#cmi level 7 is it worth it

[sbusinesstechnologylondon]

What Is CMI Level 7 Equivalent to in Management Studies?

Are you a manager or someone with experience in the management field? But still, stuck in the same position with no promotion?

Then, choosing a Level 7 qualification is the right choice. It’s a great way to improve your management and leadership skills. CMI level 7 courses are made for senior managers to take their careers to the next level.

What Is CMI Level 7 Equivalent to in the UK Education System?

CMI level 7 qualification in the UK is equivalent to a Master’s degree. Level 7 qualifications are the highest qualification in the UK education system. If you are in a management position, earning these qualifications can prepare you for roles such as CEO, Director or senior executive positions in corporate companies.

CMI Level 7: Is It Worth It for Career Advancement?

Absolutely.

Earning a CMI level 7 qualification is worthwhile for career advancement.

Suppose you have been working as a team leader for several years, and you get valuable experience in the field. Next, your goal is to become a manager. To advance your career, enrolling in a CMI Level 7 course is the right step.

The programme teaches you important skills like strategic thinking and leadership. These skills help you become an effective leader and train you for higher-level management positions in various industries.

Career opportunities after completing CMI level 7 courses

CMI Level 7 Award in Strategic Management and Leadership Practice

This course is perfect for someone with 2-3 years experience in managerial roles like team leader, department head or supervisor.

The course teaches you skills in strategic management and leadership. These skills will help you drive business activities and Prepare for senior management roles.

This is an award, so it can be completed in 3 to 6 months.

Career opportunities:

Strategic Manager with an estimated salary of €70,000 - €100,000

Senior Project Manager with an estimated salary of €65,000 - €95,000

CMI Level 7 Certificate Strategic Management and Leadership Practice

This CMI course is designed to build the skills required for effective senior managers and leaders with 3-5 years of experience in management roles.

You can finish this certificate course within  6 to 12 months.

Career opportunities: Chief Executive Officer (CEO) With an Estimated Salary of €120,000 - €200,000

Get cmi level 7 qualification from UK

pursuing a CMI Level 7 qualification can be a turning point for your career.

Are you wondering where to study CMI Level 7 courses online in uk?

Several institutions offer flexible and accredited CMI level 7 qualifications in the uk. Among them, SBTL is a leading online course provider in uk for business and management courses .SBTL offers top-class British programs, including CMI-accredited qualifications at the diploma, certificate, and award levels. These courses are available in online and blended modes to help working professionals.

Read more; https://sbusinesslondon.ac.uk/what-is-cmi-level-7-equivalent-to-in-management-studies

[eatsdefiant-blog]

Information On CMI Level 7 Coaching And Mentoring

Getting ahead at work today often means that we have to be the best we can be at what we do. It's often said that the world of work today is extremely different from what it was just a few decades ago. Today with many individuals not staying in exactly the exact same job all their lives, but instead changing functions many times to fulfill up with the requirement for certain skill sets. This means that staying ahead of the competition is critical, and all the training and skills which you can gain will only serve to enhance and make you more appealing to prospective employers. A training course in management is certainly just one of those things which you can do to get ahead comparatively rapidly. There are many main reasons why taking a management class is such a bright idea. These not only center on the abilities that you may learn from this type of effort but also some of the complementary advantages that can help you progress in your career. Go to the following website, if you are hunting for more information about cmi certification.

First of all, a management course will help give you leadership and people skills that are exceptionally highly appreciated in just about any workplace. Along with the ability to work in a group, the skill of leading a group of people is essential if you want to move onwards and upwards in almost any career path you have selected or which you see yourself on. The world of work values people who can take responsibility, set an example for their team, inspire trust and efficiently motivate people towards a common aim. Although many individuals have leadership potential, it may take experience in the workplace or a training class to bring these innate abilities. This is one of the reasons that it is possible to discover many diverse types of management course as companies push their employees down the path of further training, hoping to bring out the best in them in the long run. Bringing out people's inherent leadership qualities consistently helps to serve the business they work for. As well as enhancing leadership abilities, this also gives you a opportunity to work as part of a team of people who are not who you usually work within your day job.

