#Takeaway in Castleford

[pizzacanoe]

Pizza Canoe Castleford Takeaway: A Taste of the Mediterranean

Located in the heart of Castleford, West Yorkshire, Pizza Canoe offers a unique dining experience that blends the best of Mediterranean flavours with hearty, comfort food. Whether you're craving a succulent burger, a mouthwatering pizza, or a sizzling kebab, this local favourite has something to please every palate. Let’s explore some standout dishes you can enjoy at Pizza Canoe.

Grilled and Fried Burgers: A Classic Done Right

At Pizza Canoe Castleford, burgers are not just a meal; they’re a treat. Their grilled and fried burgers are expertly crafted, featuring juicy beef patties or tender chicken fillets, each served with a variety of fresh toppings and sauces. Moreover, you can try out various burger types like American burgers, Hawaiian burgers, Jack Daniels burgers, Bacon burgers, Italian burgers, Mushroom burgers and many more.

Pizza Burgers: The Best of Both Worlds

For those who can't decide between a pizza and a burger, the pizza burger at Pizza Canoe is the ultimate solution. This inventive dish combines a juicy burger patty with layers of melted cheese, tangy tomato sauce, and all your favourite pizza toppings, all sandwiched between two soft, toasted buns. It’s the perfect fusion of two classic favourites that will leave you craving more.

Grilled Mediterranean Kebab: A Taste of the Mediterranean

If you’re looking for something with a bit more flair, the grilled Mediterranean kebab is a must-try. Marinated in traditional Mediterranean herbs and spices, the tender chunks of lamb, chicken, or beef are grilled to perfection, offering a rich, smoky flavour. Served with a side of fresh salad, naan, and a dip, this dish transports you to the sunny shores of the Mediterranean, all while staying close to home.

Mediterranean Special Grill: A Feast for the Senses

For the ultimate Mediterranean experience, the Mediterranean special grill is the dish to go for. Featuring a selection of grilled meats, including succulent kebabs, juicy chicken, and tender lamb, this platter is a celebration of the rich flavours of the Mediterranean. Don't forget to try the best-sellers ‘4pcs Chicken Strips’ and ‘Special 100% Fillet Pork And Beef Steak’.

Why Pizza Canoe?

Whether you’re dining in or grabbing a takeaway, the restaurant is committed to providing a great experience. The Pizza Canoe menu offers a diverse range of options, all prepared with the finest ingredients. 

So, next time you’re in Castleford, make sure to stop by and indulge in the deliciousness waiting for you at Pizza Canoe!

[simplemlmsponsoring]

New Post has been published on http://simplemlmsponsoring.com/attraction-marketing-formula/copywriting/understanding-your-customer-lifecycle-this-is-what-youre-missing/

Understanding your customer lifecycle: this is what you’re missing

Customer lifecycles are part of marketing 101. But in-house marketing teams get pulled in all directions and face a constant battle for budget and resources. So, it’s little wonder that even reasonably large brands have stages in their customer lifecycles that are underserved by their content marketing strategy.

When we take on a new client we often find that it’s the earlier stages of the customer lifecycle that have been neglected. Most websites we start working on do a decent enough job talking about what they sell. But they’re not always reaching out to potential customers further up the sales funnel when they’re still researching a problem and don’t know what solution they need.

But this post isn’t about that. We’ve put out plenty of content on top and mid-funnel content marketing tactics. In this post, we’re going to the other end of the customer lifecycle. We’ll share three actionable ideas for marketing to your existing customers with the goal of getting more value out of them. That’s more value both in terms of them spending more money themselves, but also starting to advocate for you and help you make more sales.

Idea #1: Educational content to establish your authority

A first principle of content marketing is that it should inform and educate your audience. Content that meets that criteria isn’t just for introducing your brand to new potential customers. It should also form part of your strategy for retaining existing customers.

Whatever space you operate in, just because someone has bought your product or service doesn’t mean the job of your marketing team is done. Far from it. New customers are in many ways the most risky of prospects. A bad experience early on can convince them never to buy from you again and might even lead to them sharing their negative experiences with others.

When someone makes a big purchase – and this applies to both B2C and B2B – it’s natural that they immediately worry that they made the wrong decision. This is called buyer’s remorse. Whether you just bought an expensive new outfit or committed to a 12-month software contract there’ll be a voice in your head telling you you’ve made a mistake.

Marketers need to fight back against that voice and shouldn’t leave it to their product or customer service teams. Providing new customers with exclusive content – either through email, web portals or private social media groups – can help build trust. Educating your customers can help them get more value from your product or service. And it can help you learn more about what questions they have and what information they need.

The content in this immediate post-sale stage of the customer lifecycle doesn’t need to be super-targeted. But it should be exclusive to customers. People who have paid you money should feel they are getting something your regular prospects aren’t, even if it’s just a matter of how it’s presented.

Takeaways Marketing should take responsibility for tackling buyer’s remorse and convincing new customers they’ve made the right choice. You should lead with educational content – rather than promotions or special offers – to build trust and help new customers get more value from your product or service. This educational content should feel exclusive, rather just part of the marketing you’re running for regular prospects. Idea #2: Targeted drip campaigns based on customer behaviour

For content marketing to fulfil its potential it needs to be supported by some form of marketing automation. With marketing automation you can offer prospects and customers a more tailored experience. You can better understand what they want and what they need and adjust your content marketing strategy accordingly.

A lot of brands that spend money on marketing automation and content creation stop when they sign a new customer. The strategy is all about finding prospects and pushing them down the sales funnel until they buy.

But marketing automation and the right content can play a big role in building customer loyalty, value and advocacy. Similar to our first idea, you would want to make this content feel special and exclusive.

You don’t want an existing customer to find themselves auto-enrolled into a drip campaign because of some landing pages they visited. Chances are these drip campaigns will be heavily geared towards new prospects. They are likely to be more sales-oriented that you would ideally want for an existing customer. Going too hard on up-selling or, worse, trying to sell someone something they already bought – can be really damaging, especially for new customer relationships.

However, if you create exclusive content only for your customers you can still use marketing automation to tailor it to their specific needs. If you get that right, you can further strengthen the level of trust customers feel towards your brand. And by increasing their engagement with your content, learn more about what they like and don’t like.

Takeaways You should avoid dropping existing customers into regular drip campaigns Existing customers – especially newer ones – might not respond well to mis-targeted or “salesey” content Customer-only drip campaigns can help you learn more about what existing customers want and need from you Idea #3: Earning the right to run promotions and exclusive offers

While hitting new customers with the hard sell is likely to backfire that doesn’t mean customers can’t or shouldn’t be sold to. True, there are some products that people don’t usually need more than one of. You just sold someone a house or a car. Chances are they won’t need another one just yet.

But your content marketing strategy should do two important things for you post-sale: first it should earn you the right to upsell or re-sell to your existing customers; and second it should help you put special offers and promotions in front of those customers at the right time.

Earning the right to sell comes from building trust. For that you need to be generous with content that provides free advice, tips and guidance. And you need to have a sophisticated enough marketing operation to get that content right. Even the very best piece of educational content can lose some or all of its value if it comes too late or too early.

When you’ve built that trust and shown that value, you then need your salesy content to meet the same criteria. First that it’s relevant and exclusive. Customers should feel that they’re getting offers that are targeted to them, based on their behaviour. Second that it arrives at the right time. Customers who watched a webinar on new product features, for example, are more likely to respond to an offer to upgrade now than in a month’s time.

Takeaways Existing customers can and should be sold to but you need to earn the right to do it Marketing automation and content creation can build a foundation of trust and help you learn more about your customers This in turn helps you make better-targeted, better-timed special offers and promotions that are more likely to lead to customer loyalty and advocacy

The post Understanding your customer lifecycle: this is what you’re missing appeared first on Castleford Media.

Read more: castleford.com.au

[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

Is influencer marketing right for your industry?

Somehow we live in a world where you can read studies from the likes of Linqia claiming “92 per cent of marketers who use influencer marketing find it successful”, followed, on the same day, by a half-dozen recent articles about influencer marketing being dead.

Given this rollercoaster of information, it’s hard to know if influencer marketing is right for you and your industry. Some people still swear by it, while others have sworn off it.

So is your industry rife with influencer opportunities? In this article we’ll aim to find out by looking at:

Whether influencer marketing will work in your industry.

How to tell if you should be using it.

Alternatives if you reckon it’s not right.

Part 1: Which industries is influencer marketing right for?

The short answer: Any.

The long answer: Seriously. Any. It really doesn’t matter what industry you’re in! Influencer marketing is all about leveraging the power of personalities who have the power to sway other people’s opinions on a topic. Because the internet is for anyone and everyone, the actual industry vertical is almost irrelevant, as every industry has its influencers.

Yes some of these personalities have larger followings than others, but because influence is about influence, not just follower count, you can talk to personalities with small, niche followings and still get excellent engagement compared to those whose brands are followed by myriad disinterested casual fans.

Here’s a little proof: A HelloSociety study found that micro-influencers could be as much as 6.7 times more efficient at engagement than influencers with large followings.

Key takeaway: It may appear that you need to be a game developer, beauty product manufacturer or Silicon Valley tech giant to find good influencers, but this simply isn’t true. Every industry has its influencers – after all, everyone needs guests to speak at their annual conferences, right?

Part 2: How to tell if influencer marketing is right for you

So we know that it doesn’t matter what your industry is. Property, automotive, heck even custom wooden office desks – there’s somebody out there who will be qualified to promote your product. What’s next for you, then, is not the question ‘is my industry right?’ but ‘are my business goals right?’.

Influencer marketing has caused controversy in some circles because it has at times proven ineffective. That’s because it isn’t a magic wand that makes you famous. It’s a tool like any other, with correct and incorrect applications.

Getting those applications right starts with knowing your marketing goals, which we’ll discuss more now.

Influencer marketing isn’t a magic wand - it has correct and incorrect applications.

How to use influencer marketing

Use influencer marketing for: Reach and awareness at the top of the marketing funnel, with some crossover to the mid-funnel depending on the influencer. Build long-term campaigns, as ongoing relationships with your influencers and their audience is key to success.

When influencers create content with your product, they are speaking to a large number of relevant audience members. This is going to introduce a large number of people to your business for the first time. As we know from the marketing funnel, this is a user base that isn’t ready to buy yet, but now knows your name for future consideration.

Some influencers, for example product reviewers, introduce new users into the middle of the funnel instead.

Don’t use influencer marketing for: Short-term campaigns where you need fast results, Conversions can be a tricky goal to achieve via influencers.

Influencer marketing is a long-term marketing tool. It gets more effective over time as you build relationships with influencers and learn who is and isn’t effective.

Any campaign where you need big, fast results might not be appropriate for influencer marketing. The reason being that it can take time to find the right influencers and build relationships with them – although their actual act of posting about you can generate quick results once this has occurred.

Additionally, as influencer activity is notoriously tricky to measure – “determining the ROI” of influencer campaigns was the top challenge of 2018 in this area, according to the Linqia study linked earlier – you might have difficulty determining whether or not this new audience converted.

Influencer marketing has positively exploded in the age of #socialmedia - so will this new avenue for reaching a younger audience survive the new year? https://t.co/3A5e1cZU9G pic.twitter.com/rc2aiNEtzE

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) December 18, 2018

Wait, so I can’t use influencers in the lower funnel?

You absolutely can, but it’s a little trickier than those top-funnel goals as you need more than just a simple shout out or mention.

Micro-influencers with highly engaged followings are considered best by many marketing pros for bottom-funnel business goals. That’s because they have more engaged followings, and remember that engagement is key to influence, not follower count.

These are some tactics that other businesses have used successfully for BoFu influencer marketing, particularly with niche influencers:

1. Collaborating: A basic shout out won’t do it, but actually collaborating with an influencer could. For example, US business Lord & Taylor got 50 fashion Instagrammers to each wear the same dress from their latest line. The ‘grammers then did what they do best – posted a high-quality fashion photo, in this case wearing the dress. The product wasn’t just mentioned, it informed the entire substance of the content. The dress sold out the following weekend.

2. Affiliate marketing: Affiliate marketing is where you sell something via someone else (in this case, an influencer). The affiliate then gets a cut of the sale, which is their incentive to take part. Influencers are adept at weaving affiliate marketing deals into their content – some use unique discount codes, some use links, but both have the same intention. They add it into their content, and you as the business can track users coming via those unique links.

To summarise

Is influencer marketing right for you?

You’ll need to understand what your business goals are, and what you hope to achieve. Influencer marketing can be used effectively at the top of the marketing funnel and in some ways at the bottom, but in all cases it typically requires a high degree of relationship building.

While it is cost effective, it can be time consuming. If you have the time and suitable goals, it sounds like you’re onto a winner. If you don’t, we have some alternatives for you…

Part 3: Alternatives to influencer marketing

Yeah OK, obviously all types of marketing are technically alternatives to influencer marketing. Don’t go getting smart. We’re focusing on digital strategies that are similar in nature to influencer marketing, but don’t require influencer involvement.

We’ll cover:

Paid advertising

Event hosting

Your own social media

User generated content

Creating an influencer of your own

1. Paid advertising

You may recall we mentioned that influencer marketing wasn’t ideal for fast solutions. Well, paid advertising is. Whether you choose Facebook, Google Ads or another platform more relevant to your users, paid advertising is one of the quickest ways to get your content in front of more users online.

That said, as soon as the money stops rolling in, so too do the customers. Paid advertising used by itself gets costly over time. We recommend you pair it with a long-term solution like SEO content or influencer marketing,

So you have a solution that starts slow and gets better in addition to a solution that starts quickly but can be turned off later.

Paid advertising is only as effective as the amount of budget you feed it.

2. Event marketing

Event marketing is where you host an event specifically to promote a product, service or your brand in general. It doesn’t have to just be a product roll out, but could be educational (like a Hubspot conference, for example). In either, the event heavily features your brand.

Event marketing has a number of key benefits, but the big ones are:

It promotes brand awareness.

It’s a chance to network with key people in your industry.

It can generate leads, as attendees offer their emails on sign up.

It can drive sales.

If you invite influencers to speak at your event, that’s a double-whammy!

3. Your own social media

Social media marketing isn’t just for influencers. Are you posting regularly on your various profiles? Do you even have various profiles?

