#2 – Feature or write about industry influencers

When you start any content marketing campaign, one of the first things that you should do is map out the influencers in your industry – think about the type of people that you follow and whose opinion that you value.

I recently published a group interview on my blog where I invited a number of industry experts to talk about how they build reader engagement with their audience. You can view the post here.

I started by inviting a number of influencers within the marketing industry to answer a number of questions on improving reader engagement – something that all of the people I asked did very well.

In the end I managed to publish responses from Seth Godin, Anita Campbell, Neil Patel and 30 other industry experts.

 

What did I do to promote it?

I reached out to everyone that took part using social media sites such as Twitter and Google Plus – sites that would notify them that they’d been mentioned.

This was then followed up with an email to let the participants know that the post was live, where they could find it along with a call to action.

The call to action was to help share the post and vote for the post on BizSugar.

The post was then imported into my Triberr account – If you’ve not come across this before, it’s a platform that allows you to link up your Twitter profile (along with Facebook and Linkedin) and join tribes of like-minded bloggers, marketers or business owners that will see your content and get the opportunity to share it with their followers.

 

What about the results?

In just over a day the post was the 2^nd most popular post on BizSugar in June:

The post has gained quite a significant amount of traction on social media:

The post also earned some good links according to Ahrefs.com (Majestic shows more referring domains, but I prefer the graph in Ahrefs):

It also helped me get contributor of the week on BizSugar.com:

You can find the post here.

Continued Part 3:

http://onebigbroadcast.com/autospeakstraighttalk/view/287/_Part_3__There_Is_More_To_This_Content_Marketing_Than_Just_Clicking_Publish.html


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Content marketing has already proved that it can be a powerful way of building your brand visibility and generating leads but a lot of marketers continue to talk about creating great content like it’s the only thing that you need to do when there is so much more to it than that. The truth is that clicking publish is not enough and it never was.

I’m sure you’ve seen it, marketers with blogs that are that popular that they only need to click the publish button and wait for all the tweets, likes, +1’s and links to poor in.

When someone is in a position like that, it’s easy for them to forget that for most bloggers, marketers and business owners – clicking publish just isn’t going to

Paul May from BuzzStream did a great job of highlighting the reality about content marketing here and mentioned a number of important points that really ring true.

The main one being – for the majority of us, if we want to get traffic, social shares and links when we publish a post then we’ve got to go out there into the world wide web and actually promote our content.

Some of the best content is left to gather dust in the far corners of the web simply for the fact that it hasn’t been promoted.

Surely, you would want to make your content visible rather than letting it sit there right?!

Below I am going to show you a number of tactics that you can use to get your content visible to the right audience along with some examples of what has worked well for me and what I believe can work well for you.

 

#1 – Put the right content in front of the right people

Knowing who exactly you are targeting is extremely important in business and it’s extremely important in content marketing too.

If you know exactly who it is that you’re targeting then you can find their online hang outs, who is active within the industry and how you can put your content in front of them.

The other side of this is writing content that you know will be a hot topic for your target audience and cause some debate – which ultimately leads to more traffic, more shares, links and visibility.

A few months ago, the marketing agency I manage launched a new service, content marketing was one of the tactics that we were focusing on and our MD, Jason Brooks wrote an opinion piece that threw the question out there – “Is Google+ The Key to Building Links with Guest Post after Penguin 2.0?”

 

How did we promote it?

We shared the content using various social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+1.

We also shared the post on several niche social networks, including BizSugar and Inbound.org.

The post was then imported into my Triberr account – If you’ve not come across this before, it’s a platform that allows you to link up your Twitter profile (along with Facebook and Linkedin) and join tribes of like-minded bloggers, marketers or business owners that will see your content and get the opportunity to share it with their followers.

 

What about the results?

Above image taken using Linktally to generate the tally of shares.

 

Why did this work so well?

Considering the site is a few months old and doesn’t have many posts this is quite impressive but there are a few things that immediately stood out:

• The majority of our following on Google+ and Twitter consists of marketing agencies and industry professionals from the marketing and SEO space
• The post also caused a lengthy debate between a number of people in Google+ which resulted in traffic, further discussions and shares

This shows that when you target the right people with the right content you can cause a stir, get a conversation going (in this case on Google+ mostly) and ultimately get a great deal of visibility that you wouldn’t get under regular circumstances.

Part 2 Continued

http://onebigbroadcast.com/autospeakstraighttalk/view/286/_Part_2__There_Is_More_To_This_Content_Marketing_Than_Just_Clicking_Publish.html

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Marketing has been democratised.

The capability to use marketing tools and technology without having to beg or pay for attention is unprecedented. It’s a time where you can now build your own crowd to market and sell to without paying the mass media gate keepers.That’s social media.

The social media networks are at your disposal and with the right tactics and software you can create brand awareness and access to influencers and decision makers in boardrooms across the world.

This freedom to take control of your own marketing comes at a cost. The cost is complexity and time. To be effective it requires using multiple networks, constant content creation and monitoring and managing.

It’s not just multiple networks and multimedia to think of, it is also about adapting to new hardware platforms where consumers receive their messaging. This is no longer restricted to just print, TV and radio but has proliferated to laptops, smart phones and tablets. They all have their own limitations and parameters to be optimal.

Within this technology and media explosion there are many marketing trends that have been emerging that we should be paying attention to.

7 Marketing Trends

Here are seven trends that all marketers need to consider in their toolbox of tactics to remain effective and current.

