Content Marketing

We all are living in a digital era. Here is content is the king. You would surely agree to it. The market is the content consumer and there is more demand of the content than ever. It is only because of the engaging content which adds value, teaches, and entertains the audience, any business is getting popular. The average person spends at least 15 hours in a day reading and studying different types of content.

Yes, obviously the media is changing constantly. Sometime we like to watch a video on laptop, while at some point of hour we send texts from our smartphones and even listen to music while browsing through the articles also is an addition to the list of thing that we do on various media. However, the common pattern that you will notice here is that we are somehow always connected. Content is something which can capture the attention just like that. And by attention we mean capturing the leads and customers, selling products and services online, spreading brand awareness, and building a winning reputation by a brand.

So, what is important here is to know why a content is important to get viral.

Viral Content

Viral content is any piece of media which becomes popular wildly over internet overnight. The media could be anything from a Youtube video to a Facebook post, to a tweet, and almost any type of social media content. Viral means that content is getting shared by people thousands and thousands of times on various platforms. And, when this happens your brand gets exposed to a whole new audience, which obviously led to generate leads organically. You may also think as getting your content to go viral on the internet as same as hitting the lottery. Just in simpler form, we can say that a great content that’s intended to be shared online and spreads like a virus is a viral content.

Most of the marketers dream of getting their content viral for getting thousands – if not millions – of people to find the content. That’s because it takes a lot of time and efforts that they spent a lot of time creating. And the efforts are worth a while. A single line of viral post can generate significant amount of brand awareness and can generate useful traffic to your website. Considering that the traffic that comes from social shares is organic, viral content is relatively cheap as compared to paid the ads. Yes, not everything comes easy. Viral content is tough to pull off. Now that you must be wondering how to get social shares or how to make a content viral? Here are some of the best tips and tricks by the experts.

1. Do your research

You can’t make something viral overnight. So, what is important to do that is the research of the subject. You need to go and research deeper into the subjects with new research because it is among the effective ways to drive shares on the social media. You may have noticed there a number of websites which get a lot of shares for their piece of content. That’s because they know how to position and tag effective and relevant things. Posts that are heartwarming, happy, and inspirational tops the list. Yes, it has been followed by some of the people and it has worked wonders. What else you can do is the form of warnings. It is again more directive research. To gain the attention, you can do research which is referred by earlier suggested people to warn people of things. This would surely be a hit. What’s comes next is the trends. A subset of any research is showing trends. Follow some trends and post something related to it. So, all you need is to stand out and break out potentially from the content hustle-bustle.

2. Images attract more shares

It isn’t new for us if someone says images get more views and shares. We all are aware of the fact that compelling images increases engagement. And, that’s what exact do we need to get the viral post. Nowadays, almost every platform of social media allows us to share the images and content both. In other words, we can say that on an average, twice as many people love to share the posts with at least one image in the post. And, we get the trick here. This tells how important is having a visual element mixed in with bodies of text.

3. Browse viral content sites for ideas

Of course, each one us have to get a start from somewhere. So, what else could be better than scanning through the viral content which has already been a hit on the internet. Honestly, the ideas which you may be looking could just be found lying there. So, here the lesson is to learn to save time and avoid reinventing the wheel by scanning viral content sites for ideas. You can work and improve on those ideas or even can customize for your readers, making them want to share on their social pages. Some of the best examples from which we can learn is the Huffington Post, since this site already have a culture of consistently creating viral content. It is a news site and their headlines aren’t fully explanatory. They ensure to make an attractive headline so people click on that.

Yes, you may also want to write yours that way, big and bold. Moreover, video content is also something that goes viral just like that if people like it. Few of the elements which can make content go viral are the authority of the site, your timing, topic chosen and the author. Also, one additional tip, put your social share buttons like your click to tweet or your Facebook share on your blog. This makes sharing easy.

4. Feel Good Content is the need of the hour

Some of the few things which can make a content go viral is the feel good content. People should be happy reading the same. The biggest thing that determines if the content should go viral is if people feel compelled to share it. Every content that we make we surely want it to go viral so, before posting something, ask yourself, ‘Are people going to share this?’ The question along will give you an idea if your content will be shared by people or not.

Always remember one thing, the content which is shared by the people is something that makes them feel good. Few of the things that are tops the list are funny, cute, emotionally eliciting things. By no way boring things stand a chance. Any post has to be provocative and entertaining to gain the audience. By this way you will get an understanding of what the general public will be relate to. If your video represents something that is controversial or extreme, you may have a harder time connecting to your audience. So, be sure to post something that your audience likes.

5. Captivating Introductions and Colorful Visuals

What else could be better than having a content which has captivating introduction? And, the icing on the cake would be having that introduction with colorful visuals. For creating a viral post, it is important to create an introduction that attracts the customers to read the post and react on it. Just a small research based example for you. Your know people only read about 28% of a blog post. So, if you want your post to go viral it is highly important that you create a post to attract great readers fast. This means the intro that you are providing in your content should be compelling and interesting. Besides, try to make use of short and meaningful sentences. It will hook the reader to your post. As per research short sentences boosted content readability by 58%. And as we also discussed earlier, inserting images makes your content much more compelling.