If not, you need to get serious about social. It’s a direct link to your audience, where you can chat with them, answer questions, post content and pay for advertising on platforms with millions, if not billions, of users.

To get started on revamping your social presence, check out our infographic “Clean up your social media pages with this checklist”.

4. User generated content

User generated content is when people create content for your brand without being paid to do so – they simply want to.

In its most basic form, this could be asking people to include certain hashtags in their social posts – hashtags that are linked to your business, of course. Every time someone uses these tags, it promotes your brand’s campaign.

Another example would be when businesses repost user content, thus encouraging more creators to make content to be reposted. Software giant Adobe uses this regularly, asking users to submit creative work using certain hashtags, which it then posts to its own page (this is an awesome relationship between a brand and creators that use its products).

View this post on Instagram

Swipe

to see our theme for the month. Hint: it's going to be peachy.

⁣ ⁣ To kick off 2019, we’re taking a closer look at the Color of The Year. Submit your creative work using #Adobe_LivingCoral for a chance to be featured.

: @AdobeStock contributor @eyeemphoto

A post shared by Adobe (@adobe) on Jan 1, 2019 at 9:46pm PST

Other examples of user generated content include product reviews, unboxing videos, tutorials and general blog posts about a topic.

5. Your own influencer

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em right? There’s no reason you can’t try to create your own influencer to then help promote your brand. Maybe that future influencer is you!

So how does one create such a magnificent beast?

Well, it’s time consuming. But it could have serious long-term benefits that are even more cost effective than paying outside influencers.

How?

Build your expertise: Create your own high-level content, network in your industry, speak at events and become a part of the conversation. The more you do this, the more ‘expert’ your persona will become.

Leverage other influencers: Other influencers can help you become an influencer yourself. Create conversations and relationships with relevant parties on a personal level, not a brand level. Sharing their content and engaging with their content (i.e. commenting) is a good way to start this.

Look after your followers: Followers aren’t sheeple that will follow you no matter what. If you don’t respect the relationship, they’ll move on. Engage with your community, answer questions, have conversations and make it a two-way street.

For a more detailed look at this topic, check out our article “How to build your brand influence online”.

Conclusion

Is influencer marketing right for your industry? Yes! And it doesn’t matter which one you’re in. It might take longer to find relevant influencers if you’re in a very niche space, but chances are they are out there somewhere.

Is influencer marketing right for your brand? That depends more on what you want to achieve, how quickly you want to achieve it, and how much energy you can dedicate to the attempt. Influencer marketing is not a magic make-me-famous wand, but it does work when used well.

from http://bit.ly/2FjPn7p

[pizzacanoe]

https://pizzacanoe.co.uk/

Enjoy delicious pizzas, garlic bread, burgers, kebab grills, & fried chicken at Pizza Canoe, Castleford West Yorkshire WF10 1EE. Order for the best Pizza Canoe deals!

[pizzacanoe]

Discover Pizza Canoe Castleford West Yorkshire WF10 1EE, where you can enjoy delicious grilled burgers, pizza burgers, Mediterranean kebabs, and more. Order online today!

[myemilycoates]

CVL Brief - Initial Town Research 2

I definitely found more information about certain towns, towns with little online information gave me the impression they aren’t very big or well known.

6. Rotherham

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham

2. https://www.ranker.com/list/famous-people-from-rotherham/reference

3. http://population.city/united-kingdom/rotherham/

7. Blackpool

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackpool

2. https://www.liveblackpool.info/about/history/history-of-blackpool-and-growth-of-the-town/

3. https://www.iknow-uk.com/articles/blackpool-piers

4. https://bartonparkhomes.com/why-blackpool-still-popular-holiday-destination/

5. https://www.blackpoolgrand.co.uk/famous-people-from-blackpool

6. https://population-hub.com/en/gb/population-of-blackpool-5517.html

8. Oldham 

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldham#cite_note-FOOTNOTEMcNeilNevell2000-18

2. https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/inside-oldham-gem-thats-one-19018846

3. https://forum.charltonlife.com/discussion/29535/10-1-12-things-you-never-knew-about-oldham

4. https://www.oldham.gov.uk/info/200692/invest_in_oldham/1775/key_facts

5. https://www.thefamouspeople.com/oldham-1838.php

9. Castleford

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castleford

2. https://www.experiencewakefield.co.uk/thedms.aspx?dms=3&venue=2190628

3. https://www.yorkshire.com/things-to-do/listings?term=&location=Castleford&categories=historicsitestructure&categories=themedattraction&categories=sightseeingtransport&categories=animalcentredattraction&categories=attraction&categories=naturalfeature&categories=gardenenvironmentalattraction&categories=fooddrinkcentredattraction&categories=entertainment&categories=retail&categories=museumheritagegalleryvisitor&categories=musicandtheatre&categories=demonstration&categories=exhibition&categories=festival&categories=fetefair&categories=guidedwalk&categories=lecture&categories=participatoryevent&categories=performance&categories=religiousevent&categories=sale&categories=showdisplay&categories=sportingevent&categories=tradeonlyevent&categories=workshop&categories=restaurant&categories=pubinn&categories=cafe&categories=tearoomcoffeeshop&categories=bar&categories=cookeryschool&categories=brewery&categories=distillery&categories=vineyard&categories=takeaway&categories=spa&categories=sightseeing&categories=hirecentre&categories=sportandleisure&categories=adventureandactivity&categories=sportsvenues&categories=golfcourses

4. https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/yorkshireandthehumber/west_yorkshire/E35000669__castleford/

5. https://www.bornglorious.com/united_kingdom/birthday/?pl=546485&pd=01

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldham#cite_note-FOOTNOTEMcNeilNevell2000-18

10. Blackburn

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackburn#cite_note-123

2. http://www.visitblackburn.co.uk/outdoors/canals

3. https://datacommons.org/place/nuts/UKD41?utm_medium=explore&mprop=count&popt=Person&hl=en

4. https://www.ranker.com/list/famous-people-from-blackburn/reference

5.  https://www.thecrazytourist.com/15-best-things-to-do-in-blackburn-lancashire-england/

6. https://www.visitlancashire.com/explore/Blackburn

7. https://www.keytek.co.uk/local-area-guides/living-in-blackburn/

[simplemlmsponsoring]

New Post has been published on http://simplemlmsponsoring.com/attraction-marketing-formula/copywriting/is-influencer-marketing-right-for-your-industry/

Is influencer marketing right for your industry?

Somehow we live in a world where you can read studies from the likes of Linqia claiming “92 per cent of marketers who use influencer marketing find it successful”, followed, on the same day, by a half-dozen recent articles about influencer marketing being dead.

Given this rollercoaster of information, it’s hard to know if influencer marketing is right for you and your industry. Some people still swear by it, while others have sworn off it.

So is your industry rife with influencer opportunities? In this article we’ll aim to find out by looking at:

Whether influencer marketing will work in your industry. How to tell if you should be using it. Alternatives if you reckon it’s not right.

Part 1: Which industries is influencer marketing right for?

The short answer: Any.

The long answer: Seriously. Any. It really doesn’t matter what industry you’re in! Influencer marketing is all about leveraging the power of personalities who have the power to sway other people’s opinions on a topic. Because the internet is for anyone and everyone, the actual industry vertical is almost irrelevant, as every industry has its influencers.

Yes some of these personalities have larger followings than others, but because influence is about influence, not just follower count, you can talk to personalities with small, niche followings and still get excellent engagement compared to those whose brands are followed by myriad disinterested casual fans.

Here’s a little proof: A HelloSociety study found that micro-influencers could be as much as 6.7 times more efficient at engagement than influencers with large followings.

Key takeaway: It may appear that you need to be a game developer, beauty product manufacturer or Silicon Valley tech giant to find good influencers, but this simply isn’t true. Every industry has its influencers – after all, everyone needs guests to speak at their annual conferences, right?

Part 2: How to tell if influencer marketing is right for you

So we know that it doesn’t matter what your industry is. Property, automotive, heck even custom wooden office desks – there’s somebody out there who will be qualified to promote your product. What’s next for you, then, is not the question ‘is my industry right?’ but ‘are my business goals right?’.

Influencer marketing has caused controversy in some circles because it has at times proven ineffective. That’s because it isn’t a magic wand that makes you famous. It’s a tool like any other, with correct and incorrect applications.

Getting those applications right starts with knowing your marketing goals, which we’ll discuss more now.

Influencer marketing isn’t a magic wand – it has correct and incorrect applications.

How to use influencer marketing

Use influencer marketing for: Reach and awareness at the top of the marketing funnel, with some crossover to the mid-funnel depending on the influencer. Build long-term campaigns, as ongoing relationships with your influencers and their audience is key to success.

When influencers create content with your product, they are speaking to a large number of relevant audience members. This is going to introduce a large number of people to your business for the first time. As we know from the marketing funnel, this is a user base that isn’t ready to buy yet, but now knows your name for future consideration.

Some influencers, for example product reviewers, introduce new users into the middle of the funnel instead.

Don’t use influencer marketing for: Short-term campaigns where you need fast results, Conversions can be a tricky goal to achieve via influencers.

Influencer marketing is a long-term marketing tool. It gets more effective over time as you build relationships with influencers and learn who is and isn’t effective.

Any campaign where you need big, fast results might not be appropriate for influencer marketing. The reason being that it can take time to find the right influencers and build relationships with them – although their actual act of posting about you can generate quick results once this has occurred.

Additionally, as influencer activity is notoriously tricky to measure – “determining the ROI” of influencer campaigns was the top challenge of 2018 in this area, according to the Linqia study linked earlier – you might have difficulty determining whether or not this new audience converted.

Influencer marketing has positively exploded in the age of #socialmedia – so will this new avenue for reaching a younger audience survive the new year? https://t.co/3A5e1cZU9G pic.twitter.com/rc2aiNEtzE

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) December 18, 2018

Wait, so I can’t use influencers in the lower funnel?

You absolutely can, but it’s a little trickier than those top-funnel goals as you need more than just a simple shout out or mention.

Micro-influencers with highly engaged followings are considered best by many marketing pros for bottom-funnel business goals. That’s because they have more engaged followings, and remember that engagement is key to influence, not follower count.

These are some tactics that other businesses have used successfully for BoFu influencer marketing, particularly with niche influencers:

1. Collaborating: A basic shout out won’t do it, but actually collaborating with an influencer could. For example, US business Lord & Taylor got 50 fashion Instagrammers to each wear the same dress from their latest line. The ‘grammers then did what they do best – posted a high-quality fashion photo, in this case wearing the dress. The product wasn’t just mentioned, it informed the entire substance of the content. The dress sold out the following weekend.

2. Affiliate marketing: Affiliate marketing is where you sell something via someone else (in this case, an influencer). The affiliate then gets a cut of the sale, which is their incentive to take part. Influencers are adept at weaving affiliate marketing deals into their content – some use unique discount codes, some use links, but both have the same intention. They add it into their content, and you as the business can track users coming via those unique links.

To summarise

Is influencer marketing right for you?

You’ll need to understand what your business goals are, and what you hope to achieve. Influencer marketing can be used effectively at the top of the marketing funnel and in some ways at the bottom, but in all cases it typically requires a high degree of relationship building.

While it is cost effective, it can be time consuming. If you have the time and suitable goals, it sounds like you’re onto a winner. If you don’t, we have some alternatives for you…

Part 3: Alternatives to influencer marketing

Yeah OK, obviously all types of marketing are technically alternatives to influencer marketing. Don’t go getting smart. We’re focusing on digital strategies that are similar in nature to influencer marketing, but don’t require influencer involvement.

We’ll cover:

Paid advertising Event hosting Your own social media User generated content Creating an influencer of your own

1. Paid advertising

You may recall we mentioned that influencer marketing wasn’t ideal for fast solutions. Well, paid advertising is. Whether you choose Facebook, Google Ads or another platform more relevant to your users, paid advertising is one of the quickest ways to get your content in front of more users online.

That said, as soon as the money stops rolling in, so too do the customers. Paid advertising used by itself gets costly over time. We recommend you pair it with a long-term solution like SEO content or influencer marketing,

So you have a solution that starts slow and gets better in addition to a solution that starts quickly but can be turned off later.

Paid advertising is only as effective as the amount of budget you feed it.

2. Event marketing

Event marketing is where you host an event specifically to promote a product, service or your brand in general. It doesn’t have to just be a product roll out, but could be educational (like a Hubspot conference, for example). In either, the event heavily features your brand.

Event marketing has a number of key benefits, but the big ones are:

It promotes brand awareness. It’s a chance to network with key people in your industry. It can generate leads, as attendees offer their emails on sign up. It can drive sales.

If you invite influencers to speak at your event, that’s a double-whammy!

3. Your own social media

Social media marketing isn’t just for influencers. Are you posting regularly on your various profiles? Do you even have various profiles?

If not, you need to get serious about social. It’s a direct link to your audience, where you can chat with them, answer questions, post content and pay for advertising on platforms with millions, if not billions, of users.

To get started on revamping your social presence, check out our infographic “Clean up your social media pages with this checklist”.

4. User generated content

User generated content is when people create content for your brand without being paid to do so – they simply want to.

In its most basic form, this could be asking people to include certain hashtags in their social posts – hashtags that are linked to your business, of course. Every time someone uses these tags, it promotes your brand’s campaign.

Another example would be when businesses repost user content, thus encouraging more creators to make content to be reposted. Software giant Adobe uses this regularly, asking users to submit creative work using certain hashtags, which it then posts to its own page (this is an awesome relationship between a brand and creators that use its products).

View this post on Instagram

Swipe

to see our theme for the month. Hint: it’s going to be peachy.

⁣ ⁣ To kick off 2019, we’re taking a closer look at the Color of The Year. Submit your creative work using #Adobe_LivingCoral for a chance to be featured.

: @AdobeStock contributor @eyeemphoto

A post shared by Adobe (@adobe) on Jan 1, 2019 at 9:46pm PST

Other examples of user generated content include product reviews, unboxing videos, tutorials and general blog posts about a topic.

5. Your own influencer

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em right? There’s no reason you can’t try to create your own influencer to then help promote your brand. Maybe that future influencer is you!

So how does one create such a magnificent beast?

Well, it’s time consuming. But it could have serious long-term benefits that are even more cost effective than paying outside influencers.