1. Content marketing

The importance and role of content marketing and how it works across social media, search, multimedia and mobile is becoming a key focus for many brands. Many companies don’t understand the importance of this trend and how it underlies almost all digital marketing. Brands such as Coca Cola have recognised this and changed their strategies to meet the web realities.

Brands have been blinded by the shiny new toy of social media eg Facebook and think that Facebook marketing is all they should be doing beyond their day to day habitual marketing that they have been doing for decades.

This is just a snippet of your activity focus. You should not be forgetting Twitter, Blogs and Google+…just to mention a few to market your content.

Content is the foundation of all digital marketing and is the reason people read, view or share.

Creating “liquid content” is vital to create brand awareness and tap into crowd sourced marketing.

2. Mobile Marketing

The rapid rise of smart phones and tablets has flatfooted many marketing managers and delivering marketing messages and content that is optimized for mobile platforms is becoming a “must”. Increasingly consumers are viewing content, receiving emails and buying products from “small screens”.

Companies need to urgently redesign websites and blogs that are “responsive” (respond to all devices screen sizes for optimal viewing and usability) to ensure they are optimising for mobile devices. Some websites are recording 30-40% of all traffic from mobile devices. That should not be ignored. It will cost you money and lead to missed opportunities.

3. Integrated Digital Marketing

Companies that are savvy marketers are realizing that digital marketing should not be one offs that are islands of isolated tactics. Social media and content is impacting search results. Google created Google+ for a few reasons including capturing social signals. Ensuring that your approach is allowing you to tie them all together to achieve maximum effectiveness is becoming key.

This is optimised and integrated digital marketing.

4. Social Media at Scale Marketing

Brands are also realizing that “doing” social is complex and is like juggling many balls at once. We are seeing the rush to develop, buy up start-ups and implement Enterprise platforms that are assisting marketing professionals to market, manage and monitor multiple social networks and even other digital marketing (eg email).

The tools to manage the complexity are emerging and evolving as the rush to package the technology accelerates. The holy grail to have one tool to manage your marketing is the mission for many software companies who see this opportunity.

This is “social at scale”

5. Continuous Marketing

Marketers need to realise that a strong trend is emerging called continuous marketing. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t run “campaigns”. The reality is that being found online (found in social network updates, Twitter streams and in a Google search) requires constant SEO activity and content creation, publishing and marketing.

Google hates silence.

Creating, curating and marketing content that is fed into the maws of the social media beast needs to be relentless or you will left behind and you will be lost in the web noise.

To do this well requires implementing marketing automation that leverages your time and resources.

6. Personalized Marketing

The “one size fits all” approach to marketing where mass messages on television and traditional media are becoming less effective due to media saturation. We are seeing the rise of personalized marketing on e-commerce sites, websites and emails that tailor the advertising and user interface to the relevant interests of consumers.

Visit an online store once and come back and the website knows that you are male and like Nike runners. The next email that arrives has also been personalised with products that you visited while shopping online. The web is capturing your habits as it reads the data, applies intelligence and serves up information that is relevant to “you”.

This trend is being driven by technology using “big data” to increase marketing effectiveness.

7. Visual Marketing

We first saw the creep of visual marketing into the landscape when YouTube entered mainstream consciousness a few years ago. Since then this creep has turned into a torrent of visual marketing with emergence of Pinterest, Instagram and even Slideshare.

In the last 6 months this has gone to a whole new level as Vine’s 6 second snack size video and now Instagram’s new 15 second video app has marketers scrambling for creative inspiration to apply and leverage this new trend.

Your marketing needs to ride this trend to increase engagement and cut through the online noise.

What about you?

Which trends excite you or even surprise you? Have you adapted your tactics to meet the continual marketing and technology eveolution.

Look forward to hearing your stories, feedback and insights in the comments below.
Written by Jeff Bullas 
http://dealernetservicesonline.biz
 

A new study conducted by the Internet Advertising Bureau has found that 90 per cent of consumers would recommend a brand to others after interacting with them on social media.

The study focused on FMCG brands Heinz, Kettle and Twinings and found that social media can drive by driving brand sentiment, encouraging consumer engagement and increasing brand loyalty.

More than 4,500 survey responses were collected from each brands social media pages over a two month period and supplemented by 800 interviews to inform the findings.

This showed that four out of five consumers would be more inclined to buy a brand more after being exposed to their social media, with 83 per cent happy to trial the product in such circumstances.

The uplift in sentiment for each brand was measured as Heinz 22%, Kettle 17% and Twinings 19 per cent, allowing the IAB to estimate that for every £1 spent on social media as much as £3.34 could be generated.
Kristin Brewe, the IAB’s director of marketing & communications said: “The IAB study shows that, when trying to create deeper emotional connections with consumers, social media is an essential channel for brands. This isn’t surprising since social media is the only channel where it’s possible for brands and consumers to have meaningful two-way conversations, making the strength of connections that much stronger.”

Ian Ralph, the director at marketing sciences who conducted the research, adds, “Our research shows that to create an emotional connection brands really need to provide clear, timely and, most important of all, relevant content that develop a conversation. Interestingly, we also found that brands really shouldn’t be afraid about having their products on show and of linking up their social media activities to their business objectives. Social media has the potential to turn brand customers into brand fans.

“By making people love, not just like your brand, you’re more likely to drive future purchases and increase sales.”

 By JOHN GLENDAY, THE DRUM

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