6. Appropriate platform selection

Apart from just focusing on the content and the quality, it is also important for you to select a relevant platform for your content to be posted. Remember that each and every social media platform is different. Always be sure what you are posting where. Not every platform is going to give you a hit.  So, it is advisable to everyone that before creating a content, choose a platform on which to specialize. Twitter, LinkedIn Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook are all good platforms. You can choose any to start a viral marketing campaign. But, be sure to create the content that can differ depending on the platform you choose. For example, if you are choosing Instagram, a series of Instagram Stories or an image with a compelling caption would spark viral shares online. Same way, if you are choosing Pinterest, make sure it has quotes and messages.

The Bottom Line

Now that you’ve read the entire article, remember to create a content which is of quality and relevant to the user. While looking to generate traffic for your business website, make sure you show people how they can implement the advice which you are giving them. Take your time to show them with an example. You can also help them by giving them next action steps. And on more thing, don’t just upload anything for the sake of doing so. Write with emotions and good feel to it. It will allow you to target emotions of the people so you know your content will get shared.

So, what do you think? How do you use these strategies in your business?

You know, there isn’t once that we all run out of content ideas. Most of us have been in this situation most of the times. We become really unsure about what content to create and share. But, this doesn’t mean we should stop writing or producing content for Google. By somewhere or after sometime, we have to manage to find some of the resolutions to help keep a constant stream of content ideas flowing. At the beginning, we all have adequate number of ideas which flow out anywhere that works. Over the period of time, it becomes stimulating to create new ideas to share with the audience. And, one more fact is that as the audience increases, they begin to expect more from you. So as to remain on the good side of audience, it’s important to know how to constantly create epic content thoughts. The content will stagnate without great ideas, and you will be running in the risk of losing that audience which you have built after so much of hard work.

If you are thinking if content seriously has to do with the website success, remember regardless of how big you get, you never have enough Internet traffic. Content drive visitors to your website and it leads to more profit. A good content with great content marketing is a perfect way to attract website traffic. And, when we talk about content marketing, it is nothing but creating and promoting information such as podcasts, videos, articles, and images, to draw people to the website. Well, the content promotion doesn’t come into the scene until you produce a good quality content consistently. Now to produce the content we need ideas. Wondering where they come from? Read the article to know.

1. Create ideas on your own:

While generating content ideas on your own, there are a few things which you need to include:

• What is happening on Quora?
• What are your users’ reading habits?
• What can you learn from your SEO efforts?
• Which ways your competitor has adopted?

Let’s dig into this:

Understand the reading habits: First of all, while searching for the topic, try to put yourself in the shoes of your prospects. Try to empathize with them and learn about their challenges and pain points. What they want to read or which topic seems to be interesting them? Also, you can try to interview some of your best customers over a phone or email to find out about their reading habits. Finding out what customers like or not has a great influence on the creating the content. Moreover, it is easy to find which of your user has been engaged with your content. You can find their contact record to identify who visited specific content on your website, who has consumed a specific amount of your website pages and also you can find out what they like about your content, and what they would like to see more of.

Research your competitors: One of the tactics that comes in researching the topic on our own is especially researching the competitors. If you feel like you are unsure about reader’s reading habits, this is the time when you should look at your competitors’ content marketing efforts. And, this is even better option when you share a similar target audience. So, if the content that they have published is appealing the customers it likely the content will also appeal to your prospects.

Quora is savior: It sometimes happens that you may not be able to find out where your audience lives online. And, that’s totally fine. One of the approaches with content generation ideas is to start with a set of keywords. And when you do that Quora provides a set of questions & answers.

2. Successful brainstorms

You know brainstorming is an art and everyone brainstorms. However, there are only few who do it well. To set yourself up for success, brainstorming is important. This means you have keep searching for ideas where ever you go or whoever you meet. While searching for the topics, a good brainstorm is needed. Yes, you can always involve as many people as you want. But, if you are in larger groups, break yourself into smaller teams that can then report back to the whole. We have to agree on the fact that some people are great brainstorms and some have other talents. So, don’t be afraid to switch up your groups for a perfect mix.

Maintain the brainstorming spirit by outlining a few crucial parameters at the beginning of your brainstorm. The important thing is what your audience wants. So, you have to keep on thinking around the same to get a topic. Below mentioned are some of the tips to run a great brainstorming session.

• Icebreaker: You have ensure that the creativity is flowing throughout. Try an icebreaker on the group if it is unusually quiet to get them into the brainstorming spirit.

• Be welcoming: Remember one thing, all ideas are good at this stage. It is important to keep the conversation on a positive side rather than saying ‘No’. By this way you can recognize the validity of each idea and ensuring to incorporate it in a perfect way.

• Find the spark: Look for ideas which grab interest, stir desire, spark attention, and inspire action. Focusing on the brainstorming to help bring the truly off-task brainstorm back to a more productive place.

• Record everything: Recording and capturing all the ideas is important. It can be done on a whiteboard or in a microphone. You can also take a picture or write good notes. Record of your process so you can go through it in case you need to find a second idea.

3. Make Use of analytics

Using your analytics is among the fine ways to know what the liking of your audiences are. If you really want to tell what is working and what is not, social media analytics is the best way to let you know. All you need to do is, just study your posts that are top-performing and re-create them for your users.