This is a valuable experience that prospective employers will search for, not only because you are proving your teamwork skills but also your ability to adapt to working with new individuals. Adaptability and solid people skills are other features that are highly valued, meaning that this kind, of course, can also boost your proficiency in the eyes of prospective employers. Being able to work together with a group of virtual strangers is necessary for such courses, and this will show well on all participants of this professional training. Last, taking management courses also shows a great determination to improve and to succeed, which will look great and show a positive reflection of your personality. Individuals that want to develop themselves and push themselves are highly valued in the world of work, and undergoing professional training of your own volition is a clear indicator of this. With many employees looking to improve themselves using a management course, many major cities have lots on offer in the way of professional training for the people working there and traveling there. These cities are cheap to fly and offer some of the best training, and for that reason could be well worth your consideration. Regardless of where you examine management skills, rest assured that this type of training won't only help you develop your skill set farther, but it will also build your character and show you in the best light in your resume.

[patriotloading81]

Sunplus Sound Cards & Media Devices Driver

Sunplus Sound Cards & Media Devices Drivers

Sunplus Sound Cards & Media Devices Driver

DVD Single Chip MPEG A/V Processor

Tech support scams are an industry-wide issue where scammers trick you into paying for unnecessary technical support services. You can help protect yourself from scammers by verifying that the contact is a Microsoft Agent or Microsoft Employee and that the phone number is an official Microsoft global customer service number. After reading reviews I was hoping the sound quality would be comparable to the expensive replacement Apple earbuds. The sound is better than most other cheap headphones but they sound like you are inside a tin box. At $5 a pair though I suppose it's up to the buyer to decide if they are worth the price tag. Padarsey PCIe Sound Card, 5.1 Internal Sound Card for PC Windows 7 with Low Profile Bracket, 3D Stereo PCI-e Audio Card, CMI8738 Chip 32/64 Bit Sound Card PCI Express Adapter 3.8 out of 5 stars 187 CMI 8738 Chip. File Name: sunplus-1512-firmware.exe Version: 1.1.8 Driver Date: 19 February 2011 File Size: 10,200 KB. Sunplus is a leading provider of multimedia IC solutions for Automotive DVD players, portable DVD players, Car CD/DVD players, etc. Meanwhile Sunplus is offering high-speed I/O IP, high performance data conversion IP, and analog IP for a broad range of applications on consumer, portable, and connected devices.

Sunplus SPHE8202 series is a highly-integrated DVD SoC. It incorporates a high-performance 32-bit RISC, DVD/CD servo controller, MPEG transport stream demux, 4-ch multi-format TV-encoder and stereo audio quality DAC. It also provides capability of real-time decoding MPEG-1/2/4, DivX® and RMVB 720p video contents along with greatest audio/sound effect.

Features

Real-Time 720p Decoding

HW JPEG Decode

4-ch Video DAC

5.1-ch Audio DAC

2-ch Audio ADC

USB2.0 HS

3-in-1 Card Reader

64M SDRM/16M Flash

216QFP Package

Application

RMVB DVD Player

When S/PDIF became available in the Teensy Audio Library I thought this might be the solution to ground loop problems I’d been having when interfacing projects to my PC. However, I quickly realized I didn’t have any sound cards with an S/PDIF interface.

In the belief that I’d rather build than buy I decided to update one of my previous projects, a PCM2904 based sound card, to include an S/PDIF interface. The update was a cinch because TI has a pin-for-pin replacement for the PCM2904 (the PCM2906) with an S/PDIF interface. All I had to do was replace the audio jacks with fiber-optic transmitter/receivers connected to the appropriate pins.

The resulting schematic and prototype are shown below. (If you’re interested, the boards are available through OSH Park)

There’s not a lot to it. It’s simply the reference circuit from the PCM2906 data sheet with portions I don’t expect to use eliminated.

Testing The Interface

To test the interface I looped the transmitted fiber optic signal back to the receiver. When plugged into my Linux laptop it registered as a Texas Instruments PCM2906C Audio Codec as shown below.

Starting up the PulseAudio Volume Control and playing back a file using VLC, I could see the input and output audio levels varying with the signal from VLC.

If you want to actually hear the looped back audio you can use the PulseAudio loopback module.

Open a terminal and execute the command shown below. The result will be a list of names associated with alsa modules, sources, and sinks.

Look for the alsa analog stereo output to identify the sink. On my system it takes the form alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo.

Look for the PCM2906 input to identify the source. Ony my system it took the form alsa_input.usb-BurrBrown_from_Texas_Instruments_USB_AUDIO_CODEC-00.analog-stereo.