How?

Build your expertise: Create your own high-level content, network in your industry, speak at events and become a part of the conversation. The more you do this, the more ‘expert’ your persona will become.

Leverage other influencers: Other influencers can help you become an influencer yourself. Create conversations and relationships with relevant parties on a personal level, not a brand level. Sharing their content and engaging with their content (i.e. commenting) is a good way to start this.

Look after your followers: Followers aren’t sheeple that will follow you no matter what. If you don’t respect the relationship, they’ll move on. Engage with your community, answer questions, have conversations and make it a two-way street.

For a more detailed look at this topic, check out our article “How to build your brand influence online”.

Conclusion

Is influencer marketing right for your industry? Yes! And it doesn’t matter which one you’re in. It might take longer to find relevant influencers if you’re in a very niche space, but chances are they are out there somewhere.

Is influencer marketing right for your brand? That depends more on what you want to achieve, how quickly you want to achieve it, and how much energy you can dedicate to the attempt. Influencer marketing is not a magic make-me-famous wand, but it does work when used well.

The post Is influencer marketing right for your industry? appeared first on Castleford Media.

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[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

The key aspects of writing a brief for your website content

As much as I hate to admit it, I’d be lost without good content briefing. In fact, if this article about briefs wasn’t so well briefed, it wouldn’t have a chance of ranking, meaning you probably wouldn’t be reading it.

This is no chicken and egg conundrum: The brief has to come first.

Not only does the brief have to come first, it also has to be on point – and this is what we’re going to cover today. Read on to find answers to the questions:

What is a content brief?

What must you include in a content brief for writers, designers and video producers?

Why are briefs important? 

Let’s go – I’ll try to keep this brief. 

These 10 tips will help you get most out of your content writer, whether that’s an employee, a freelancer or an agency writer. https://t.co/tU6yZLnc4R

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) July 3, 2019

What is a content brief?

A content brief lays out the whos, whats, whens, whys and hows for a piece of content. This could be anything from a blog article or ebook to an infographic or webinar. When done correctly, a brief should be a set of instructions a producer can follow to create an asset that exactly meets your marketing goals.

Who writes content briefs?

We’ve written before about the role of content strategists. These data-driven individuals are perfectly placed to turn insights gleaned from their close relationship with your website content into actionable briefs for producers to execute. 

In other words, the person writing content briefs in your organisation needs to be someone with a complete grasp of your marketing goals, combined with a fluent understanding of the role content can play in meeting them.

Top tip: Whoever ends up as the brief boss in your company, we advise they create a template for these documents. Many of the vital details producers need will often remain broadly similar from piece to piece, so having a template (which you can tweak as necessary) will be a real time-saver.

Not all heroes wear capes. Here we pull the mask from the mysterious #content strategist to show just what they can do for your business. https://t.co/aqsSeq3XPf pic.twitter.com/4f9JixGkGg

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) March 17, 2019

What to include in a content brief

Every content brief you produce should incorporate:

1. The target audience

This article would read very differently if it was aimed at older CEOs as opposed to hip, young marketers (stop blushing). Not only might I need to explain more about digital marketing to provide context, but turns of phrase such as ‘on point’ would be less appropriate.

See what I’m getting at? Your producer needs to know exactly who will view their content if they’re to nail tone, style and subject matter.

So, where do you get the information on your target audience? Two words: User personas. These are essential documents your strategist should compile containing details such as:

Age

Location

Income

Interests and education

Values and beliefs

Common pain points

Ideally, you’ll use this information to create specific personas for each campaign. For example, if you’re a real estate company you may be specifically targeting first-time buyers, or families wishing to upgrade. You need to include this audience information in your brief.

User personas may sound like an unnecessary process, but they are the key to good quality content. Don’t believe me? Check out our reasons why. https://t.co/HLd89bVlvj pic.twitter.com/G2NEuyczlo

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) January 18, 2019

2. The content’s goal(s)

Whether you’re briefing up a whitepaper on generating ROI from SMART technology, or a custom graphic showing how curtain materials impact lighting in a room, every single piece of content you create should fulfil a specific mission.

This is another area where your strategy team plays a key role. They should already be analysing all aspects of your website content to establish:

What content has performed well in the past.

What hasn’t.

What gaps currently exist in your content.

What types of content would best achieve this.

The content marketing funnel is a good way to set goals for individual pieces:

1. The top: This is where you have content aimed at thought leadership. You won’t namedrop individual products or services, and your Call To Action (CTA) might encourage people to simply read more about a subject on your blog page.

Top-of-funnel content is great for raising brand awareness, positioning yourself as thought leaders in your industry and answering common audience queries. Note: With the right SEO tactics, thought leadership content can be great for boosting your organic search rankings.

2. The middle: Production aimed at mid-funnel objectives will retain some thought leadership elements, but is for searchers who’ve gone passed basic questions. Now, they want more information on solutions to a pain point. 

The idea here is to guide prospects towards the bottom of the funnel, without scaring them off with a hard sell. You can start to introduce your offering, perhaps as the best among a group of alternatives, but aim to keep an educational tone.

A mid-funnel CTA might be downloading a higher value asset, for example an eBook, that will entrench your knowledgeable status further in their minds. 

3. The bottom: This is where the magic (hopefully) happens. Following careful nurturing, your leads should by now recognise your brand as an authority in a given area, and you can present them with an offering that will meet their needs. 

A CTA with bottom-funnel goals could be a link to a specific product landing page or booking a meeting with a sales representative. 

For your producer, knowing where in the funnel a piece is supposed to sit will help them find the right tone, and will also guide their research. For example, should they be reading up on product specs for a bottom-funnel piece, or delving into reputable sources to use in thought leadership?

Finally, the brief should also allow them to choose a suitable CTA to drive desirable reader actions.

A content planner keeps your #content aligned with your commercial goals, ensures blogs are published in time, and allows for transparency. It's an essential tool. Here are our best tips and tricks for creating a really effective blog content calendar: https://t.co/1ZtHu9Z0jz

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) June 19, 2019

3. Deadlines

The other element that all content briefs must contain is a deadline. 

This is particularly important for time-sensitive pieces – for example, content aimed at supporting a product launch – but applies to every asset you create.

The reason is simple: You want your marketing campaign to stay on track, right?

Specifics to include for a content writer’s brief

A content writer’s brief should include all the above, and:

1. Word count allocations

While this may feel like an editorial decision, it’s vital you set word count allocations at a strategic level.

This is because word counts can impact SEO. One of the criteria Google’s algorithm uses to rank written content is how informative it is – the more information you provide to your readers the better. The idea is to be as comprehensive as possible. Of course, this is generally easier to achieve if you give your writers more words to play with.

However, don’t take this to mean:

That longer is always better – Your content also needs to be full of value takeaways and well written. Rambling, unfocussed articles that lack purpose won’t do you any favours in Google’s eyes.

That you can never write shorter copy – It really depends on the competing content. If you’re up against an article that’s sitting on 1,800 words, and you only plan to write 600, you’ll likely struggle to beat it. However, if your content is really unique then this isn’t as important. 

Wondering where to begin in calculating appropriate word counts? MarketMuse can give you topic specific suggestions to help you outrank your competitors.

2. Necessary collateral 

If your writer requires particular collateral to complete their work, this needs to go in the brief.

Common examples include:

Contact information for internal external experts writers might reach out to for quotes or insights.

Access to reports or statistics they will use for writing.

Custom images created by the graphics team to exemplify points in the article.

Do not push work into your production system if you’re yet to finalise this sort of collateral in the brief – you’ll only have yourself to blame when it causes bottlenecks down the track! 

Keywords are like Sean Bean - no matter how many times people try to kill them off, they just won’t die. Here’s why they’re still crucial to your #SEO #strategy https://t.co/jbEF82XriL pic.twitter.com/3WEzeWHH0B

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) April 11, 2019

Specifics to include in a design brief

Ideally, you’ll already have a company style guide that your designers follow religiously. However, it’s still important to properly brief each piece of content your in-house team creates. 

The vital elements are:

1. Image specifications:

The most important details here are the size and resolution of the image. If you’re creating something to use as a website banner, the specs will be radically different to a small thumbnail that you might include as part of a clickable CTA.

2. Any deviations from brand guidelines

Your brand guidelines should include precise requirements in terms of fonts, colours and logos that your designers will use in the vast majority of their content.

However, if you want a particular piece to diverge from these in anyway, this info has to go into your design brief, otherwise your team will go on autopilot!

You can also instruct your designers here on the specific tone you want a given piece to convey, and what mood you aim to inspire in viewers.

The term ‘brand style guide’ is bandied around a lot in #marketing circles, but what do they contain, and why does your company need one? https://t.co/yFxVohBM8Z pic.twitter.com/k5X5m9JHCZ

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) March 8, 2019

 3. Specifics to include in a video brief

In 2019, you need to be using video marketing. Why? Because it works. In fact, according to a 2018 survey from Brightcove, 53% of respondents reported engaging with a brand after viewing one of its videos on social media.

What’s more. 83% of marketers last year told Demand Metric that they thought this medium is going to become more important in future.

However, you’re only going to see ROI on your video content if you brief it correctly in the first place. Here’s how Spielberg would do it:

1. Length

The videographer’s equivalent of a word count, the length will dictate how much detail the content can go into. 

So, what’s the perfect duration? According to Wistia, videos up to two minutes long get a lot of engagement, but if you get more towards the three minute mark, you’re likely to experience a drop off in attention spans.

However long you decide to make it, just make sure that information is in the brief.

2. Participants

If you want the video to contain interviews with experts, product managers or members of the public, you need to tell your producers who these people are and how to contact them.

For content requiring a narrator, define any stylistic requirements – i.e. do you need a particular accent if your customers are based overseas? Similarly, are you going to seek someone to read a script in a foreign language, or provide subtitles?

3. Location

If it’s important to the target audience or video’s purpose, specify where the shoot should take place. 

Think about the message you’ll send – B2B companies will likely want to highlight professionalism by shooting in an office environment, while B2Cs may wish to show off their fun side by going somewhere a little off the wall.

from http://bit.ly/2lEd0Qh

[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

What should you include in a marketing report?

Reporting on the outcomes of digital marketing campaigns is much like stretching after a long run – somewhat tedious, occasionally painful, but vital for future success.

In the same way that a runner looks for niggling aches and pains, without an unblinking analysis of how your campaign performed, you’ll have no idea where your strengths and weaknesses lie, and what you can do differently next time the starting gun sounds.

Today, we’ll be exploring how to write a robust marketing report. We’ll look at what to include, how to demonstrate ROI and some handy tools for getting the job done.

Time to report for duty.

Ten essential elements of successful #B2B #marketing strategies with actionable takeaways, links and plenty of nerdy detail. No download required. https://t.co/cKG2dLFlox pic.twitter.com/IYcETHHSC7

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) April 30, 2019

What should you include in every marketing report?

Whether you’re producing a monthly, annual or end-of-campaign report, it should include the following features:

1. An overview

Before you dig down into any precise details, start with a succinct cover page that gives a broad brush idea of how things have gone. Mention any particular wins as well as areas where you were hoping for better results. This means someone who isn’t necessarily familiar with digital marketing – your CEO, for example – can understand the headlines at a glance. 

While this overview should come first, you’ll probably write it last as it will be based on the trends you dive into during the meat of the report.

In this overview, you should also briefly outline the campaign strategy, specifically:

The scope and objectives.

The target audience.

The channels you used to reach this audience.

You could probably recite this information in your sleep, but remember those outside your department may have less insight. 

From here, we can break things up into specific sub areas.

2. Lead and conversion results

Ever met a senior executive who isn’t interested in ROI? Me neither, and that’s why this needs to be top of your reporting list. The key things to include here are:

Revenue – If you’re selling from an e-commerce store, start this section by demonstrating exactly how much money it has made for the business.

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) – To work out how much your new customers cost, add up the total spend on marketing in this campaign (not just advertising – think staff salaries, bonuses and overheads) and divide by the number of new patrons won in the period.

Estimated customer lifetime value – Working out the lifetime value of a customer involves taking the gross margin of that individual away from the revenue they’ve generated for you, and dividing this figure by their estimated cancellation rate.

Leads and conversion rates per channel – Your readers will want to know where these new customers are coming from. Be sure to include every branch of your strategy, from paid search to email marketing to social media.

Organic vs. paid leads – While they could work it out from above, your CEO will likely be interested in a distinct breakdown of paid vs. organic results, so make it easy for them!

#Marketing audits are an essential part of any business checkup. Let’s delve into what they are, how they work and the benefits they bring. https://t.co/okiN7zAn7c pic.twitter.com/Nzshv6Ay3V

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) March 11, 2019

3. Traffic metrics

Even if some web traffic didn’t ultimately convert, it’s still important to establish where they came from. Raising brand awareness is a key part of many marketing campaigns, and this will tell you which channels are bringing home the metaphorical bacon.

A lot of this info can be found in Google Analytics. Among the nuggets it can divulge are:

Overall traffic – Ideally, you should see an increase in overall web traffic as a result of your marketing campaigns. However, you should view this in the context of conversions and the actions users take on your page.

Sources -In Google Analytics you can see how users came to your site. Standard routes include:

Organic search – If you’ve been attempting to raise your SEO game, you’d hope to see a marked spike in traffic from blogs and landing pages.

Social media – Social is great for getting your name out there, and if you’ve been targeting these platforms ideally this will be borne out in Analytics.

Paid search – You can filter by Google Ads campaign names in Analytics to see if your paid efforts have delivered ROI.

Direct traffic – You’ll also be able to identify users who’ve come to your site simply by typing in your URL.

Bounce rate – Getting people onto your site is no good if they take one look and run the other way. Don’t panic if this is happening to you – you just need to take some time to improve searchers’ experiences. 

Optional extras based on your needs:

From here, the order you take for the remainder of the report is up to you, and will probably reflect the particulars of your last campaign. Standard elements to include are:

4. Social media

Each of the major social platforms has its own analytics hub – think Insights on Facebook and Instagram or LinkedIn Analytics. 

These are a veritable gold mine of info for marketers, but you need to know which social media metrics matter. The most important are:

Engagement – One of the best things about social media from a marketing perspective is the chance to have authentic interactions with your target audience. This is where measuring engagement comes in – are people liking, commenting on or (probably best of all) sharing your content?