Below mentioned are some of the ways to find your top-performing posts with the analytics. Here is how:

Facebook: On the Facebook, one of the ways by which you can find posts that are top-performing is by going to your Page Insights > Posts. And, over there you can easily watch for posts with greater engagement. “Overview” tab is a shortcut which you can use to go to the Pages to watch feature. Click on the Page and Facebook will allow you to see your top posts for the week.

Instagram: If you are looking for Instagram analytics, it is mandatory to have your own business account. Under that account, click on the analytics icon and then, tap on “See more” under the section of “Posts”. Here, you will be able to look top posts that are segregated by impressions. Moreover, you can also organize it by reach, engagement, and more. Moreover, there you can also adjust the time period. You can also get top posts on various other social media platforms like Pinterest, Twitter and LinkedIn using the individual analytics.

Safeguard customers

For the people, who are using Pro or Business plan, they can easily find analytics information under Buffer dashboard. You can directly Posts report by going to Analytics tab. There, you can look for “Most Popular” to watch the most-engaged posts of yours. More to this, you can sort your top posts by clicks, comments, Likes, and more.

So, by some of the ways mentioned above, you can find your top posts and later you have to try to observe a pattern between them. Below mentioned are some of the questions to ask yourself:

• Is the content piece is from a specific source — like the blog post or any other publications?
• Does it has a particular type of content— image, text, or video — that is performing better?
• Did any user leave interesting comments?
• Is there any common topic of discussion among them?

4. Refresh the Existing Content

You know there is one mistake which businesses repeatedly do that is ignoring their formation of mind-blowing content after its initial success. Believe it or not, but there is a huge amount of value that a content gets when you re-visit it and refresh a few months after it was launched initially. We are not saying to give your content a look only once, but give it the chance that it needs to shine. This way, it will also be possible to make it obtainable to a part of your users who had missed it for the first time around.

Below mentioned are some of the different ways through which you can refresh your amazing content:

Updation of content pieces that are already existing

This is an easy to do. What all require is to go through a top-ten list which you have written six months ago. You can always update and re-publish but don’t forget to provide explanation why? This will not only ensure that you are putting it right to your audience, but it will also show them that you’re dedicated in staying relevant. A blog which is frequently refreshed and updated becomes a hit again definitely in front of the customers.

Visualize it: Updating a blog is great option, but remember one thing that most of the users are visual thinkers, and a long blog may not interest them a lot. They may not want to read the content piece. So, consider to make a blog posts more interesting by adding infographics, or informative videos. And, shareable infographics and videos are amazing as they can make the blog post content go viral.

Make it Socialize: Here the great bulleted points which you have mentioned in the blog post comes into action. You can separate them and turn them into a series of tweets or individual posts. Moreover, make sure to publish small and nice snippets on social media to keep your brand present.

Expansion is important: One of the easiest way to make content more intriguing is to go deeper on it. You can always make expansion of the points which you have mentioned in the blog. Expanding the content by adding something even more unique and to the point is an amazing way to re-engage with your readers.

Conclusion

We have covered some of the best ways to research content topic. However, it depends what type of content you are searching for what our audience wants to read. We understand all the great writer’s suffer from writer’s block from time to time and the struggle is real when you have to come up with new content ideas. Well, we have mentioned most of the things in the article so it could benefit you.  Go through it and let us know which one worked for you.

What is your opinion on researching the content? Share your views with us!

Believe it or not, yes we are talking about social media contest. A social media contest is an amazing thing when used correctly. And by using contest templates makes it simpler to arrange both contests and giveaway programs, effectively boosting your followers, engagement, and even sales growth.

Still don’t agree? Here are some facts.

Many companies when tried adding social media contests to their marketing strategy received a 35% increase in online sales. Another small company that started on Instagram with just 300 followers, grown into a massive 500,000. Do you what was their main strategy? Yes, you guessed it right, social media contests! Honestly, social media contests are among the wonderful things which could help in amplifying brand, products, and services. We all know that most of the people are choosing paid techniques to boost their brand, because of this the organic reach is on the decline.And, in this scenario social media contests are few effective ways to increase the brand online with a minimal promotional budget. Companies use Instagram Posts Scheduler to promote their contest on social media which helps them to grab more user attention & can help them to scale up their post reach.

Below mentioned are some of the best ways to use social media contests for your business. Let’s dig in.

1. Ascertain the intention of the contest:

First thing first, you definitely require to find out the purpose of launching a contest. Why are you launching this contest for? If it is for promoting your product and services or you want gain engagement on social media account, define the goal first. Setting a goal is really important as by doing this, it becomes very easy to come up with a robust strategy and effective contest ideas to achieve desired goal.

Whenever a brand is hosting a contest, the usual goals include-

• Building the Email list
• Increasing brand or product engagement
• Boosting reputation of a brand
• Converting visitors into leads
• Increase in followers
• Understanding customers better through surveys
• Increase in website traffic
• Growing social media presence

You should understand the fact that a campaign can accomplish all these things, all you have to make sure is you prioritize the goals, which are important to your business. Making a contest too complex and hard won’t let the customer engage with you. And, also consider a budget for the prize, promotion cost, and any paid services which you will use.