Open a terminal and execute the command:

where <source_name> and <sink_name> are those identified above. Please note the source and sink names are case sensitive.

Sunplus Sound Cards & Media Devices Drivers

You should now hear the looped-back audio through your system speakers.

Sunplus Sound Cards & Media Devices Driver

Posted in: Uncategorized

[clarencenicholsonata]

13 Savory Tips from the Best Restaurant Instagram Accounts

Instagram marketing is now the norm. Restaurants are no longer limited to marketing withing their local community, but can now peak the interest of globe trotters as their next must-visit spot when they travel.

If you're still unsure about Instagram marketing for your restaurant, here's a couple stats to peak your interest:

Approximately 80% of all Instagram users follow a business on Instagram. Followers are ready and willing to engage with businesses on the platform.

Brands have been known to see a 5-2X increase in sales in stores due to Instagram ads, proving more effective than other social media platforms like Facebook and proving Instagram as a genuine contender for online ads.

Almost 40% of Instagram users have high levels of disposable income.

In this article, I'll be showing you some savory tips from the best restaurant Instagram accounts and how you can apply them to your restaurant's Instagram account.

Ready to learn how to cook up some Insta-worthy content?

1.Show Off Your Restaurant's Authenticity

What makes your restaurant different from the rest?

It could be as simple as the items you serve on the menu, your restaurant's location, or the people that love your food.

Pinpointing what makes your restaurant truly authentic is something worth sharing on Instagram.

Sweat Shop Cafe

Sweatshop is a Brooklyn-based coffee shop and cafe. It's listed as one of the most "New York" coffee shops in Brooklyn. This restaurant has become a modern-day staple to locals in the neighborhood and is listed as a "hot spot" for Instagrammers and coffee lovers passing through the big apple.

Things that make Sweatshop unique include the look and feel of its black concrete exterior and crates used for coffee tables. There's also a number of quotes peppered throughout the cafe space.

Showing off what makes your restaurant authentic helps your content in two ways:

It differentiates you from all the other restaurants in your area.

You'll attract your ideal customers. For example: If you spend 2 hours to make one dish, because perfection is part of your process, you'll attract Instagram followers who have a deep appreciation for your cooking craft.

A good place to start is by deleting any old photos that don't truly reflect your restaurant. Start capturing the culture of your restaurant’s experience, food, and preparation.

2. Use Outside the Box Content

You might have to step away from the dinner table and cook up some creative content.

Use outside of the box content on your Instagram page. About 60% of [Instagram users use the platform daily](https://ift.tt/2smII80, scrolling through and binging content so if your content doesn't catch their eye or peak their interest, your Instagram post can easily get lost in their feed.

Piada Italian Street Food

For a back to school special for college and high school students, Piada used a school bag and savory food bowl to show off their fun side and flavorful dishes.

So why should you put so much effort into your restaurant's Instagram content?

CMI’s digital content marketing report found that 72% of marketers have seen good content marketing have a direct impact on revenue and sales.

In other words, good content attracts customers. So shake things up!

To get started, you can try these four food photography ideas for your next Instagram post:

Bae Little Tokyo

You can start by planning holiday-themed content shoots.

Try using neutral backgrounds when shooting images of your food. Choose backgrounds like black, white, wood, blue, or nude to highlight the food on display.

Take pictures of your food or drinks in motion: capture splashes, spills, and gooey cheese shots to capture the texture and taste of your food.

Ditch the plate and play with your food. Use nature, your neighborhood, and your outside surrounds as backgrounds and for inspiration for your next shot.

3. Take Detailed Shots

Next to finding creative ways to capture your food, you need to take detailed shots of your delicious dishes.

Close-ups and macros shots can put your dish at the focal point of your post. Foodies love when your post is more focused on the food than the restaurant itself.

Voltaire Beach House

When taking pictures be sure to make your food look vibrant and yummy, use editing tools to add an extra touch.

Take a look at the example below. The only difference between the image of the right and on the left is an Instagram filter.

There are a lot of apps on the market, but luckily we found the 12 Best Instagram Apps to Create Amazing Content.

4. Collaborate with Food Influencers

Influencer marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry; it's no stranger to food brands and restaurants.