Reach – Pretty straightforward – how many people are coming across your brand’s content? This is a top-of-funnel metric great for indicating the success of awareness campaigns.

Referrals – Referrals show how many people come to your website from a given social platform.

Click-through rates – CTRs track the number of people clicking on your social media content or ads to access your website or blog.

Are you looking to measure how well your social is performing? Find out how you can track and calculate your #SocialMedia #ROI today. https://t.co/C9BnM0gX4k pic.twitter.com/uMiXzAO6oF

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) February 11, 2019

5. SEO report

If improving organic search rankings was a key KPI for your marketing campaign, you’ll need to report on your SEO progress.

The crucial aspects of this section in your marketing report should be:

Ranking improvements – Have you improved your site’s position on Google results pages for target keywords?

Website health – Are there any problems with your site that could impact SEO progress? Think broken links or missing tags.

Organic traffic – Which pages are driving overall traffic numbers, and which are falling behind?

External backlinks – How many external sites are pointing back to your own? Are they high quality? This is a great opportunity to show off the hard work you’ve put into link-building relationships.

Remember, the exercise here isn’t to bamboozle CEOs with intangible graphs and SEO terminology. Making this understandable is the best way to show the importance of SEO to the business’ objectives.

6. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

Google Ads provides insights aplenty on the performance of your search and display ads, and is a great tool to use for this part of your report. Here you’ll provide specific details on:

Your ad spend.

CTRs.

Cost per conversion.

Impressions (This is the number of times users view your ad, or how often it displays.)

This section is a really tangible area for demonstrating ROI in your marketing report. Your company is shelling out on these ads, so you need to clearly link this spending with results. 

However, it’s important to remind readers of the intent behind the ads. You won’t always be targeting ads directly at conversions, some may have higher funnel objectives – so ensure you set expectations and communicate this properly.

So what is SEM, and how does it relate to #SEO or #contentmarketing? We’ve written your new go-to guide, covering these questions and more. https://t.co/41RSTevbCD pic.twitter.com/W4qzC56z3H

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) May 1, 2019

7. Blog performance

If you’re devoting time and resources to creating and curating blog content, your audience will want to know if it’s proving worthwhile.

As well as demonstrating how the blog is impacting leads and conversions, this will also be a useful exercise to establish what types of posts are working best. Are your target audience engaging most with thought leadership pieces, or are they flocking to practical ‘how to’ articles?

Google Analytics should be your go-to here – you can analyse if people are reading your content in the first place, how long they spend on it, and if they’re taking desired actions such as following links to landing pages. 

The best tools for creating marketing reports

Google Analytics and Google Ads are brilliant starting places for creating marketing reports but, in the name of choice, here are some other handy options:

Supermetrics – This app can bring together information from a variety of external tools into a centralised dashboard. A huge timesaver, this means automatic compilation of website and social analytics as well as PPC and SEO results. All of this data can be delivered directly to your inbox!

Cyfe – With similar powerful functionality to Supermetrics, Cyfe allows you to build custom reports related to specific marketing objectives.

Moz – Moz is one of the big names in SEO, and has all the reporting capability you need to track your site’s organic search performance.

DashThis -This focuses on PPC, allowing you to track all your most important paid search KPIs and produce reports from one easy dashboard.

from http://bit.ly/2XlxCiy

[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

How bad website design is ruining your organic rankings

Don’t kid yourself – when you think about website design does your mind go to slick image carousels and fancy graphics, or organic search performance?

I’ll wager my daily coffee(s) that it’s the former, but be warned: Bad website design can seriously impact your SEO ranking, potentially lending your competitors the edge in capturing vital digital leads.

So, let’s explore what website features impact SEO, why your site needs to be mobile friendly, and the tools you can use to squeeze the most out of your company’s corner of the internet.

Struggling with these common website tracking problems? Digital Strategist Chas Lang is here with the best fixes and advice. https://t.co/IYyPAXasu5 pic.twitter.com/ayKWWG6NCT

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) January 14, 2019

What website features impact SEO ranking?

Here are some common website features you must get right if you want Google to look favourably on your site:

1. Keywords

Despite what you may hear, keywords are very much alive in 2019. However, shoving them in willy-nilly, or deliberately overfilling articles and pages with keywords, won’t help your website’s cause. In fact, keyword stuffing is actively penalised by Google’s algorithm – you could actually slip down the rankings rather than rise up.

Your website design should include keywords in the following core places:

URL – While only a minor ranking factor, every little helps – if you can organically get keywords into your URL, then go for it.

Title tags – This is the big one. Without a title tag, Google has no immediate idea of what a given page is about. This makes it harder for the search engine to index your site, meaning you could miss out on appearing in relevant searches by prospects.

Heading tags – More on formatting later, but breaking up copy with keyword-optimised title tags will make digesting the content easier for both readers and the crawlers. Google uses to understand pages.

Body copy – Whether it’s a blog or a landing page, including keywords naturally in your copy helps alert Google that it’s relevant to a specific search query.

Alt tags – Google uses alt tags, or alt text, to determine what’s in an image and how this relates to accompanying text. This is because crawlers can’t see and understand images themselves.

2. Navigation

It’s crucial your website navigation boosts both SEO performance and user experience. Illogical or broken site architecture will frustrate human searchers and search engine  crawlers alike. Here are some top tips:

Use content hierarchies – Start with broad landing pages that link to related, more specific sub pages. You can continue this pattern so bots can follow a clear progression through your site. This also gives you the opportunity to rank for general head terms as well as more specific long-tail keywords.

Include horizontal linking – The danger of content hierarchies is that you silo different sections of your site from each other. Prudent use of horizontally linking across different arms of your hierarchy makes life easier for crawlers to connect the dots.

Get specific – People aren’t searching ‘products’ or ‘services’, so don’t use these in your nav. Instead help search engines and users know exactly what a page will contain before they crawl the copy itself.

Be careful with dropdown menus – If you want to use dropdowns, ensure they are written into the HTML. If not, these can be hard for bots to crawl, meaning you lose ranking points for navigability.

Beware JavaScript – Google and co. can have real trouble locating internal links created with JavaScript. Therefore, if you use this programming language, your site architecture can seem non-existent to bots. Search engines are improving their capability here, and some would argue JavaScript is vital for user experience, but be wary when it comes to using it for nav.

Make the most of blogs – It’s common practice for a blog CTA to link to a product page, but this can also work in reverse. When a blog post can aid the buying process for a specific item, don’t be afraid to link out to it.

When #copywriting is done right it woos your site's 2 most important audiences: search engines and prospects. Companies with value-adding copy rank and they convert. https://t.co/B6vkcAxrK3

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) June 7, 2019

3. Page speed

Google and humans are equally impatient it seems, and page loading speed is an important  ranking factor.

There are two sides to how this works:

Time to first byte loading – How Google measures page speed is somewhat unclear. However, research from Moz shows the search engine might be specifically looking at what’s known as ‘time to first byte’ – i.e. how long it takes your browser to get the first byte of info from the page server. Those that deliver faster are considered higher quality.

Crawler allocation – Much like marketers, search engines are time poor. They have an allocated crawl budget, and a slow site may miss out on being fully indexed if its pages are slow loading.

So, how can you speed things up a bit?

Compress files – HTML, CSS and JavaScript files can be compressed using a software app called Gzip. If you want to compress images, use a dedicated program like Photoshop or Lightroom so you don’t reduce quality too.

Boost your server response speed – Factors from your hosting solution to your website traffic can slow your server response time. Root out potential speed bumps in the form of insufficient memory and slow database queries to improve this.

Take advantage of browser caching – Browsers can cache lots of information so they don’t need to reload whole pages should visitors return. You can use a tool named Yslow to select how long you want information to be saved, with a year being a standard timeframe.

Cut redirects – Every time a webpage redirects to another, users have to wait for a request-response cycle between the browser and server. Reducing redirects therefore means shorter wait times.  

4. Formatting and appearance

You also need to consider aesthetics when optimising your site for SEO ranking. The following can influence how your website performs:

Formatting:

Search engines reward copy that can be scanned easily for takeaways, so including the following elements can be beneficial:

Bulletlists and numbered points.

Short paragraphs with clear headers.

Bolded texts.

Pictures:

Images on your website should:

Have an image title.

Be relevant to the page they’re on and accompanied by alt text.

Be compressed without compromising on quality.

Other rich media:

In addition, including other rich elements such as videos or social media embeds can boost your ranking. It’s important that these are used only when they add real value to the page.

#Infographics are powerful because they tell a story, offering information in the form of vibrant images. But there's a big difference between a successful infographic and one that fails to fly. The key is tailoring them to your audience. https://t.co/VAUW6XBqI1

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) June 16, 2019

5. Security

While our eyes often skim over the first part of a domain name, for Google there’s an important difference between HTTP and HTTPS sites.

Given the name of this subsection, there are no prizes for guessing that the S here stands for security. HTTPS websites protect users in three ways:

Authentication prevents cyber attacks on users.

Data integrity means internet files can’t be corrupted as they’re transferred to the searcher’s browser.

Encryption means hackers can’t steal user information or track their activity.

Security has been a Google ranking factor since 2014, and a study by Blue Corona found that 40 per cent of page 1 results are HTTPS sites.

As recent digital privacy controversies have shown, the public is becoming increasingly critical of companies that don’t take adequate precautions to protect data. As ranking factors reflect searcher priorities, expect to see security becoming even more important in the years to come.

Why mobile friendly websites rank better in SEO

Mobile friendliness is so important to ranking today that it deserves it’s own H2.

According to Statista, 52.2 per cent of all worldwide website traffic in 2018 came from mobile phones. This was up 2 per cent from the year before, and nearly 10 per cent from 2016.

Since 2015, Google has made it explicitly clear that mobile friendliness is a ranking factor. Indeed, a survey by Blue Corona found that 70 per cent of sites on page one of Google’s results page are optimised for handheld devices.  

If your business hasn’t yet adapted to what marketers at the time dubbed Mobilegeddon, here are some things to think about:

Design responsively – To ensure your mobile audience sees the same content as desktop users, make your website device responsive. If you’re not a programming expert, either get professional help with this or seek templates that have designated mobile functionality.

Avoid Flash – Flash is bad. Bad for SEO (due to slow loading speeds), bad for your street cred (because who uses Flash these days?) and definitely bad for mobile searchers as neither iOS or Android support its use.

Use media queries – This allows your site to ask a device what size it is, and then instruct the browser to display your content according to the relevant CCS you have set.

Don’t block CSS, image files or JavaScript – While in the past, some mobile devices couldn’t support these elements, most now can. Given you want to make your site as universally reachable as possible, leaving these options open is in your best interests.

Consider scrolling – Thumbs and fingers aren’t always precise as computer mice, so making sure your buttons aren’t too big or too small will help users get around your site easily.

Optimise for local search – You should do this for your site anyway, but the local factor takes on new significance for on-the-go mobile users who may be en route to purchase. An important step is including your business’ postal address and phone number in the site metadata.

Mobile page speed – Rapid loading is even more important for users accessing your site from a handheld device. You can use the same tactics outlined earlier to speed up page loading.

Important changes in mobile, (Google) Maps, and Microsoft have been dominating the news headlines. Here’s the rundown of the goings on in the content marketing world last week! https://t.co/pbJ9mgDUZU

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) June 7, 2019

Useful (and free) tools for improving a website’s SEO performance

Google’s Webmaster Tools – Google itself has a host of tools you can use to analyse your website’s SEO potential. For example. Fetch as Google allows you to view a URL as Google sees it in order to pinpoint weak spots.

SEMrush – SEMrush can conduct a full SEO audit of your site including keyword research and link analysis.

Google PageSpeed Insights – A self-explanatory tool, Google PageSpeed Insights not only speed checks your site, but also suggests ways you can improve loading times.

Hubspot’s Website Grader – This is another great multipurpose app that allows you to analyse:

Mobile readiness.

SEO performance.

Security for users.

Performance, including speed metrics.

Check My Links – Perfect for a final check before your site goes live, Check My Links allows you to, well, check your links. It can analyse both internal and external links to ensure none are broken.

UpCity’s SEO Report Card – Primarily a competitor analysis tool, SEO Report Card lets you analyse factors including:

How well you’re incorporating keywords in your site.

How quickly your site loads.

How easy it is for crawlers to index your site.

from http://bit.ly/2MUsXPx

[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

What’s the purpose of web copywriting?

When copywriting is done right it woos two of your website’s most important audiences: search engines and prospects. Companies with value-adding copy don’t just attract and retain customers, they rank and convert.

A copywriter’s aim is to pitch your brand to a target audience through compelling writing, using their words to sell a product or a service with creativity.

We know what you’re thinking: Isn’t copywriting the same as content writing? The short answer: No. Here’s the difference:

Copywriters set out to craft content that will persuade an audience to take an action.

Example: A landing page about your business services and features.

Content writers create media that communicates information to an audience.

Example: A whitepaper about upcoming trends in your industry.

While all copy is content, not all content is copy. If you’re confused just repeat this mantra: content tells, copy sells.

Okay, now that we’ve got the basics down, let’s take a look at what questions we’ll be answering in this article:

What’s the purpose of copywriting?

Are there different forms of copywriting?

How do you attract leads with your copy?

What are the most valuable tips for writing strong copy?

We’ve got a lot to cover, so let’s jump in.

Does Copywriting Have A Purpose?

It’s a question we get a lot. In the world of crafty videos and eye-catching graphics, isn’t the written word obsolete?

Think back to the most impactful media you’ve seen in the past five years. We’d be willing to bet that the majority of it had some kind of copy complementing it.

Fantastic Copywriting Examples: 13 Companies With Truly Creative Copywriters https://t.co/vbOTQnsxqw by @lkolo25 pic.twitter.com/syqdfNUocc

— HubSpot (@HubSpot) 19 August 2016

Copy will always be king in the world of marketing because people resonate with the written word.

Copywriting’s purpose is to inspire audiences to action with concise and compelling word choices. Copywriters use their wordsmithing skills to encourage conversions, increase brand awareness and solidify brand presence.

Are There Different Types Of Copywriting?

