. Find the best distribution channels
  13. Cross promote or vary content
  14. Track and measure engagement, conversation and results

In a recent study by MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute their results demonstrated that 93% B2B organizations now use content-based tactics for their marketing promotions and 73% specified they now produce more content than the previous year.

Custom content is 92% more effective than traditional TV advertising at increasing awareness and 168% more powerful at driving purchase preference.

If you need a little more convincing about the value and necessity of content marketing, take a bite from the menu and these are just the appetizers.

Top 6 Content Marketing Trends To Watch Out This 2014 (Infographic)

12 Most Innovative Ways to Create Content That Gets Shared

Top 10 Ways a Content Calendar will Improve Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

30 Steps for Getting Started with Content Marketing – Smarter Shift

25 Top Content Marketing Tools Every Marketer Should Use

The 3 Ways to Succeed at Content Marketing When Everybody in the World is Doing Content Marketing

Content Curation Tools: 21 Criteria To Select And Evaluate Your Ideal One

2014 Content Marketing Trends and Tactics

7 Metrics To Accurately Measure Your Content Marketing

What will be your first step in implementing your content marketing plan?

Send us an email from our contact page if you would like a little help organizing and facilitating your plan for CM success.

“Content marketing is a commitment, not a campaign.” – Jon Buscall