Restaurants like “Burgers N’ Fries Forever” (also known as BFF) increased its brand awareness as one of Canada's top burgers and fries spot in the market by adding influencer marketing to their content mix.

Still not convinced?

About 71% of consumers stated that they'd most likely make a purchase based on a social media referral, the catch is, most social media referrals are from influencers.

Plot twist, whether you intend to use influencers are not, they can still have a say in how people view your restaurant. So why not control the narrative so their content works in your favor?

Take a look at how food influences like Tom Big eats can drive sales for brands by giving honest reviews.

Food Blogger Toms Big Eats

Three ways to find your dream food influencer:

1. Monitor Instagram and Check Hashtags: Take a look at the people your followers and fans engage with regularly. Search hashtags like #influencer #foodblogger and #foodie, and take a look at the person posting content with that hashtag.

2. Host a Tasting or Event: Host a (free or paid) tasting to attract attention and influencers to your restaurant. Reach out to local influencers or bloggers, make it an exclusive event to build buzz.

During the event, mingle with influencers, watch and take notes about who captures your food best. After the event, you should reach the Influencer of your choice, and ask them to repost your content, work together during a brand campaign.

3. Work with an Agency: Use online Influencer marketing agencies to help you find the perfect fit for your restaurant. Influencer agencies are like talent agencies; they allow you to view each influencer, their past jobs, and brand collaborations.

Agencies can act as a proxy to ensure that partners receive payment and the quality of work meets requirements. Just be sure to have a budget in mind when working with an agency.

Here's an Essential Guide to Getting Started with Influencer Marketing.

5. Show Off Your Foodie Fans on Instagram

Every restaurant has its super fans, and what better to get free content than reports and to show off your fans.

Hint it has a name; it's called "User Generated Content."

User-generated content is content created free of charge by your fans and followers. This could include an interior shot of your restaurant, or a picture of an entree just as it's served.

Rime Time Pops

Rime Time Pops is a sweet treat brand that loves to repost UGC from their Rime Time fans.

Instagram etiquette: always tag the person or influencer in the content that you repost on your Instagram.

People share UGC because they want a brand to notice them, and to get the recognition for their content. Tagging people encourages them to continue sharing more content for your brand.

Start taking a look at the people tagging your brand or using your brand's hashtag. This is also known as social listening; the funny thing about social listening is that you can do it on every social media platform to find UGC.

Take a look at these tips on How to use User-Generated Content Effectively (and Why it Works)

6. Use Foodie Hashtags

Hashtags make your post discoverable for people who aren't following your account. It helps to increase engagement and allows your target audience to find and connect with your brand.

Naturally, each industry has its own set of popular hashtags, including restaurants and food lovers.

For the restaurant's post to get the most out of hashtags, you'll have to use more than one hashtag. Use hashtags that your followers or potential customers would be interested in, for example, if you're an Italian restaurant, you'll need to use hashtags like #pasta #italian #restaurant

Roti Modern Mediterranean

A fabulous Indian and Mediterranean restaurant uses Dallas hashtags to help them to be locally discovered.

Instagram posts that include hashtags between 21 and 24 characters in length perform better than average.

Initially, Instagram allows you to use up to 30 hashtags, so you'll have to use it wisely. Check out The Most Popular Hashtags: The Ultimate List, and pick out 30 of the most popular food hashtags for your next post.

7. Set the Table & Show Off Your Layout

A restaurant's ambiance can set the tone for the culture and people it attracts. A nice space can feel like home or even a great escape for your customers.

Tattu Restaurants

Tattu has been listed as one of the most Instagrammable restaurants in the United Kingdom.

They're one of the many restaurants that have mastered their layout and ambiance perfectly.

Not sure if your restaurant decor might not be Insta-worthy? Here are 7 Easy Ways to Update Your Restaurant's Decor.

8. Show Off The New Menu

When customers are discovering new restaurants, they might want to take a look at your menu to get an idea of the food they’ll be getting.

Post about your menu in your stories or social feeds. Create a saved reply in your dm’s to share with anyone who messages you.

Roka Restaurant

If your menu changes daily then you can post it in your Instagram story, which disappears after 24-hours leaving you with enough time to inform customers and get ready to post a new special after it’s gone.

9. Fill Your Stories With Mouth Watering Treats

Instagram stories have grown since its launched in August 2016, and now more than 500 million Instagrammers use stories daily.