2. Cover your bases:

Don’t forget that legalities can come into action while making a contest online for your brand. So, act smart and hide your bases before time. This will surely prevent your business from getting into any unwanted issues. It is sure that you would want to avoid anything that is spam or against the law. However, there are many more things too which your business must be aware of while planning for upcoming promotion. All you have to make sure is that the campaign which you are running is legal and within the policy restrictions of the network where you are planning to run the contest. Moreover, be aware of the fact that each social media platform has its own set of guidelines and rules that must be followed carefully, if you want your contest to be booming.

3. Know your audience:

Running a contest can only be successful only when you know who your target customers are and how much time they are spending on social media sites. Once you get an understanding of your audience, you’re able to find out which platforms you should be concentrating on. Moreover, when you understand your customers, it will also help you know which type of prize or contest would make the sense. You should know the answers to questions like what would lure your customers to enter in a social media contest. What kind of action they are willing to take? Always remember one thing, the contests that you are running must cater to your visitors and target audience, not just potential participants. So, make sure to do everything so as to stay relevant for them.

4. Make appeal to potential clients, not just entrants

Now that you are all set with the legalities, now is the time to create a gainful social media contest. It is very important to design a campaign which looks bewitching to your target audience. Some of the ways to do it are mentioned below:

• Adding labels: One of the effective ways to do it is to add labels in your contest copy. This is perfect to address your target audience. For example, a food brand might choose “Are you a foodie? Enter here to win buffet lunch with your partner.”  Or, an adviser might opt for “Marketers! Enter to triumph a subscription for year.”

• Shaping your promotion: Next, you have to tie your publicity to an event that is applicable to your target audience. For example, if you promoting your contest in Halloween, connect it with the episode of The Vampire Diaries, or the Twilight Series, only people fascinated in that event will enter.

• Choose goodies or prizes of value: The prize that you will decide for your target market must be of value. If you have an ecommerce business, you can choose a merchandise as your contest prize. And, if you’re a food brand, a discount coupon may work well.

5. Follow up emails:

You work doesn’t end with the end of the contest. Just right after a contest comes to en end, you can take the follow up with your contest entrants to know their opinion. One of the perfect times to make them think to participate in your contest again is right after the contest ends. It will give you a great chance to send them a follow up offer, and choose them for any extra thing which you wish to mail them right after the contest.

Conclusion 

Follow these pointers to create a successful contest with thousands of entries. Creating contest is a perfect method by which you can easily increase your number of Facebook Likes, Twitter and Pinterest followers. More to that, contests are an easy way to generate social engagement and buzz by having people view and follow your brand on various social media channels.

So, have you created the contest yet? Let us know!

Day after day, year after year, we have been showcased with the brands that are crushing with content in their niche. This is what content marketing is all about, turning the visitors eventually into customers using content. Once you use the content marketing, you will know how effective it could be. But, there is only one problem that we all could face that is it can be seriously hard work and we can run out of ideas for content marketing campaigns. Because today’s marketer knows content is king, they definitely want to make content that stands out in the crowd.

If we believe the facts, more than 60% of organizations struggle to develop unique content consistently, and more than 65% face the challenge to develop engaging content. The facts clearly mean that if the organizations are unable to produce unique and engaging content this means they are losing money. This is why after knowing the requirements, we’ve put together a list of some of the best content marketing instances to apply to your own content. So, be ready to get inspired by some of the content marketing examples. Let’s get started!

1. Nintendo’s Multi-Channel Campaign

One of the best content marketing illustrations that we would start with is Nintendo. This is when Nintendo was introducing their Switch console, they used different marketing channels to produce excitement among the people for the launch of new console. The campaign that they started was global, spreading different accounts to reach users across the world. Since the product Switch console was a world-wide product, Nintendo made sure to get the word out about their new console on a world-wide scale. Be it a post on social media or a huge billboards, the company maintained the usage of consistent visual branding across different channels and different locations.

Let’s see how it can help you. Let’s assume, even if your business isn’t a world-wide brand, you can still gain expertise from Nintendo’s Switch campaign. Their multi-channel campaign proven to be effectual because they kept their message and branding consistent across all the channels. What we learn from this is that it’s important to use visual branding and messaging accordant. You should stay focused on continuous branding, so that you can make sure that your brand is sending one direct message across every campaign in all channels.

2. Google’s Doodles

Unarguably Google launched the most successful internet company ever. However, Google doesn’t need an introduction, still one thing which they are good at is producing the great content. Just because Google don’t need an introduction, it is a huge mistake to think that it doesn’t need to promote itself. Like many other small and large enterprises, Google too needs to evolve and stay relevant. And, there is no surprise in the fact that they are doing it extremely well.

One such successful campaign that they launched was the Google Doodle. Now, we all know that it has turned into a much loved tradition. Don’t you think this is such a great idea? On notable days all around the year, Google transforms its logo into animated pictures to match up with the day it’s celebrating. Apart from just being interactive, it keeps the audience engaged.

What we learn from Google is that you need to stand out from the crowd. Only this is the way people will share and talk about your content. Don’t worry, if you are thinking about the time, resource or creativity, there are plenty of content marketing experts out there to help you. One thing surely no one can ignore that is the power of content marketing.

3. ASOS

Honestly, it’s very hard to select just one element of content marketing strategy of ASOS. They have so much and they are all so good. The company seamlessly work on with its blog, email strategy, Instagram presence, and video marketing all other things.