Copywriting is an umbrella term that encompasses lots of different types of writing. Here are a few of the most common:

SEO Copywriting: When you write for SEO you have two main goals: ranking in search engines and appealing to prospects. SEO copywriting is about more than good writing, it’s about understanding how to create content that will get a website indexed properly. This means conducting keyword research, targeting those terms throughout your copy, creating tags and building strong meta-descriptions.

Website Copywriting: Your website design is only as good as the copy on it. Your website copy is only as good as the design behind it. If design and copywriting aren’t working together, they’ll hold each other back. Website copy is all about producing strong, actionable, SEO-focused content that drives results.

Social Media Copywriting: Social media content was practically made to be written by copywriters. Posts need to be short, effective and engaging. While limited word counts and the need for snappiness may make social media writing seem easy, truly compelling copy in such a short form is difficult to master.

"Content and Design Are Inseparable Work Partners" by @jmspool — I've been saying this for years. One of a #UX designer's best skills is #ContentStrategy and #Copywriting — https://t.co/W8Xh3rSwNZ

— Natalia Story (@NataliaOnFire) 10 December 2018

How To Attract Leads With Your Copy

Consider this: a mere .75 per cent of leads result in conversion, according to Salesforce. That means to better convert, it’s smart to ensure each lead you get is high-quality.

Copy plays a big role in this strategy. There’s a strong correlation between copy quality  and lead quality. Consider these statistics from HubSpot:

Strategic website copy is used by 68 per cent of businesses to acquire leads

In B2B settings, case studies help convert and accelerate the most leads.

Companies with 30 or more landing pages generate 7x more leads than those with fewer than 10.

The key to quality copy that generates better leads is defining your user personas to create more targeted campaigns..

Building Personas

User personas provide a research-based profile of your intended audience. These profiles are based off key information about the group, such as:

Age.

Job title.

Hierarchy within company.

Personal and professional interests.

Industry expertise and experience.

Once you’ve collected this information, you build out detailed personas and determine what kind of collateral would most suit their demographic.

Without the focus that user personas provide you risk producing content that doesn’t appeal to your audience. It’s also common for companies without user personas to disseminate their information through the wrong mediums.  Which leads us to our next point …

Creating Targeted Campaigns

Whatever the copy, it has to resonate with your target audience.

This means your copywriting needs to:

Be distributed through the channels most relevant to your audience.

Written in a way that engages your distinct user personas.

Fo example, a young marketing assistant is pretty likely to click on an Instagram post linking to an article titled “6 ways to slay your next marketing pitch.’

A 55 year old CMO? Not so much.

Setting And Measuring Conversion Goals

By targeting your copy toward those actually interested in your services, you may generate less site traffic or gain fewer social media followers.

In the grand scheme of things this is fine, those metrics are more about vanity and less about revenue.

Well-targeted and persuasive content will pinpoint the more meaningful metrics. You’ll likely see an increase in pages per session and social engagement, things that will ultimately drive up the number of quality leads.

Which brings us to our next action, determining conversion goals. We know copy should spark action, the question becomes: what kind of action is your company looking for?

You’ll need to start by narrowing down what outcomes matter most your team. Are you looking for your audience to subscribe to your newsletter or set up a demo request?

Broadly speaking conversions can be broken down into two categories.

Micro conversions: These actions don’t have a direct commercial impact but they can help nurture leads through the sales funnel. (ex: eBook downloads or form fills).

Macro conversions: These actions have a direct commercial impact. (ex: purchases, contact with sales team).

Once you’ve set your goals, you’ll want to measure their impact. Google Analytics dashboards can help here by providing some traditional metrics such as:

Social engagement.

Open rates.

Opt-in rates.

Organic rank.

Organic click-through rates.

CTA click-through rates.

Unique visitors.

Dwell time.

Social shares.

If you’re looking for more context, set up Goal Completions in your Google Analytics dashboard. This will give you clearer insights into how well your copy is converting. In an ideal world, at the end of your campaigns you’ll be able to pinpoint which new customers came in as a result of your copy.

#Copywriters bring more to the #marketing table than just a way with words. Here’s a completely unbiased look at a writer’s responsibilities and business value. https://t.co/ogcVVZS07R pic.twitter.com/NB1Qhx4POz

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) 21 March 2019

Best Practice Tips For Writing Valuable Copy

Highlight Your Brand’s USPs Early On

It should be abundantly clear why your business is THE business to interact with. It’s a copywriters job to create content that is persuasive and engaging, clearly identifying why customers should buy the product or service. It’s helpful to ask yourself a few questions before writing:

Why is your business worth listening to?

What makes your brand interesting?

What sets you apart from your competitors?

When you think of your brand, what three words come to mind?

With these answers in hand and the right power words on deck, your copy should be able to convert even the most fickle customer.

Write With Seo At Front-of-mind

Keep your keywords close when writing any copy. You want to keep the content engaging and shareable while ensuring it contains key search terms for your intended audience. It’s easy to gauge success here as you’ll see an increase in traffic or even get your site ranking on the first page. Remember: organic SEO strategies take time but once they start working they’re well worth the wait.

Be Clean, Concise And Captivating

Clarity, immediacy and value: these are the pillars of good copywriting. Never use 100 words when you could use 50. Always ensure your word choices are crisp and clear. Check your copy to make sure every sentence adds value.

Good copy doesn’t hide behind fancy words or big chunks of text. It gives readers exactly what they need and then takes a gracious exit.

Know When To Sell

It doesn’t matter if you create the best copy in the world, without calls to action, your efforts will fall flat. Strong copy includes plenty of internal links, well-placed CTAs and provides the reader with a clear purpose. Copywriting is meant to make engaging with the business as simple as possible. Your words should light up the path to conversion, plain and simple.

Our Key Takeaways

Copywriting serves a clear purpose. It’s meant to encourage action.

With the right tactics your copy can inspire brand loyalty, awareness and conversion.

So, what are you waiting for? Get writing.

from http://bit.ly/2XuQgjJ

[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

The complete infographic definition & how-to guide

Infographic: in·fo·graph·ic /ˌinfōˈɡrafik/ (noun) – A visual image such as a chart or diagram used to represent information or data.

Infographics deliver the one-two punch for content marketers. You combine good information with rich imagery, giving you a piece of content that will engage and educate.

Infographics are usually created by graphic designers – sometimes with the assistance of copywriters. In an agency like Castleford, it goes like this:

Our client provides us with a brief (including brand guidelines and the goal of the deliverable).

Our editorial team whips up some attention-grabbing copy.

Our graphics team takes those words and makes them pop off the page with eye-catching visuals.

We deliver the product to our contact.

Marketing magic ensues.

These data-rich images are so effective because they have the unique ability to capture your audience’s attention while also conveying information that will likely be retained.

Need a reason to reduce your meat consumption? Here are 5:https://t.co/Bh3IQHm5p2 pic.twitter.com/kiZcNnyOPe

— Greenpeace (@Greenpeace) March 6, 2018

How to create a compelling infographic

Infographics are powerful, when they’re done right. The difference between a good infographic and a great one comes down to a few critical elements.

Using the right words

While the star of the show will be the imagery, you want to make sure the words displayed are emotive and punchy. Don’t waste a single letter. Draw people in with catchy phrases and thought-provoking questions.

Finding the perfect data

You want to find the statistics and key points that will make your readers think. It’s important to be smart about this process. You want enough information to make your point but not so much that your infographic becomes an article with a graphics background.

Perfecting the design do’s and don’ts

The  best advice here? Show don’t tell. The whole point of an infographic is to tell a story with images. Opt for images over words every time; there are loads of ways to present things visually, you just need to think outside the box.

What are the different types of infographics?

While all great infographics share those key elements, they don’t always come in the same package. There are a range of infographics businesses use to their advantage. Here are a few of the most common formats:

Process Infographics: These graphics are ideal for showcasing steps in a particular process that might be difficult to understand otherwise. You can number the steps or follow a top to bottom flow.

Statistical Infographics: If you have survey results or are covering a topic rich with data points, the statistical template is right for you. This graphic will put emphasis on your data and help you tell the story behind the numbers.

Timeline Infographics: Are you looking for a fun way to visualise the history of your company? Maybe you’re keen to detail some key events as part of an article? Whatever the reason, timeline graphics help showcase a timeframe more visually.

Informational Infographics: For those looking to clearly communicate a new or specialised concept, informational graphics are the go-to format. Typically these are divided into clear sections with bold colours.

Leveraging infographics in your content marketing strategy

Okay we’ve got the different types and we know why they’re so important, that leaves one last question for today: Here’s how to best utilise infographics in your content marketing strategy.

Break Down Your Processes

Looking for a fresh way to present your sales process to prospects? Maybe you’re hoping to answer some commonly asked questions about your products in a more interesting format?

Infographics are an effective solution to both of those scenarios. They help you explain points with visual aids, giving your audience two different ways to process the information.

Spice Up Your Landing Pages

Infographics are known for highlighting key takeaways, engaging readers all the way down to CTAs and grabbing user attention. These accomplishments are no small feat and can be particularly valuable for your landing pages.

Why not leverage infographics on your product pages to work with your copy? These assets make your value propositions stand out and can give your pages a much-needed boost in engagement.

Repurpose Them For Social

The best part about infographics is that they can be repurposed in so many different ways – from creating a blog post around the data to sharing snippets of the infographic on social to generate interest.

Take a look at your infographic from this angle. Can certain sections stand alone? If so, use these pieces in the weekly posting on your social platforms. In the description, link users to the full version. You’ll pique the interest of your readers and likely drive traffic to your site.

#Infographics are shaking up the #digital #content world. Here's everything you need to know about the various types and how you can use them within your strategy. https://t.co/xcaRwZfE7D pic.twitter.com/Om7mhtpotk

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) April 9, 2019

What are the takeaways here?

Infographics can be a dynamic force for your content marketing strategy. When used correctly, these data-rich assets engage your audience, relay critical information and provide your business with shareable content across mediums.

from http://bit.ly/2E9it82

[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

What is an SEO specialist?

For the uninitiated, search engine optimisation (SEO) can be like black magic – inexplicable, otherworldly and a tad scary.

If these three letters have you reaching for your broomstick in order to beat a hasty retreat, hold up just a minute. There’s someone who can help – an SEO specialist. Never heard of them? These are the white knights behind every company website killing it in Google’s rankings, and they can help you too.

In this article we’ll answer the following questions:

What is an SEO specialist?

How can they improve your website?

What are black hat SEO tactics?

Is it possible to learn SEO quickly?

Wands at the ready. Here. We. Go.

What is an SEO specialist?

An SEO specialist is responsible for analysing a website and suggesting changes to improve how that site ranks in internet searches for relevant terms. You may also see this title shortened to simply ‘an SEO’.

Quick definition of SEO: SEO aims to boost the amount, and the quality, of traffic to a website from organic search results.

We’ll look at some of the key features of a site that an SEO specialist would review in the next section, but first let’s explore the skills and attributes these individuals need to possess:

Keyword research – Despite what you might hear, keywords are still hugely important for SEO strategies. Therefore, an SEO should be able to conduct thorough keyword research, and use the terms ‘naturally’ in your business’ content. Natural usage is the opposite of keyword stuffing – something we’ll cover in our black hat tactics section later on.

Website analysis – Understanding the website elements that contribute to search engine ranking, and staying on top of best practices are essential to an SEO’s role.

Search engine knowledge – Search engines are constantly evolving. SEOs must stay on top of the latest algorithmic updates to boost website performance and avoid ranking penalties.

IT know-how – A solid grounding in CSS, HTML and other programming languages, as well as experience with tools such as MOZ Keyword Explorer and SEMrush is crucial to an efficient SEO workflow.

An analytical mind – The ability to identify problems and implement effective solutions based on hard data is meat and drink to your SEO specialist.

Strong communication skills – If online marketing and SEO are new avenues for your business, chances are your SEO specialist will need to be able to explain its importance to key stakeholders to get buy in at all levels.

Keywords are like Sean Bean - no matter how many times people try to kill them off, they just won’t die. Here’s why they’re still crucial to your #SEO #strategy https://t.co/jbEF82XriL pic.twitter.com/3WEzeWHH0B

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) 11 April 2019

What roles can SEO specialists take?

The above skills position SEO specialists perfectly for a number of roles within a business’ digital marketing team:

Content writing – In addition to crafting perfectly poised prose, SEO is a big part of modern content writing. Google’s Penguin update highlighted the importance of writing for humans instead of search engines, but understanding how to organically deploy keywords is a key SEO consideration for content writers.

Website developers – High numbers of backlinks to your website from other reputable online sources is an important ranking factor in search. They show Google that your site is considered to be a useful resource and help crawlers to find it. Website developers are also crucial for ensuring your pages are correctly tagged, another indicating factor for Google of a high quality site.

Strategists – There’s a strategist behind every successful digital marketing campaign. Understanding, and improving, the SEO performance of your site is a big part of what a strategist brings to the table, so expertise in search engine ranking is crucial to the role.

Search engine marketing (SEM) – In many ways SEO and SEM are opposite sides of the coin. However, keyword understanding as well as the organisational and analytical mindset that SEO specialists have position them well for running and reviewing paid digital ad campaigns.

So what is SEM, and how does it relate to #SEO or #contentmarketing? We’ve written your new go-to guide, covering these questions and more. https://t.co/41RSTevbCD pic.twitter.com/W4qzC56z3H

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) 1 May 2019

How can an SEO specialist improve your website?

Now we get into the real sorcery. Here are some common tactics an SEO specialist will use to improve your site’s search ranking:

Using tags: You need to remember that search engines speak their own language – and your website needs to too. HTML tags are key in helping crawlers identify different elements on a given page or blog post, and will be a high priority for your SEO specialist. Among the most important are:

Title tag – This tells the search engine what each page is about. Your title tag absolutely must contain the keywords that page is targetting. On a search engine results page (SERP) this is where users click on to select a result. Tip – Limit your title to around 60 characters to avoid clipping.

Meta tag – Directly beneath the title tag on a SERP comes your meta. This is a couple of sentences (ideally 130-160 characters) that acts as additional bait for would-be clickers.

Header tags – Divvying your content up with prudent use of H1, H2 and even a cheeky H3 tag not only makes it easier on the eye, but also benefits SEO ranking. These headers are behind those bulleted snippets you see at the top of SERPS (#goals).