You can share daily menus, treats, and drinks that you'd be serving for the day. Add text, stickers, and hashtags to add a creative touch to your story.

38 South Cafe & Bar

Instagram stories only last for 24 hours before disappearing. But If you want to keep your IG story around for long, you can create an Instagram highlight.

Highlights allow you to save and segment your stories so people who follow or view your account can go through past and present stories with ease.

Check out how GT Fish & Oyster categories their Instagram stories.

GT Fish & Oyster

10. Introduce Your Staff on Instagram

The people behind the food are just as important as the plates they serve. Your employees are your first and most influential brand ambassadors, followers, and fans.

Studio B Experience

Instead of racking your brain for content, highlight members of your staff on your Instagram post or story.

According to a study done by Hinge Marketing, 96% of businesses point to increased brand visibility and recognition as the top two benefits they get from implementing an employee advocacy program.

Ask employees to follow or promote your restaurant page to help with marketing by being your brand ambassadors.

11. Get Your Content Curated

One way to market your restaurants and Instagram content is to get your content curated or highlighted by a food Instagram page or blogger.

Get your food highlighted on pages like Feast on These with a massive following of food lovers.

Feast on These

Maybe food pages aren't your style, reach out to food magazines like Bon Appetit to highlight your restaurant, food or chef to get further exposure.

Bon Appetit Mag

12. Highlight Your Customers

Your customers can be your biggest fans. So show them some love on Instagram.

California Donuts

Here are a few ways to show customer love on Instagram:

Like, share and comment on customer posts about your brand and food. Let them know that you see and care about what they have to say about you.

Handle your customer's queries and services on your Instagram. Marketing Charts found that 7 in 10 survey respondents indicated that a brand's response to online consumer reviews or messages actively changed their perception of a brand.

Here are 6 Tips for Using Instagram for Social Media Customer Service.

13. Cook Up Specials on IGTV

Last but certainly not least, show off your restaurant with IGTV.

What is IGTV and why should you use it?

On June 20, 2018, Instagram launched IGTV to combat Youtube, the second largest search engine. It’s still growing but the platform is a hit on Instagram with its full screen and vertical videos.

It's a great way to show what goes on in your restaurant, from ingredients to plate. IGTV allows you to give people a tour of your restaurant or to show them how you create your most-loved dishes.

Once you've created your IGTV channel and video, they're automatically stored in your feed next to your post and tagged images.

Food and Wine

Summary

Instagram isn't just a social media platform; it's a community for people who love food, sharing their experiences, and capturing the moments around it.

Here's a quick recap of 13 savory tips from the best restaurant Instagram accounts:

Show Off Your Restaurant's Authenticity

Bring the Food Outside

Take Detailed Shots

Collaborate with Food Influencers

Show Off Your Foodie Fans on Instagram

Use Foodie Hashtags

Set the Table & Show Off Your Layout

Show Off The New Menu

Fill Your Stories With Mouth Watering Treats

Introduce Your Staff on Instagram

Get Your Content Curated

Highlight Your Customers

Have Fun With Your Account

Related Articles

Social Media Marketing for Restaurants: 21 Tips

How to Win at Restaurant Email Marketing: 5 Best Practices & 7 Content Ideas

8 Steps to Master Instagram Restaurant Marketing Like a Pro

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230801 https://ift.tt/36rQo7H via IFTTT

[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

11 exciting B2B marketing trends you need to know

When is voice search finally going to take over? When do we start auto-generating blog posts? Are we still living in the age of influencer marketing?

With a couple of weeks to go, it’s not going to be 2019.

But as our minds turn to 2020, let’s have a look at some current B2B marketing trends that all marketers should have an eye on.

A snapshot of B2B marketing spend

CMI’s latest benchmark report indicates spending on content marketing is expected to rise. Just 4 percent of B2B marketers plan to decrease their content marketing budget, while about one-third intend to keep their spending levels static.

And how is that money being spent? The majority of new investments are going toward content creation, particularly audio and visual content.

And are marketers heading in the right direction? Are they becoming more successful than they were last year? Seventy percent believe so. And 30 percent either don’t believe so or aren’t sure.

So what trends are on the horizon?

1. Account-based marketing (ABM)

ABM has been a bellwether since 2017 or so.

More businesses are experimenting with account-based marketing because the reported results are just too positive to ignore.