What we should look into the company is their most engrossing strategic choices for incorporating the influencers into their strategy of content marketing. Each of their influencer has a specific ASOS Instagram account to share shoppable ASOS styling. The influencers are featured on their site with a specific artistic underlines under their picture. This tactic of theirs has enabled a customer to determine which influencer suits best with their own personal style.

Wondering what makes their Content great? Content is at the heart of company’s marketing strategy. You just can’t force “content marketing” into a separate silo. The company strategies to mix old and new.

4. HubSpot

The inbound marketing industry has been loaded with organizations, such as Pardot, Marketo, and Infusionsoft, among others. However, the king of the crowd remains HubSpot. The primary reason why HubSpot has gained popularity quickly because of their strategy of content marketing.

They have kept blogs as the central part to their content marketing strategy, one is purely focused on marketing and the other is on sales. The ultimate goal that they have set through these blogs is to grow traffic to their funnel. We all know that HubSpot serves small businesses so that their focus remains on knowing about inward marketing, like writing blogs, SEO, and social media posts. This is how the top of the funnel is covered. Their resources section features everything content from middle to the bottom-of-funnel, which is determined on turning visitors into leads. Content marketing is the only thing that has been their growth drivers since inception.

Final Thoughts

Every single one of these examples that I have written above relies on developing something of value and promoting it to interested audiences. Yes, it is very easy when we talk about why “content is king” but, when it comes to implement the same, we face struggles. One thing is for sure that we should all be producing more content because this is the only way to actually execute it in such a way to get amazing results. Furthermore, the examples that we have mentioned above are relatively replicable and straightforward ideas at their core.  Content marketing focuses on consumers first thing, builds trust, and let them approach the brand when they’re ready.

Did you spot a trend yet?

In recent years, content marketing has been moving at the speed of light and the reason behind this is also very clear. The brands are highly indulged in advertising and sales tactics to attract customers and show them about their authenticity, transparency, and friendliness.

Content marketing has been reliable, proven way to drive traffic and increase leads and sales. The advent of the internet and social media has a lot to do with this. Content marketing is used by most of businesses as it is helping their customers to pick and choose exactly whom they want to interact with. Marketing statistics is a great way to remain relevant and stay up to date on marketing trends. We know that enterprises are giving out so much content daily, there is no wonder that marketers may be guessing if content marketing could still be a relevant thing to do. So, to take this question out of marketers mind, we have pulled out some of the content marketing statistics and facts to prove them wrong.

1. Stats of Content Marketing Trends

• 61% of marketers improved “their strength to measure and analyze marketing efforts”.
• 92% of marketers perspective content as a real business success asset.
• 70% give importance to the content quality than quantity.
• For the content distribution 64% of content marketers use PPC or SEM
• 62% of companies having more than develop daily content.
• Infographics (37%) and Stock photography (40%) are the most frequently utilized visual content.
• Over 91% of the audience reward the brands for their authenticity.
• 51% of content is gathered from organic search.
• According to the 35% of the marketers, the major struggle that they face is in creating engaging visual content frequently.
• Prescriptive content is used by 97% of content marketers, while 78% uses press release in the strategy.
• 56% of the businesses increased their content creation spending.
• Major concern of content marketing organizations is changes to SEO and social media algorithms.
• The challenges that have been seen in content marketing is reportedly lack of data and lack of strategy.

2. A cost-effective method than paid advertising campaigns 

You won’t believe that each person watches more than 5,000 advertisements per day. With so much clutter, people have now learned the ways to tune out banner ads, pop-ups, and pay-to-click links on Google. Look at the stats that we have considered taking in account about the price of hiring a content team vs. creating a paid search campaign. If we take a medium to a large-sized enterprises, the cost of content marketing may be up to 41% less per lead than paid search. However, the cost for a big enterprise for an average customer acquisition has been dropped per lead after switching to content marketing. It is true that it takes much less time to get a paid campaign give results, but, the content marketing strategies create four times over leads.

(Image: © Smartinsights)

Always remember the fact that more the content on website= more the traffic. Companies who pay to write blogs have more than 434% indexed pages than the companies who doesn’t believe in writing the blogs. Publish the content frequently, Google will definitely continue to increase your page rank. Hence, it will be easier for the customers to find you. 77% of users read blogs and this information is known to be a subtle way to increase your audience’s attention. After all, blogs are a perfect way to let customer learn about a company. So don’t wait further just start writing!

3. Content strategy is followed by 38% of B2C brands and 37% of B2B brands 

The key to get successful in content marketing is to have a full-fledged strategy. Despite the fact that there is a strong relation between representing a strategy and sensing success, just 37% of B2B brands and 38% of B2C brands strategize. The message is clear by this statistics that you need to analyze the data and spot the recent trends to gain success. If you are wondering what kind of content would perform better with your audience, first of all modify the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy. One way by which it could be done is by looking at your competitors. You can also try to spend time with customers to observe their behavior, get a meaningful small data. After this, you need to create a one-page plan with all the objectives, strategy, goals, and the performance metrics.