Alt tags – Did you know that Google can’t read images? As we’ll see, the right pictures are important ranking factors – but without alt tags, search engines won’t have the foggiest idea what they show.

Adopting keyword best practice:  I could write a whole e-book on keywords (in fact, one of my colleagues did), but here are the most salient, SEO related points:

Find the right ones: Your SEO specialist should know which tools to use in order to find keywords that receive good traffic.

Think about placement: Try and get keywords into your title tags, subheads, opening paragraph, URLs and image alt tags.

Be organic: Unnaturally cramming keywords into the above (or anywhere else for that matter) could see you penalised by Google Penguin. Let the keywords serve the content, rather than distract from it.

Creating cornerstone content: Cornerstone content consists of posts or pages that comprehensively cover one topic. Its primary aim is to help you rank for specific keywords (Google loves takeaway-heavy articles). Your specialist can help you identify areas to target, and use purpose-built tools such as Market Muse to establish competitive word counts.

Including rich media: Rich media includes elements like video, custom images, social media embeds, and polls and quizzes. As well as making your page more visually interesting, these features can help your ranking.Just remember to add the appropriate tags!

Optimising links: Google attaches significant value to links – after all, they help its crawlers get around and establish connections between different pages and sites. Indeed, a study by NinjaOutreach showed how a tiered SEO linking campaign can boost traffic by 40 per cent. An SEO specialist will understand the different types of links, and how to use them effectively for SEO.

Targeting features snippet – AHREFS found that, on SERPS where they appear, 8.6 per cent of clicks go to featured snippets. These SEO jackpots aren’t chosen at random – an SEO can help you tailor content towards capturing them.

Getting local – Your SEO specialist can tweak your SEO to capture the local market, and this is no small fry.

Getting to grips with voice search – By 2020, 30 per cent of internet browsing will be done without a screen, predicts Gartner. Voice search is already playing a role in this shift, so you need an SEO who can update your site for these latest trends.

Voice search is here and it's changing the way that we search, so what can digital marketers do to adapt? https://t.co/AFoG2nsGCF pic.twitter.com/Ivdx7R5Ell

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) 18 January 2019

What are blackhat SEO tactics?

If your SEO specialist suggests any of the following blackhat tactics, it’s time to book them a one-way ticket to Azkaban. Many of the following could see your site penalised by search engine rankings:

Keyword stuffing  – Until relatively recently, you could get away with unnaturally high frequencies of keyword use. However, now Google values quality of content over quantity of keywords. An example of keyword stuffing could be:

Looking for nose warmers in Alice Springs? We sell nose warmers in Alice Springs, so get in touch with one of our experts in Alice Springs to buy a nose warmer today.

Duplicating content – If you copy and paste content from another site, or within your own, you’re likely to fall foul of Google Panda. This algorithmic update seeks to weed out poor quality or duplicated content.

Content automation – Compelling content is important in many aspects of digital marketing. However, if you’re tempted to get machines to do it for you – think again. Firstly, the stuff they produce will lack value, formatting and images. Secondly, Auntie Google doesn’t like automated content, and will penalise your site.

Cloaking – This refers to showing one page to searchers, and another to search engines. This allows spam websites to rank for content that isn’t relevant to their content and mask the garbage they’re putting out.

Link farms – The number of links to your site is a key ranking factor. For this reason, some bright sparks set up so-called link farms – websites that exist solely to supply links to sites that someone wants to rank highly. Unfortunately, link farms are easily identifiable for search engines, and should be avoided.

Personal blog networks – Like link farms, personal blog networks aim to make it look like a website has lots of links. These are authoritative sites that form a network where each links to the target site, but not to each other.

Paid links – Building links with authority sites is an important SEO tactic, but you need to play by the rules. Buying links, or exchanging them for goods, isn’t allowed under Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and both the buyer and seller can be penalised if caught.

Website redirects – Similar to cloaking, this involves sending crawlers to one page, and users to another. Only use redirects for their intended purposes – for example, when you’ve changed domain name and want users to find your new site.

Spamming blog comment sections – In the past, Google and other search engines would count links from blog comments among their ranking factors. While this is no longer the case, you’ll still find plenty of people advertising their blog commenting services to boost your SEO performance. Ignore them.

The days of quantity over quality in terms of #socialmedia posting are over. Today, your content needs to hit the mark every time. Here’s why. https://t.co/qwxWMfziox pic.twitter.com/2J1lHjIPcw

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) 25 February 2019

How long does SEO take to work?

Precisely 49 minutes.

Okay, sadly that’s a lie – you can’t put a timeframe on how long it will take your SEO tree to start bearing tasty click-through fruit. This is because the results of your tactics depend not only on the skills of your SEO specialist, but also what your competition is doing.

It also matters what industry you’re in. For example, business selling laptops in Sydney are going to be up against tougher opposition than those flogging Wallabies rugby shirts in Auckland. More people targeting the same SERPS and keywords can mean it takes longer for you to see tangible results from your SEO campaign.

Can I learn SEO fast?

Given that 71.3 per cent of searches result in a page one organic (unpaid) click, according to Moz, SEO is something that businesses really can’t afford to ignore.

If you’re interested in learning SEO for yourself, there are a number of great resources out there to start improving your knowledge. These include

Moz.

Search Engine Journal.

Search Engine Land.

Marketing Land.

ClickZ.

Search Engine Watch.

The good news is that a lot of the basics of aren’t hard to understand, and you can start practicing immediately by implementing some best practices on your own site.

Learning through doing is definitely the trick when it comes to SEO.

71.3 per cent of Google searches result in a page one organic (unpaid) click.

However, much like FIFA, you can never complete SEO. And this is where business owners tend to fall down when trying to tackling this aspect of digital marketing alone,on a long term basis. It’s one thing to get your site optimised, but you then need to continually review and tweak in accordance with changes to what the search engines want to see.

Modern digital marketing agencies have a lot to offer. Here’s our comprehensive guide to their services, and how they can help you. https://t.co/jz6AXdDvOl pic.twitter.com/gsOOsPR6aX

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) 18 April 2019

Why outsource SEO to an agency?

For these reasons, many businesses outsource their SEO concerns to agencies. Here are some of the benefits they bring to the table:

Expertise – From strategists to writers, digital agency personnel are well versed in the latest updates to search engine protocol. In addition to actioning change to your site themselves, they can also help you expand your own understanding of all things SEO.

Access to tools – As well as an in-depth understanding of SEO, agency staff will have access to and experience using the tools needed to review and improve your site’s performance.

Accountability – To prove their tactics are working, any agency worth its salt will provide a plethora of reports and walk you through the results. This means that even if you don’t fully grasp every detail of what they’re doing, you get full visibility over whether it’s achieving the desired results.

Time-saving – Once you’ve found an agency you like working with, they can get on with SEO work in the background while you focus on the business itself.

from http://bit.ly/2LDcGhl

[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

What To Consider For Your Next Email Blast

An email blast is a single email message sent to a large group of people.

Some marketers stick up their noses at email blasts. Aren’t group emails a thing of the past?

Not really.

In fact, research by ExactTarget found that nearly seven in 10 marketers say email is at the core of their business, and almost 50 per cent send approximately 500,000 messages annually.

 Lee's tips are perfect for anyone planning email domination. https://t.co/bJNuV4Dnab

— Salesforce (@salesforce) May 3, 2018

What’s more: About 60 per cent of consumers subscribe to a brand’s email list to get promotional messages and deals, according to MarketingSherpa. That’s compared to the mere 20 per cent that follow brands on social media for messaging.

Research by Remarkety found that email blasts sent to entire contact lists and segmented lists had an open rate of 23.4 per cent and a click through rate of 17.8 per cent.

The takeaway here: Email blasts can be really useful but only when you’re providing customers with the right content.

What Should You Consider For Your Next Email Blast?

1. Brevity Is Your Best Friend

Turns out Shakespeare was right. Brevity is indeed the soul of wit. And there are few places this rings more true than in email copy.

Think back to emails you’ve actioned – were they full of big blocks of text? Did they require a lot of reading time? Our guess is no. Users are looking for summaries, bullet points, formatted text that make it easy to skim through and get to the main points.

Long email copy makes it more difficult to get your audience to click through and eventually act. Keep it short and compelling; the users keen to read more can head over to your site for the juicier descriptions.

2. Ensure Every Word Adds Value

The business market today is saturated. There are thousands of brands competing for consumers’ attention at any given moment. Your audience has learned how to filter out what provides them with value and what doesn’t. In fact, they expect every form of communication from brands to be valuable. There’s no more success with half-baked content – your customers are expecting you to put your best foot forward every time.

Look for opportunities to engage your email list.  Offer useful tips, provide exclusive discounts or give your subscribers the opportunity to share feedback – what content adds value will depend on your customer base.

Pro-Tip: If you’re at a loss for what they want, try sending out a poll and asking your subscribers directly. This is a great way to boost user engagement and ensure your content is hitting the right marks.

3. Send Out Your Blasts At The Right Time In The Right Segments

Timing is everything when it comes to email blasts. You want to make sure you’re sending out the right content at the right time to the right people on the right device.

Research from a Harland Clarke Digital survey found there are optimal time ranges to reach customers across devices.

Desktops: Desktop computers remain the most common device used to open emails, according to the report. Nearly 55 per cent of consumers opened emails on laptops or PCs (twice as often as they did via smartphone). The best time to reach desktop users is between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. – approximately 4 per cent of emails are regularly opened during this time frame.

Smartphones: Smartphone users are most likely to read emails between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m as well. The overlap between smartphones and desktops means around 7 per cent of emails are opened on both devices, the report revealed.

Tablets: Open rates for tablets are highest between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. – meaning users are viewing emails at home after work. These hours mean they might be more receptive to entertaining blog content.

But it’s not just about timing, it’s about segmenting. You’ll want to group your email addresses according to market segments and send out email blasts according to each of your target audiences. This way you can tailor your content to different audiences for maximum efficacy.

4. Leverage Graphics (But Don’t Sacrifice Copy)

It’s tempting to go heavy on the visuals. We’ve all seen the stats – you retain information better when it’s visually appealing (Nielsen Norman Group). However, the same study found that users ignore decorative images that don’t add real content to the page.

While the graphics work will make your email campaign look good, your words will be what inspires action, calls forward brand loyalty and communicates your value propositions. Users crave information-carrying images; visuals that showcase content that’s relevant to the task at hand are much more impactful.

Graphic work is an addition to strong copy, never a replacement. Use the power of the two for the best results.

Graphic designers offer creative visual expertise that covers everything from print to #WebsiteDesign. So are they essential to your #contentmarketing? https://t.co/yfIxpXjA5t pic.twitter.com/Lt1XUS6HFP

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) March 15, 2019

5. Use Actionable Language And Strong Design In Your CTA  

The most effective emails always include strong calls-to-action. CTAs should always be easy to identify and action. Don’t forget, people tend to skim emails and if there is one thing you want them to take away from your content it’s your CTA.

The two factors of any strong call-to-action are great design and great copy. For HTML emails this means strong graphics with eye-catching colours. Plain-text emails will rely more on the copy, which should include language that is succinct, clear, and action-oriented. Don’t neglect optimising your plain-text emails as not every user will choose to display your images.

How Can You Measure ROI From An Email Blast?

If you’re not measuring the results of your emails blasts how can you ever refine your strategy?

Before you start sending out your emails, you’ll need to set goals for your campaign and pinpoint some core metrics.

Here are a couple of the most common email marketing ROI goals and measurements.

Website Traffic

If you want to expand your business and build awareness you need people to visit your website. This allows them to familiarise themselves with your offerings. Email marketing can play a big role in website traffic when your campaign is well executed.

To check which website visits are attributed to your email efforts, monitor the following metrics:

Click-through rate (CTR):  How many customers click on the links in your email? Divide the number of unique clicks by the number of delivered emails and multiply the result by 100.

Сlick-to-open rate (CTOR):  How many of those opened emails resulted in clicked links? Divide the number of unique clicks by the number of unique opens and multiply it by 100.

Sales And Conversions

Email helps you gradually move your prospects up the sales funnel. It’s a practice in relationship-building – you give a little, you get a little. In order to measure this keep tabs on:

Lead Acceleration: To get a better understanding of how email affects a user’s journey through the sales funnel, compare how fast a nurtured and non-nurtured lead moves along the buying cycle.

Impact On Revenue: This shows the role of emails in shaping up your company revenue over time across touchpoints. Assign a value to each of these points and have your CRM keep track of when emails lead to action.

The Takeaways

Email blasts can provide you with real results when done right. Make your email campaigns brief, value-adding and actionable and you’re sure to draw the right people in.

from http://bit.ly/2vMFVne

[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

Is SEM a part of your content marketing strategy? It should be

SEM, or search engine marketing, is the science of using paid advertising to increase your chance of ranking in key search terms. It’s a vital cog in the acronym-packed machine of digital marketing, and an extremely important ally to content marketing.

So that’s what we’re going to cover in today’s article. By the end of the piece we will have answered four vital questions (and then some):

What is SEM?

How much is it going to cost you?

How does it fit into your content marketing strategy?

What tools do you need?

Right. Let’s crack our knuckles and get stuck in.

Part 1: What is SEM?

As mentioned, SEM is where you pay to rank in search. It involves promoting key pages on your website through the use of services such as Google Ads in order for your name to appear at the top of relevant search engine results pages, or SERPs for short.

It’s not as easy as we’ve just made it sound, though. You’re going to have to do a lot of research and behind-the-scenes optimising in order to increase the cost-efficiency of your ads. Ranking in search is a tasty pie, and everyone else wants a slice too. This makes competition fierce.

Commonly used SEM platforms

The two most common paid search ad platforms are Google Ads and Bing Ads. In some areas, Yahoo is also popular.

However, in Australasia specifically, anyone other than Google may as well not exist. According to data from StatCounter, Google has approximately 95% market share in our region. Bing is the next-closest, although when we say ‘close’ we mean ‘distance between the Sun and Earth’ close. They have about 3.6% market share. Yahoo, third, has less than 1%. Well, technically DuckDuckGo is third, but the company syndicates its ads through Yahoo so we haven’t counted it here.

How do paid search ads work?

You ever been to an auction? Well, now you sort of know how SEM ads work.

When you create a new ad, you set a total budget and then how much money you wish to ‘bid’. This will commonly be charged on a per-click basis, which is why paid ads are often given the name PPC advertising, or ‘pay-per-click’.