Relative to other marketing activities, ABM delivers 97-percent higher ROI. But at the moment, only about 20 percent of B2B brands have dedicated ABM strategies; 60 percent are hoping to implement one soon.

2. Marketing automation adoption and integration

The content marketing supply chain is ripe for automation at nearly every stage. From keyword research and creation to distribution and measurement, the proliferation of marketing automation tools, plugins and platforms has made content more efficient and cost-effective than ever.

Actual marketing automation systems are used by 54 percent of B2B brands, although other types of martech have even higher adoption rates. These various technologies are often integrated, so automation is practically inescapable in this era of marketing – and that’s a good thing.

3. Customer experience, first and foremost

Customer experience (CX) has undergone significant transformation in the last five years. Because the methods of communication and comparison available to consumers pervade our actions and thoughts, businesses are often caught on the back foot.

Amazon has made same-day delivery an expectation. Netflix has made on-demand streaming a nightly activity. Google has made information of any kind readily available at the tap of a button or the voice command of a user. The “customer” is satisfied only when these networks function exactly and in real time, expectations that carry over to the B2B habitat as well.

As PwC recently found, buyers demand these top CX traits:

Speed.

Convenience.

Knowledgeable help.

Friendliness.

Presently, 46 percent of all B2B researchers and buyers are millennials, so the above customer-experience expectations are innately ingrained into their lifestyles and purchasing habits based on their upbringing in digital-first environments. A large B2B software vendor, for example, must have faster problem-resolution protocols and authentic organic search presences that they may not have needed years ago.

Bad reviews on Google My Business, negative commentary on social media and a lack of positive referrals can lead to irreparable reputational harm and fewer leads. Further, poor UX on mobile sites and apps, incessant cold calls or emails and difficulty locating information online immediately turn off today’s B2B buyer, eroding trust, loyalty and satisfaction.

B2C brands have dealt with this reality in front of our eyes, but B2B brands will now confront the same customer-experience challenges moving forward.

4. Artificial intelligence

One of the ways companies are addressing CX needs is through the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Chatbots have certainly grown in adoption, but they are but one variation of AI for marketers.

Programmatic advertising marketplaces are more commonly integrating AI into their ad buying techniques, connecting publishers and advertisers with more efficiency, speed and accuracy – and at a price point that’s already pre-set within the system.

AI is still relatively nascent in the content marketing industry from the standpoint of actual production, though. It can help decipher structured data sets and pull out key insights through machine learning, but turning that information into organic content is much more difficult.

That’s not stopping marketers from experimenting, however. And rightfully so.

5. Marketing podcasts

They may not be as universally intriguing as Last Podcast on the Left, Serial or NPR’s Hidden Brain, but podcasts about marketing can definitely teach you a thing or two.

IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review and Content Champion from Content Marketing Institute have been long-running marketing podcasts of acclaim, and more recently, Searchmetrics launched Voices of Search. Our friends at Brafton are also moving with a full head of steam with their podcast Above the Fold.

As evidenced, B2B marketers have now jumped fully onboard with podcasts, viewing them as the ideal format for connecting with on-the-move audiences. Their rise in search popularity is illustrated in Google Trends data:

6. Lead conversion (not just lead generation)

As B2B brands’ marketing matures, more of a focus is placed on actual macro conversions.

We know blogs drive traffic, which can be funneled toward gated content, generating leads. But how valuable is a lead that never ever actually makes it toward the bottom of the sales funnel?

Content can help at this stage as well.

It’s estimated that only 0.75 percent of leads result in closed revenue, which is infinitesimal, especially for companies that already struggle with generating quality leads in the first place. But 41 percent of B2B firms are looking for content marketing to be a veritable “revenue center,” so, clearly, much headway is to be made toward the goal of generating plus converting leads.

Using video testimonials, customer references and case studies can help inch prospects toward signing on the dotted line. And that’s what’s necessary for most marketers to justify their budgets to their CEOs – actual revenue, not just micro conversions.

7. LinkedIn crowds out other social channels

More than 50 percent of all B2B social traffic comes from LinkedIn, and 80 percent of leads are derived from LinkedIn, too.

It’s clear that LinkedIn reigns supreme as a distribution channel, a publishing platform and a referral network, so much so that B2B marketers are unsure whether it’s even worth their time to allocate resources toward other feeds like Facebook, Twitter or Medium.