4. Video Content Marketing Statistics

Video is another type of visual content marketing and there is no doubt why marketers are going big on video. As we know, most of the people are spending more than 4 hours in watching videos. This is why about 48% of the marketers are taking YouTube video as a priority and not only this, 46% plan to focus on Facebook video. Video gets results and there is nothing much surprising in this. Customers trust videos and those who are aged 18-34 would stop whatever they’re doing to watch a new video. Videos are effective and the content marketing statistics show 72% of B2B marketers and 76% of B2C marketers are using the video marketing that is possibly generating 66% more leads per year.

5. The Cost of Content Marketing

• Paid method is used by 71% of B2B marketers: Content marketing is comparatively inexpensive than traditional methods. A marketer has to pay for content creation, no matter if it is done in-house or by a freelancer. A B2B marketer spend money on dispensing the content. The content contains backlinks and social media advertisements. Paid version is used to find a much wider audience so that it helps in boosting various content marketing statistics that are important.
• Cost is 62% less than traditional marketing: A phrase like “building a trusting relationship” sounds nice. And, the idea behind it is also great as the ultimate goal behind content marketing is to make money, while spending as little as possible.

Summing up

Content marketing is a priority and must be a priority, no matter your business is new or old. By all the statistics above, one thing is sure that content marketing can do wonders to your business.

So, what do you think? Tell us in the comments below.

So, you are a budding entrepreneur. Now that you have a digital storefront, there is no need for brick-and-mortar store anymore. You are all set with all-important website and ready for the next. The next is wanting the virtual visitors, who are interested in buying what you’re selling. For that, you require more traffic on the website. However, the question arises how to generate more traffic for your website?

If you are struggling to drive the traffic on your website, you’re not alone. Do you know about 61% of the professionals are challenged in knowing what is most important for their audiences. More than 50% did not know the goal of the audience at a particular stage. And, to cover all this, people think SEO is the only part that will work. If you look in the past few years, everyone is claiming to become an ‘SEO expert’. The most disturbing thing about SEO is that people have a problem in understanding what information to trust. This is surely a valid concern. Let’s go ahead with the answers to some questions.

Why do we need more Website Traffic and what is Free Traffic vs. Quality Traffic?

The growth of your online business depends on the website traffic as it works as an indicator and driver for the growth.

Website traffic will help you to:

• Look into the working mechanism of marketing
• Gain insights to make decisions about your audience
• Amend SEO and search engine credibility
• Create more leads, gain conversions, and get more customers

But, the thing is, in order to achieve these benefits it requires driving traffic to your website in the right direction. The focus must be on driving quality traffic. When we talk about quality traffic, you might be thinking what is it? As we have understood that traffic on the website helps in improving the ranking, but we have to make sure that the increase in traffic is associated with an increase in engagement as well. For the quality traffic, it is important to attract the right visitors to your site in the first place. Because only those will be the people who would likely to convert into leads and customers.

Below mentioned are some of the ways to drive regional traffic on the Website:

1. Promote website on different channels and stand out from the crowd: We all know what social media can do. It is undoubtedly the powerful tool to promote your portfolio website. It is perfect to help you in managing to build an audience or community. We have so many social media platforms out there and it is important to choose from the right platform in order to display your web designs. Make your web design portfolio unique by projecting the things which you have done in the past and add unique and creative completed projects too.

2. Rank you content in Google’s featured snippet: We all know how important is content for the rankings. And, to get yourself in regional rankings, you must include featured snippet in the descriptions. This will help you in appearing more and more frequently for question-based keywords. The Featured Snippet section is available in inside the first page of Google.

Featured Snippet contributes a lot. Some of the things that you will notice are: 

• Aim to target search keywords within one of the HTML headers.
• Google doesn’t always include a whole paragraph of text in the Featured Snippet.
• Less question-orientated keywords or for shorter ones, Google frequently pulls through a paragraph of text that is opposed to a one-by-one section.
• Google tends prefer Featured Snippet content.
• Tools like SEMrush can help you in finding keywords which will rank you higher for where there is a Featured Snippet.

3. Implement good SEO: Rankings can only improve if you are doing the right SEO on the website. Discovering the techniques about SEO and implementing them in the right type of traffic delivery strategies will help you in driving more traffic on the website. Don’t twist or break the rules, just understand the SEO so that you could really surpass your results from the past.

4. Run paid social media Ad campaigns: In order to increase your website traffic, the first and foremost that you need to do is to be able to get your business in front of your ideal customers. Paid search, display advertising and social media advertising are some of the fabulous tricks to attract visitors. It will help in building your brand and getting your site in front of people. With paid social media ads, you can also adjust your paid strategies to suit your goals. Create highly targeted campaigns, which can serve as tailor-made ads to the customers.

5. Get customers excited with contests and giveaways: In the points above, we have talked about technical things that may help you in driving the website traffic. However, these methods may seem like long term solutions for increasing your traffic, but some of the things like viral contests, giveaways, and sweepstakes can quickly able to drive more traffic to your website. All you have to announce is to offer exciting prizes in exchange for your customers’ participation. Always keep in mind that prizes and rewards are the most powerful incentives for getting both current and new customers to actually buy from you.

6. Accept reviews and testimonials: Let other customers know your worth by the customers who are already associated with you. Reviews from your existing customers on improving your products & services can add the good points of your company. Support your clients in giving you the ratings and reviews so that you can work on the area that they need you to improvise.