The ad platform, using Google as our example, will then take this bidding information and compare it to the quality of your ad itself. Google will perceive your ad as being of higher quality if it is more relevant to the audience. Quality is then measured on a scale of one to 10, called the Relevance Score.

Quality and bid are used to rank ads against each other on the applicable SERPs.

So highest bidder wins?

If two ads are created equal, chances are yes – the highest bidder will win. But, if you spend a ton of money and your ad is of poor quality, someone who bids less may still outrank you. Having higher quality increases the cost-efficiency of your ads.

Ad quality and bid amount are used to rank ads against each other on their applicable SERPs.

To share a comparison from AdEspresso: If the average cost-per-click (CPC) of an ad marked with Relevance Score of 1 is between $0.90-$1.00, the average CPC of an ad marked with Relevance 10 is less than $0.10.

What is a ‘poor-quality’ ad?

Basically if the ad copy and landing page either don’t match each other or don’t suit the target audience, they may be given a low Relevance Score. So for example, if your ad copy offers one thing but your landing page offers another, Google will be like, “Uh uh, something isn’t right here,” and could mark you down.

How do I appear in the ‘relevant SERPs’?

Largely it’s a keywords game. Keywords and audience demographics. You’ll run your ad on a set of keywords that you feel are relevant to your advertised page, and then tell Google which users are the people you want to target.

Google will then use this data to figure out where best to serve your ad based on what people are searching. If other businesses are trying to go for the same keywords/users, your bid and quality score will help sort you.

The difference between the Search and Display ad networks is easy to understand. Here’s how to choose what kind of Google Ads campaign to run. https://t.co/iuyRCwSmd0 pic.twitter.com/ANwB685v2q

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) January 17, 2019

SEM vs. SEO

It’s easy to confuse SEO and SEM, especially as, once upon a time, SEO and SEM were often considered part of the same acronym. However, these days there’s a distinct difference.

SEO is…

…the process of optimising a website and its content to rank highly in organic search. Basically, SEO helps Google crawl your website, understand it, and place it where it should be in search. It’s quite technical and takes a long time to get going, but can be cost effective over a long period of time.

SEO includes such strategies as:

Incorporating keywords naturally into content.

Optimising web page load speeds and formatting for mobile.

Regularly releasing content.

Strengthening your link profile.

SEM is…

Skipping many of those tactics by paying for results. It gets you a short-term traffic boost, but as soon as you turn off the ad, the traffic stops flowing.

SEM vs. content marketing

SEM is a totally different strategy to content marketing, but they should not be seen as opposing options. As we’ve alluded to above and will summarise below, they should be seen as allies.

SEM and content marketing may be different, but they should not be seen as opposing options - they are allies.

Content marketing is…

…the act of producing content of various types in order to educate, inform or entertain an audience. It is increasingly common that content marketing is used as an educational tool for businesses to build their authority in a specific area, becoming synonymous with that field and building trust with users. Content can also be used to buff SEO and brand awareness.

Content types include (but are very much not limited to):

Blogs.

E-books and whitepapers.

Graphics, such as infographics.

SEM is…

…your means to get that content out into the search world and yield short-term results.

There are great benefits to educating your customers with #contentmarketing. Education is an opportunity to build trust. and authority. But how? Find out here.https://t.co/XKRr13Tr1x pic.twitter.com/YUewRZXLnl

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) October 16, 2018

How much does SEM cost?

You’ll hate this answer but … how long is a piece of string? Or in other words, what do you want to spend?

Your budget is entirely up to you. So long as you’ve optimised your keywords and audience, and produced a highly relevant ad, you’ll get at least some results no matter what you spend (they just might not be great). That said, we won’t leave you without at least some data to go off, so here we go:

Some Google Ads data

The average CPC across US-based industries on Google Ads is about $2.69, found Wordstream. The most expensive industries are legal and consumer services ($6.75 and $6.40 respectively), while the least expensive are e-commerce and advocacy ($1.16 and $1.43).

The average CPC across US-based industries on Google Ads is about $2.69.

The average conversion rate of these ads is about 3.75%, across industries. This is highest in the dating & personals and legal categories (9.64% and 6.98%), and lowest in advocacy and real estate (1.96% and 2.47%).

According to Wordstream, Australia is about 5% less expensive per-click than the US, and NZ is about 14% less.

Key takeaway: If you can guess how many users you’d like to convert, you can extrapolate that to how many clicks you need and, thus, how high your budget will have to be for keywords in your industry.

So do I need SEM, SEO or content marketing?

It kinda sounds like SEM is your cheat sheet to results, right? Paying for short-term rankings instead of earning them over a period of time. Well, while this is definitely true, it’s not the whole picture.

SEO is your way to appear in organic search results, the links of which users are far more likely to click on – at a margin of 94% to 6% (6% here being ads), according to GroupM UK/Nielsen data. SEO is also more cost-effective over time.

Content marketing is the meat of your SEM and SEO strategies. Without good content, users having nothing to actually land on when they click.

The final answer: Really, you need all three. Content forms your bedrock. SEO earns you long-term, passive traffic. SEM gives you a short-term boost on key campaigns..

Part 2: A list of useful SEM tools

Google Ads tools

In Australasia, Google Ads is going to be your primary source of paid traffic. There are three free Google tools that can help you when you’re using this platform:

Keyword Planner: This tool gives you keyword ideas, helps you see search volumes for important terms and forecasts how certain words might perform in future.

Google Ads Editor: Editor lets you edit your ads and make bulk changes – even offline.

Google Analytics: Google Ads has its own data built in, but Google Analytics will help you go much deeper.

Additional strategic tools

Ahrefs: Ahrefs analyses your competition and helps you understand why they rank so highly. It can report on their keywords, content and backlinks, and track competitors in real time.

SEMrush: SEMrush has a number of useful SEM tools, including keyword research, competitor analysis, and more. It also has SEO, PR and social media functions to provide insight into other areas of your overall digital marketing strategy.

Unbounce: For a little help building a good page for new users, try Unbounce. It has an easy-to-use drag-and-drop landing page building tool that even beginners should be able to pick up.

Part 3: Best types of content for SEM

PPC landing pages

This is a page where users land specifically to convert in some fashion. At the top of the marketing funnel they might want to download an informational guide; in the middle of the funnel they could be interested more in your specific services (and how they could help); and at the bottom of the funnel you’re capturing actual sales.

Your PPC landing page should have compelling copy that entices a clear goal, and smart navigation so the goal is achievable without hassle or confusion.

E-books or whitepapers

E-books and whitepapers are downloadable guides that pack a ton of useful information into a single PDF. Both should be put together by a graphic designer to improve professionalism and memorability.

E-books and whitepapers are downloadable guides that pack a ton of useful information into a single PDF.

These assets are critical in a lot of content strategies. They are excellent lead generators, and the sheer weight and helpfulness of them shines your business in a very authoritative light.

Infographics

Infographics are like e-books and whitepapers except simplified. They are designed to pack an incredible amount of dense information into a digestible format, with limited text and heavy use of imagery. Basically, you want the reader to consume a lot of knowledge at just a glance.

One of the reasons infographics are so popular is they are an easy sell. The user gets the information they seek but doesn’t have to read 60 pages to get it.

Cornerstone content

Cornerstone content is the best of your website. These are your long-form blog articles that pack the most depth, answer the most questions and rank the highest on search. They have a heavy focus on education and not so much on sales, and form the anchor to your wider content strategy – you will write multiple spin-off pieces based on this cornerstone content, all of which link back to the main page (and Google loves itself some links).

Cornerstone content can also be in the form of landing pages.

from http://bit.ly/2GQBEnV

[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

Ultimate Guide to B2B Marketing Strategies

Welcome to our ultimate guide to B2B marketing strategies. We’ve got three parts and 10 chapters to help you build campaigns that delight your audience and deliver tangible results for your business.

At Castleford, we specialise in content-driven, B2B digital marketing campaigns. We’ve worked with hundreds of clients across Australia, New Zealand and beyond over the past nine years. So we’ve got plenty of first hand experience to draw upon for this guide.

But an ultimate guide is no small undertaking – both to create and to read. So, we’ve chopped it up in case you want to jump straight to the part or chapter that’s most relevant to you. You’ll also find our bite-sized takeaways and link to further reading at the end of each chapter. Here’s the full breakdown:

PART ONE: ANALYSIS AND PLANNING

CHAPTER ONE: Personas, Goals, Website Development and UX

CHAPTER TWO: SEO Analysis and Content Planning

PART TWO: CONTENT CREATION

CHAPTER THREE: Landing Pages

CHAPTER FOUR: Blogging

CHAPTER FIVE: Downloads

CHAPTER SIX: Video

PART THREE: AMPLIFICATION

CHAPTER SEVEN: LinkedIn

CHAPTER EIGHT: Google Ads and Facebook Advertising

CHAPTER NINE: Remarketing

CHAPTER TEN: Email and Marketing Automation

PART ONE: ANALYSIS AND PLANNING

Your B2B marketing campaigns should be on a constant cycle. So, while the analysis and planning stage is the start, it’s also the end. Digging into the results of your previous campaigns is one of the most important parts of planning your next campaign. So, let’s get started.

CHAPTER ONE: PERSONAS, GOALS, WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT AND UX

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All marketing campaigns should start with the target audience. One of the most common mistakes marketers make is to run campaigns aimed at themselves. Their own preferences – consciously or subconsciously – skew everything from the target keywords to the tone of the blogs. The best way to avoid that with your B2B marketing strategy is to create some robust user personas.

Always start with user personas

When we run campaigns for our clients we always start with personas. Once you understand who the campaign is aimed at, what they want from your brand and what actions you want them to take, everything else flows from there.

You can use your user personas (or buyer personas if you prefer) to establish your campaign’s goals and objectives. Having both goals and objectives is important in our view.

Goals and objectives

Your B2B marketing strategy needs a strong link back to your bottom line. It’s not enough to create really great content or drive a tonne more traffic to your site from SEO. Your B2B marketing strategy needs measurable, tangible actions.

Those are your goals.

We recommend splitting your goals into primary goals (the most valuable actions users can take) and secondary goals (not as valuable as your primary goals but still useful and much more relevant to people earlier on in the buyer journey).

Campaign analysis first and last

Before you jump into your next B2B marketing campaign, we’d recommend looking back the personas, goals and objectives from campaigns you’ve already run. When you dig into your Google Analytics or whatever measurement tools you use, how well did the goals line up with the personas? And how successful was the campaign in delivering on those goals?

UX analysis and web development

This is a good point to jump into user experience (UX). UX analysis can be an excellent tool for learning the lessons from old campaigns. It’s how you identify and smooth out the bumps that stopped people completing your goals.

UX analysis provides a hit list for your web developers to go in and remove barriers between your users and the actions you want them to take. It might be something really simple like how fast important landing pages load. Or it could be finding ways to reduce the number of steps between arriving on the site and completing a goal.

Chapter One Takeaways

Analysis of previous campaigns should always be the first step as you prep for a new B2B marketing campaign.

User personas are an essential tool for preventing marketers skewing B2B marketing campaigns with their own conscious and subconscious bias.

UX analysis before your B2B marketing campaign launches gives your web development team priorities for smoothing out user journeys and helping you drive more conversions.

More on this topic: How marketers knock content strategies off course

CHAPTER TWO: SEO ANALYSIS AND CONTENT PLANNING

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SEO should always come after UX. SEO is primarily about acquisition. It’s getting your brand in front of people who typed in a relevant search term.

There are two really important things to remember with SEO:

It’s risky to rely on any single channel to deliver traffic. SEO should always be part of the recipe, but not the only ingredient.

SEO is not free. It is expensive, difficult and time-consuming to get your content ranking in the top results for the most valuable search terms (see Chapter Four and Chapter Five for more on that). So, it’s a good idea to first make sure you have suitable conversion goals in place and that you’ve removed the barriers that are stopping users from completing them.

SEO analysis

When you’re ready to jump into the SEO element of your B2B marketing strategy we recommend starting with some analysis of your site and your Google Analytics set-up. Even if you’ve been running B2B marketing campaigns with some success in the past, it is always a good idea to have a look for problems that could be preventing Google from crawling and indexing your site.

Often fixing these issues can be a relatively painless process. Similar to UX, some SEO analysis before your campaigns get going can be an excellent efficiency saving.

Content planning

Once your SEO tune-up is complete you can start looking at your content. These days, getting content to rank in search takes a lot more planning.

There was a time when SEO was like a content arms race. Publish more than your competitor and you could make a land grab and occupy the most fertile keyword territory in your space.

Now the algorithms are more sophisticated. As a result there is a greater emphasis on quality and more competition than ever before.

Where to find keyword targets

We recommend looking first at keywords your site already ranks for. There are lots of third party tools you can use to help with that. You’re looking for keywords that have good volume (are enough people searching for them?) and good intent (do you want someone searching for those terms on your site?).

If the answer to both of those questions is “yes”, then you can turn your attention to pushing your pages further up the rankings. In most cases, getting from page two in a Google Serp to page one is a lot easier than earning page one rankings from nowhere.

Chapter Two Takeaways

SEO is about getting more of the right people on to your site from Google’s organic search results. Making sure your site set up for conversion should always come first.

SEO and Google Analytics health checks are worthwhile exercises ahead of any B2B marketing campaign to find the quick wins that can make your strategy much more efficient.

Valuable keywords that your site already ranks for are often a good place to start your SEO strategy. Improving what you have tends to yield quicker results.

More on this topic: How important are keywords for SEO in 2019?

PART TWO: CONTENT CREATION

Now it’s time to get creative. B2B marketing strategies need to leverage a full range of content to cut through the noise, engage users and drive useful actions. We’re going to look at four content pillars:

Landing pages

Blogs

Downloads

Video

CHAPTER THREE: LANDING PAGES

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In the previous chapter we talked about SEO and keywords, which brings us neatly to landing pages. Your landing pages will be the big assets when it comes to ranking for valuable search terms in Google’s organic results.

Product and topic landing pages

In our experience, a lot of B2B marketing strategies focus too much on product landing pages. These are the pages that talk specifically about what you do and how you do it. These pages are super important but your landing page strategy shouldn’t stop there.