B2B buyers, researchers and influencers will likely leverage their LinkedIn profile even further in 2020 and beyond due to the highly valuable concentration of their core target audiences: other B2B buyers, researchers and influencers.

8. Local search optimisation

One underrated and potentially overlooked component of SEO this year has been local search.

Google My Business (GMB) listings have traditionally been most useful for consumer-facing brands with geo-targeted marketing and sales strategies. Google Maps and organic results in Google SERPs scrape business data from GMB, allowing searchers to find info about organisations, the products they sell, their physical locations, their contact info and user reviews.

B2B brands have been much slower to adopt Google Maps marketing strategies or even to completely populate their GMB listings, not to mention other online business directories like Yelp, BBB, BizJournals and Glassdoor.

Via BrightLocal.

By forgoing these localised marketing methods, B2B brands may be disrupting the buyer journey of their prospects. If the Knowledge Panel on the right sidebar of Google SERPs displays incorrect information, or it shows that you only have locations in certain regions, searchers may just turn away, believing you’re not equipped to help them in their journey.

9. Paid ads

Organic search is just one side of the marketing coin. B2B brands have found that paid search ads can be a quick and measurable way to immediately leapfrog organic listings in Google SERPs and stand out from competitor posts.

For example, the search term “content for SEO” only returns two results above the fold. One is a featured snippet from Yoast and the other is an ad from SEMrush.

But what about the other 10 or so listing that are also supposed to appear on Page 1?

Those positions belong to big industry names like Moz, Wordstream, Search Engine Land and Neil Patel, but you would never know it because THEY DON’T SHOW UP without a user having to scroll down to find them. That’s the benefit of paid ads – immediate SERP ownership over competitors.

While organic content marketing tends to generate more leads than paid ads, that’s not the whole story. For commercial-intent keywords, search ads actually receive twice as many clicks as organic listings.

So, the lesson is that informational or navigational content may not be suited for paid ads, but commercial content is. Don’t waste your money paying for advertising campaigns built around wrong-intent keywords.

That’s why combining paid and organic strategies is necessary for brand awareness, SERP visibility and high-intent traffic in 2019.

10. Re-optimisation

There’s too much content on the web. We know that.

So flooding SERPs with new content isn’t really the best way to break onto Page 1. Since fresh content requires starting from scratch with external link accrual and waiting for Google to actually index and rank your page, your time-to-rank can be too long to produce the results you’re looking for more immediately.

And as the chart above shows, if you’re not ranking in the top three spots in SERPs, you practically don’t exist.

Re-optimising existing posts, on the other hand, allows you to retain your current URL structure and your page’s already-earned link equity and SERP positioning – you’re just making it even better!

“Better” could mean updating data with more recent findings, replacing older imagery and expanding upon certain subtopics to improve the comprehensiveness of the page as a whole.

We’ve followed this process for over a year now and the results have been just as we expected, including getting 70 percent of our product landing pages ranked on Page 1 of Google.

B2B brands are currently ramping up their development of long-form content, specifically. In-depth articles, guides and evergreen lists are ideal formats for continuous optimisation over time, as they typically need just minor adjustments to propel higher in SERPs year after year.

11. Email marketing personalisation

In addition to LinkedIn, email marketing is a distribution channel that has been rock-solid for B2B marketers.

Roughly 60 percent of B2B marketers say email marketing is their most effective channel for generating revenue, and it’s also the third best way to find information. What’s first and second? Recommendations from colleagues and industry thought leaders – hard to beat.

To increase the margins on email even further, personalisation has been a goldmine. Because of the number of templates and tools on the market that simplify outreach, personalise messaging and segment audiences, it’s no longer a game of mass email blasts with low response rates; brands can now better measure and predict the success of their email campaigns.

Personalised emails have proven to increase transaction rates six-fold, a figure that may rise further in 2019.

We promised 11, and we gave you 11! What predictions do you have?

from http://bit.ly/2rIvnqE

[a-breton]

How to Plan a Year’s Worth of Content With One Original Research Survey

When you look at the library of content you publish, is it a string of somewhat-related blog posts, videos and more — or do all the pieces work together to tell a better, broader story?

Of course (to poorly paraphrase Robert Rose), you want your editorial to tell one story instead of each piece being disconnected from the rest.