Conclusion 

Getting more website visitors does not happen overnight. It requires a lot of strategies and hard work to take your business rankings on the top. With the points that we have mentioned above will surely help you in getting what you desire for your business.

So, which trick is working best for you? Share with us.

Increasing organic traffic is not easy in a scenario where paid marketing is widely used. Organic traffic can only be increased if you focus on high-volume, organic keywords. Not only increasing, you should even know which ones get the most traffic. Determining which keywords are driving traffic is what you should know to make your SEO pay off.

Keep in mind, some random keywords may provide you the rankings, but it doesn’t mean that you’re going well with SEO. Getting better rankings on Google is a real struggle. If you are not able to get it, then the possibility is that you are using techniques which are outdated for keyword research. Keyword research is among one of the things that you must master. It is the way to generate high traffic on website. If you are into digital marketing, you must be knowing that most of the users never browse past the first page of Google search results. Now, you can imagine how important it is to do proper keyword research to rank among the top 10 search results.

Keyword Research

If you are wondering what is Keyword research, here we explain. It is the process of finding and analyzing the actual search terms, which people enter into search engines. Keyword research is the foundation on which every search marketing campaign runs. Targeting relevant keywords, structuring the campaigns and relevant ad groups, and eliminating wasteful negative keywords are among the steps that advertisers follow to build a strong marketing campaigns.

Optimize your website for organic keywords

Now that you know what keyword research is, let’s move ahead with optimization. On-page optimization is holds a strong position to drive traffic through organic search. In this, site organization is also important as one cannot just dump all the keywords onto one page and hope it will work.

For example, if you run a cake shop, you may want to create a single resource which targets a set of keywords related to cakes. These different keyword variations may include how to bake a cake, cake baking tips, or ideas for cake designs. Also, with this if you have a baking classes, you should create a separate landing page optimized for “baking classes” keywords. Also, keep in mind one thing, quality is important for search engines and users. They both favor content which unique and exceptionally helpful.

Below mentioned are some of the areas where your keywords need to appear to help you in ranking organically.

• In the URL
• In title and H1 tags
• First sentence or at least the first paragraph
• Subheadings
• Image file names and alt text
• The meta description
• In links to related content

How to upgrade your keyword research strategy?

Now that we have understood the importance of keyword research, let’s see where to start? Give a productive start by following these tips.

1. Brainstorm broad topics related to your business: Start thinking of the different topics on which pertain to your business. While thinking start with broad category, and don’t worry about getting too specific. For example, if you own a bakery, you may have to break down your topics by the types of baked goods that you sell. Think about creating topics on croissants, cupcakes, cakes, quiches, brownies, cookies and many more. Note the main topics which you’ve thought.
2. Don’t force keywords: Some businesses, in their SEO strategies, define an arbitrary keyword density goal, which usually leads to redundant and superfluous phrasing. This decreases the quality of the content. Always keep in mind that shoving keywords into the articles doesn’t improve your SEO. The simple technique is to enter the keywords naturally in your content. But, if doing so distracts your reader just leave it. In few cases where you cannot include the keyword in your content, you should go back to your research and select new ones.
3. Find what users want: Content Strategy is the thing from where the keyword research process begins. You should first figure out what type of topics people are searching for, before you start researching about the keywords. And, Quora is one of the best platforms to do so. You can browse the category on Quora and figure out what kind of questions people are asking. After this, you can create a keyword rich topic for your blog post.
4. Gather keyword ideas and group similar keywords: Anything that a person search for, to want to buy product or services is a potential keyword. Look at emails from customers or customer questions and have analytics data to find keywords. Moreover, use the competing sites for finding the keywords. This way you will get the list of keywords and the next thing which you need to do to start grouping related keywords together. Phrases like ‘Cake shop in Japan’ and ‘Japan cake shop’ are same.
5. Use keyword searching tools: Alright, the fun begins from here. First, you really need to put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Understand what they would likely to search. Begin simply with brainstorming. Let’s get back to our cake shop example. If you are making cakes for special occasions, some keywords like “birthday cakes,” “affordable wedding cakes,” and “wedding cakes”. But, for all this you need to use keyword tools to surface all the relevant keywords. Keyword searching tools are easy to use to get a list of related keywords. They are even associated search volume and other data. All you need to do is to type the specific keywords to see what kind of volume they are getting.

Some keyword searching tools:

• WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool
• Jaaxy
• Google Search Console
• Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
• Moz’s Keyword Explorer
• SEMrush
• SECockpit
• Google Keyword Planner
• Google’s Keyword Planner
• KeywordTool.io

For more information, refer another blog.

Conclusion

Keyword research might seem like a daunting task. But, with an organized method and the right tools, you are able to generate organic traffic for the website. Your search engine optimization efforts are only ever going to be as effective as your process.

What efforts have you put in to generate organic traffic?

Today we all live in a digital world. Marketing Automation is the tool that paves your way to success, in a fast track process. This is a concept that is beyond tools, optimizations, keywords and all other such paraphernalia. Marketing Automation provides you with endless possibilities to get best results in business.

What is exactly meant by Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation is the practical use of software and other platforms to automate the repetitive tasks in business.