There are often some really good opportunities with B2B brands to create new topic landing pages. These pages are aimed at the broader issues and questions that matter to your target audience. Usually they are not related to a particular product or brand.

Whereas product landing pages are most useful at the bottom of the sales funnel, the opposite is true of topic landing pages. They provide the helpful, useful information users need earlier on in the buyer journey.

If you can get at these users before your competitors, you can nurture them down the funnel and turn them into customers.

Landing pages and conversion

Landing pages do more for B2B marketing strategies than SEO. They are also where a lot of conversions happen. With this in mind, it’s important to ensure that any UX analysis includes your most heavily-trafficked landing pages. This is where the opportunity lies to convert visitors into leads.

In our experience, a really useful tactic for boosting landing page conversion in B2B marketing campaigns is to call on your designers. Graphic design is part of the essential content marketing toolkit. When it comes to landing pages you’ll want infographics.

One of the challenges with B2B brands is that their products and services can be complex or dry. Infographics are an excellent way to help users visualise how a process works or why a particular product better serves their needs. And they dramatically improve the aesthetic appeal of otherwise text-heavy pages.

Chapter Three Takeaways

Create dedicated landing pages for each of the keywords that are most valuable to your B2B marketing strategy.

Product landing pages are important, but there may be an opportunity to get ahead of your competitors and target users higher up the sales funnel with topic landing pages.

Infographics help B2B brands take dry and complex subject matter and present it in a memorable and visually-engaging format.

More on this topic: Mixing up your content strategy with different types of infographics

CHAPTER FOUR: BLOGGING

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Blogging is the engine room of your B2B marketing strategy. Your blog can expand your website’s keyword footprint and provide content that you can re-use in social media and email campaigns.

A common mistake B2B brands make is to limit their blogging to talking about themselves. If you only post when you’ve won an award or have a new product to push you don’t really have a blog. What you have is some press releases on your website.

Pillar and cluster content

Really your blog should feed off your landing pages. If you have strong product and topic landing pages they can provide the structure for your blog.

Your landing pages will target the very competitive, high volume keywords. Your blog sits underneath, with each post going after a related longer-tail variation of those keywords.

This is what HubSpot calls a “pillar and cluster” approach to content creation. This video does a great job of explaining how it works:

Not all of the “pillar” content you create needs to be landing pages. You might choose to do that on your blog as well. This post is a good example. It’s an extended blog post (4,000 words plus). We create one or two of these per month. The idea is that we’ll be able to link back and forth between this post and a whole bunch of shorter posts on related topics.

Competitive blogging

Whether your big, meaty content is on landing pages or blogs the important thing is that it is competitive.

That means it should be written based on an analysis of what already ranks in search. SERP analysis is a now a key ingredient of any B2B blogging strategy.

Without it, even the best writing will struggle to get traction in Google’s organic search results.

Chapter Four Takeaways

Don’t limit your blog to press releases about new products. It’s your chance to own the topics and questions your audience cares about.

We recommend a hub and spoke approach to blogging, with big, meaty posts linking back and forth to smaller posts on related topics.

Blogging is highly competitive. You need careful planning as well as excellent writing to rank for the most valuable search terms.

More on this topic: Top Australian marketing blogs of 2019

CHAPTER FIVE: DOWNLOADS

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Downloadable content is a must-have for your B2B marketing strategy. Downloads provide an opportunity to dig deeper into a particular topic. And you can really stretch your design team to create something aesthetically beautiful.

Capturing and nurturing leads

The real benefit of downloadable content is the opportunity to capture and nurture leads. In Chapter One we talked about goals – your B2B marketing strategy should have tangible, measurable actions for each segment of your target audience and each stage of your sales funnel.

In our experience, a lot of B2B brands are missing a strong mid-funnel goal. What this means is that a significant proportion of website visitors leave without doing anything really useful. If they’re not ready to commit to the primary goal – buy something or book a meeting – there’s nothing else for them to do.

Gated downloads can fill that gap. By offering a relevant, compelling download on key landing pages and around your blog you give your users a natural next step. For people you don’t know, you can get a name, email address and other useful lead information for the first time.

For customers or regular website visitors you’ve already identified, accessing your download tells you more about them and what they’re interested in. It might also be an indication that they’re ready to receive more sales-oriented content.

Chapter Five Takeaways

Downloadable e-books or whitepapers can fill the mid-funnel gap in your B2B marketing strategy.

Remember that users who swap their lead information for a download will expect something that looks great and offers real value beyond what’s freely available on your website.

Like any high value asset, you need to maximise your return from your downloads. That means promoting them aggressively around your site, in your emails and in social media ads.

More on this topic: How to decide when content should be gated

CHAPTER SIX: VIDEO

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Content creation should support every stage of your sales funnel, and that doesn’t apply just to writing. It’s also true of video.

Video can help your B2B brand reach out to new customers at the top of the funnel. It can build familiarity, trust and affinity in the middle of the funnel. And it can provide the social proof that is so important for closing deals at the bottom of the funnel.

Video is accessible to all B2B brands

While video can seem like a big investment, the cost of producing high quality video for your B2B marketing strategy has never been lower.

There are now a huge range of options from very simple, templated videos for a few hundred dollars up to TV-quality content that runs into the tens of thousands.

One of the great benefits of video over written content is that it can be reused. With blogs and landing pages you have to be careful not to duplicate your content. Pages that look very similar can lead to your site getting penalised in search.

But with a video, like graphics and other similar content assets, you can embed it in blog posts, add it to landing pages and upload to it to multiple social media sites. Often this means video works out a lot cheaper than it first appears.

Chapter Six Takeaways

Video can be effective at every stage of the sales funnel. From awareness, through consideration into action.

Like graphics, video can bring a significant uplift in conversion and engagement on landing pages.

Video has never been cheaper for B2B brands to produce, but users expect high production values and content that works just as well on a smartphone

More on this topic: How to generate engaging video ideas

PART THREE: AMPLIFICATION

The third and final part of our ultimate guide to B2B marketing is about amplification. This is the bit where you take the amazing content you created and devise clever ways to get it in front of as many relevant people as possible. We’re going to look at LinkedIn first, followed by Google Ads, social media advertising, remarketing and email.

CHAPTER SEVEN: LINKEDIN MARKETING

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LinkedIn is the world’s largest social media network for professionals. According to its website, it now has more than 600 million users in 200 countries. So, it felt right to give it its own chapter.

That’s not to say that LinkedIn is the only social media site you can use to reach a B2B audience (more on that in the next chapter). But a presence on LinkedIn is a hygiene factor for any brand targeting other businesses. It’s something users expect, even if their interaction with a company’s Linkedin page is very limited.

Extend your brand reach through your employees

So assuming you have a Company Page already the first thing to focus on is branding. This should extend beyond your Company Page and on to the profile pages of your employees.

Providing help to employees for improving the look and feel of their profiles will help you control a little of how your brand is perceived by people in their networks.

Some businesses choose to take this further by paying to promote content created by key employees.

By building up thought leaders and influencers in your space, you can access a wider audience when you have your own creative or promotional material to promote.

This can also be a good way to keep hold of influential employees who might not get offered the same support elsewhere.

Posting to your LinkedIn Company Page

While organic reach is very limited on LinkedIn, posting updates does still matter. Just like updating your blog, posting to LinkedIn shows users that you are open for business and trying to engage with your audience.

Your employees can be a useful asset in helping to promote the content you post to your LinkedIn Page. If employees share your content with their personal networks, it can help to boost your engagement metrics. This in turn is a helpful trust builder for any potential customers coming to check out your Company Page.

LinkedIn Ads

The real value LinkedIn can offer your B2B marketing strategy is through its ad products. LinkedIn allows brands to advertise with text ads and sponsored posts. It also offers sponsored InMail, which gets your content into the internal inboxes of LinkedIn users.

As an advertiser you can target users by an increasingly broad range of criteria such as job title, seniority, experience, location and group membership. You can also match users anonymously to email addresses you already have in your CRM. And you can retarget people who have visited your website (more on that in Chapter Nine).

The downside with LinkedIn advertising is that the cost per click is usually higher than Google Ads or Facebook. However, LinkedIn argues that its audience is better-qualified, with the profiling effectively based on each member’s resume.

But what that means is that testing out a campaign designed to send traffic to a landing page will require a bigger investment before you start seeing results. That carries some risk, but of course if the results are there the cost of getting the traffic matters a lot less.

Chapter Seven Takeaways

A LinkedIn presence is a hygiene factor for brands targeting a B2B audience and something users just expect to see.

Your employees offer a way to promote your content and extend your brand into a much larger network. It’s worth investing some time and money in helping some of them improve their profiles.

LinkedIn advertising offers some really compelling targeting options for B2B marketing campaigns but cost per click will often be higher than other channels.

More on this topic: Why your staff should have appealing LinkedIn profiles

CHAPTER EIGHT: GOOGLE ADS AND FACEBOOK ADVERTISING

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LinkedIn can be an excellent way to promote your brand, your content and what you sell. But the majority of B2B buyer journeys – 71 per cent according to Google – still start with a search. That means your customers are searching for information in your space. And when they do that, they either see links to your site or links to your competitors.

Google Ads

We talked a bit about SEO in Chapter Two. But of course the other way to get among those page one links is to buy your way in.

Google Ads is arguably the most successful advertising platform of all time. Its search and display ads helped Google’s parent company, Alphabet, generate US$116 billion from advertising last year. That is close to half of all online ad spend going to one company.

And there’s a good reason for that. Google Ads works. Take a search campaign, for example. There are 3.5 billion Google searches every day. Google enjoys market share in Australia and New Zealand of more than 90 per cent. It knows what we want.

Keyword Planner

Google Ads allows brands to bid for slots on the first page of results for relevant keywords. And it supports its golden goose with a suite of free tools, such as the Keyword Planner. This is an excellent starting point for campaigns, helping you find new keywords and showing you historical trends for volume and seasonality.

Google Ads also gives you access to a display network. But we’ll get into that in the next chapter.

Facebook advertising

Before we move on, let’s talk about Facebook.

There is plenty of skepticism about the role Facebook can play in a B2B marketing strategy. A lot of people still categorise Facebook as play rather than work.

Unrivalled reach and better ad products

While that may be true, Facebook’s unrivalled reach and superior ad products mean dismissing it without proper consideration is a mistake.

If, for example, you want to build brand recognition with your target audience, getting your content into their Instagram feed is probably the best way to reach them when their on their phones.

Chapter Eight Takeaways

B2B buyer journeys usually start with a search. You can get among the top results organically with SEO or you can buy your way in with Google Ads.

Google offers a range of free tools to help you build bigger and better search campaigns.

LinkedIn is not the only social media network for B2B marketing strategies. The huge reach and sophisticated ad products across Facebook’s properties can offer real value in this space.

More on this topic: Ultimate guide to successful Facebook promotion

CHAPTER NINE: REMARKETING

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Remarketing or retargeting is about reaching out to people who have already engaged with your brand in some way.

This could be something as simple as visiting your website. Or it might be more nuanced. Visiting certain pages or making multiple visits within a set timeframe, for example.

Awareness and consideration

The idea is firstly to build brand awareness.

If you want someone to know about your business and associate you with what you sell, then getting in front of that person regularly really matters. Even if they don’t engage with your ads, the visibility alone is worthwhile.

Secondly, you want further consideration. Someone who has spent time on your website must have been there for a reason. If you can put something compelling in front of them, maybe they’ll come back. And maybe they’ll do something more useful next time.

Google Ads and social media remarketing

The most popular remarketing channels are:

Google Ads: Which offers access to more than 2 million websites globally.

Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter: Which offer some form of website tag, allowing you to build audiences for remarketing ads.

An alternative provider that we’ve had some success with is AdRoll.

There are two big challenges for running effective remarketing campaigns in the B2B space. First is “filling the hopper”. If you want to retarget people who visited your site, you have to get more people visiting your site.

Second, if you want to get beyond brand awareness, you need relevant and engaging content for your ads.

While that might sound like a given, remarketing works best when the targeting is really tight. That requires good segmentation of your audience and the creation of specific content assets for each segment.

Chapter Nine Takeaways

Remarketing campaigns are an excellent way to move people down the sales funnel and show some early results from your B2B marketing strategy.

If you want to make remarketing part of your B2B marketing strategy you can do it through Google’s display network or one of the big social media sites.

Remarketing works best when the ad content closely matches the audience segment. This requires good audience segmentation and also the ability to create enough ad content to support each segment.

More on this topic: Facebook remarketing in 60 seconds

CHAPTER TEN: EMAIL AND MARKETING AUTOMATION

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Email is the oldest digital marketing tactic.

But it can still be one of the most effective in terms of ROI.

For B2B marketing campaigns, email is absolutely essential. More than 80 per cent of people said email was their preferred method of business communication, according to HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2018.

When considering email for your B2B marketing strategy there are two elements to consider. The first is a regular email newsletter. The second is more targeted drip emails.

Regular newsletter

The key benefit of a regular newsletter is that it provides a touchpoint with your audience.

People who aren’t ready to buy now are more likely to choose your brand when they are ready if they get an email reminder from you every week or every month.

Email newsletters also offer you the chance to show your audience that you have more to offer than just selling.

You can use your newsletter to promote the helpful, useful content that you’ve created for your blog or social media.

This is the content that answers questions and solves problems ahead of pushing special offers and promotions.

Drip emails

If your email marketing starts and stops with a newsletter you’re missing a huge opportunity.

Even without a full service marketing automation platform you should be able to do some basic automated functions. This includes drip emails.

Drip emails are a series of messages sent at regular intervals after a trigger. This trigger could be manually fired. For example, a salesperson might enroll prospects in a drip campaign if they were interested but not ready to buy.

Or the trigger might be automated, such as when someone downloads an e-book or submits a feedback form. This video does a pretty good job of explaining how that works:

Drip emails can save you time.

And they can help you separate the wheat from the chaff. You can have thousands of people enrolled in a drip campaign – more than your sales team could ever reach out to manually. Only when people engage does a manual process need to kick in.

Chapter Ten Takeaways

Email should be part of every B2B marketing strategy.

Brands targeting B2B customers should consider both a regular email newsletter and more targeted drip emails.

Even without full service marketing automation software most email platforms now support basic drip emails.

More on this topic: Your complete guide to successful drip emails  

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