Marketing Automation helps you to streamline, simplify and measure approximately all tasks and workflows, related to your marketing activities. Marketing Automation is targeted to increase your marketing operational efficiency, to help you grow your business revenue.

Marketing Automation automates the process of delivery of your marketing contents to your customers, in a precise manner. But this process of delivering marketing contents to your customers needs to be analyzed for their business outcome. Marketing activities are aimed at the service of Revenue Delivery.

How does the customer view the technology?

You have to be conscious about what your customers think of the technology of marketing automation. You must know how you can best engage your customers, so that they turn into your advocates. Similar to how the marketing and sales should be interlinked, service to customers should also be in step of these two. All these strategies are equally important and complementary to each other, when you sell your product or your service to your customers.

Marketing is no longer a demand generating or lead routing process. It is now doing more than managerial and administrative tasks. Nurturing relationship with a customer has become most important now, because that can transform all aspects of your business, starting from service to sales, to marketing.

The point where humans meets machines, in marketing automation

Planning and development of marketing campaigns are totally human efforts. You are selling your products or services to your human customers, through your marketing efforts. You have to keep in mind the terms of business preferred by your customers first, to be able to reach to them successfully.

The solutions offered by marketing automation do not necessarily have your brand’s unique selling points, brand’s message or your product vision, in the beginning. It is a human thing deciding what message you want to give to your customers and where you would like to deliver it. How your customers are going to be engaged with you is also a human thing. You have to yourself understand the individual personalities and realize truly all the factors that can motivate them. If you analyze the metrics of your customers reach, just the large number of contacts does not mean that you are reaching the right customers, at the time and places they prefer best for getting engaged with you.

Marketing Automation will provide you data, tools, and resources that will help you to make informed decisions regarding making your marketing strategies and designing its related campaigns. But it is necessarily a human effort to execute these marketing plans and learning the factors that motivate people to engage with your platform. You have to understand how to tailor and differentiate the brand experiences for your customers. You need to own your contacts to convert them to be your customers.

A very great example of this is Amazon for Business. How smart the company is to recommend to you what you need for your personal life. It is a very human message and concise with your business needs too.

By delivering content value to those customers, who are already well informed

The current consumers and buyers do a lot of market search and research, before they make their purchases. They themselves make their buying decisions, based on their own market findings, before they meet with any sales person. There is an abundant bunch of information available to the buyer that they get from different social networks, from product reviews, from word of mouth publicity, before the buyer eventually meets with your sales team.

Most of the customers are of the opinion that modern technology keeps them well informed about product choices, than ever before. You have to think ahead of it and change your marketing tactics accordingly. You need to open up more opportunities for your buyers to engage with your brands, before they make their buying decisions.

Customers have now become self educated. You need to move beyond on boarding and teaching customers about the product only. You have to offer them with contents and other resources, which will teach them the strategies and skills they need for making their buying decisions in a brand agnostic way also.

An example of this is the initiatives of Salesforce’s educational contents. The company is thriving Trailblazers community that sits on the Trailhead learning platform. The community members use this platform to evangelize Salesforce’s products and they also organize local meetings to provide helpful user’s tips. They share honest feedbacks to others, to make the others benefit from their in depth knowledge and firsthand experience with the brand.

By planning for Successful Technical implementation of Marketing Automation

The following steps are suggested to be followed for successful implementation of Marketing Automation:-

• You need to align your sales and marketing teams from day One. You must also be internally synchronized, if you want to offer your customers a seamless customer experience.
• You have to ensure data cleanliness and hygiene. You have more options from having your data cleaned and updated, current and in your Customer Relation Management system. It effectively streamlines productivity, to have all your data in the same place, motivating your entire team to be focused on accomplishing the same objective.
• You have to adopt a policy of account based marketing. It helps the sellers to prioritize account based selling tactics. It helps to improve the customer’s experience.
• You need to make your business Customer Relation Management centric. It needs to be in place to successfully implement Activity Based Management. Customer first thinking needs to be prioritized by sales and marketing and work with an open data model, where data does not remain locked in a website. You have to have process and strategy to operate effectively.

By finding the real meanings inside the metrics

Proliferation of data can not necessarily guarantee the insight needed for you, to drive your business ahead. You may not that trained as a data scientist. The analysis paralysis issue can be tackled by harnessing artificial intelligence to inform the most effective marketing decisions.

Artificial Intelligence helps you to scale access to predictive analytics and recommendations, which will help you to deliver the maximum business value. It can also answer questions you may not be knowing, you ought to be asking.

Artificial Intelligence and analytics, when used in a meaningful way, by your sales team on the same platform can augment their work and will help them deliver more tailored informed and experienced needed, to close deals positively. Your objective is ultimately to make sure that the Artificial Intelligence and analytics is leading your business towards actionable insights, while analyzing data.

You need to start with an end goal in mind to develop a strategic and focused approach first, before you start digging into slicing data to uncover insights. Be clear about what the question is that your business would like to answer, which would steer you towards the most impactful performance data insights. Artificial Intelligence can help you capitalize on data. But having a thoughtful strategy of how your business would be using Artificial Intelligence would be driving more actionable insights for you.

Do you now think marketing automation is for you? Do you need to have additional information on this topic? Do you like to share your view on this subject? Share with us.