Your editorial should tell 1 story instead of many disconnected pieces, says @MicheleLinn. Click To Tweet

While there are many ways to do this, one approach that works well is to use a survey-based research project to bring focus to all of your editorial. That research can serve as your keystone from which spring many assets and related stories.

This article walks you through the steps of designing and publishing survey-based original research to make it the cornerstone for your editorial plan.

But, before I begin, an important note: The goal of your research is to be able to tell a compelling story validated with data. The quality of your data is, of course, important, but it needs to relate to a broader story. Constantly ask yourself: Why will someone care?

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Thinking of Creating Original Research? 8 Things to Consider

Step 1: Choose a topic

Spending time deciding on the area of focus is even more important when you plan to use your survey as your editorial glue.

The best research topics check three boxes. They need to:

Interest your audience (Note: This, of course, requires you to define your audience. Customer? Prospects? Media or influencers?)

Align with your brand story

Focus on an area not yet covered with research

If you are in a new space or trying to create a new category, an original research project on the state of the industry could be ideal. YOU become the source of authority and you are what people link to because you have the stats — especially if you repeat this study annually to show trends.

If you are in a crowded industry, such as, ahem, content marketing, focus on a niche. What is that thing you want to be known for?

This is a challenge Brody Dorland and team faced when embarking on their research project in 2017. Their tool, Divvy HQ, helps content marketers, but as Brody explains:

We did not want to do a state of content marketing report because others had already done so. Instead, we decided to focus specifically on content planning, which is something that had not been covered – and it’s something our business directly helps marketers with. This research was a way for us to better understand the challenges our customers face, validate the direction of our product roadmap, and provide insights that marketers can use to benchmark their own content planning process.

TIP: Answer this question: How do you want your audience to think or act differently as a result of reading this research?

Do you want to validate current thinking? Challenge a belief or assumption? Reveal an opportunity? Keep your reasoning top of mind.

Example: Let’s say you work for a workflow software company, and you want more content marketing teams using your platform. Studying team productivity is too broad, so you focus your research on how content marketing teams operate and whether their processes are working.

Step 2: Pinpoint the survey ‘dimensions’

Once you know your general topic, identify the specific topics you want your research to cover. I call these areas of focus “dimensions” — the key categories you want the research to study. Think of these dimensions as a table of contents. You can see how CMI’s annual content marketing research easily falls into a table-of-contents format.

Think about a table of contents when you structure your #research dimensions, says @MicheleLinn. Click To Tweet

Dimensions serve as a way to organize your thinking, prioritize the questions you want to ask, and provide structure for your data analysis. (I’ll explain all of these steps in more detail as we go through the process.)

Example: Continuing the workflow platform solution company example, to study content marketing teams, you choose these dimensions:

Team composition: Which people and skills do people have on their teams? Are people in-house or outsourced?

Communication: How are teams communicating with each other — and what’s working? 

TIP: The example only looks at a subset of topics. As a rule of thumb, identify three to five dimensions.

Step 3: Hypothesize your story for each dimension

Once you know the key dimensions, hypothesize what the results will tell you.

Now, this is important: You aren’t designing the research to end up with a specific angle. You are using your research to test your hypothesis.  

If the results differ from what you expect, that’s OK. In fact, that may be a story.

It’s OK if your #research findings differ from your hypotheses. That could even be a story, says @MicheleLinn. Click To Tweet

CoSchedule embraced this hypothesis vs. results idea in its State of Marketing Strategy in 2018. I love how the team details what it expected the data to show and the actual findings.

Example: The chart illustrates the hypotheses for each dimension established for the workflow software company.

Step 4: Draft questions to test your hypotheses

Next, draft the questions for each dimension to test your hypotheses.

How the questions are asked is incredibly important. (If you are unfamiliar with survey design, consider getting help with this step of the process, including these pointers.)

Example: Add a column to the table for “possible questions.” As you see, the questions you ask will help you determine whether your hypothesis is correct.

TIP:  Ask only questions that will provide insight. Continually ask, “How will I use the data from this question?” If you are uncertain, chances are you don’t need to ask the question.

Step 5: Identify key segments for comparison

If you want to do comparisons, looking at the data through that lens will offer more opportunities to tell the story in a nuanced and useful way. Salesforce does a great job comparing segments in its research, as you can see in State of Service.

TIP: Any segment you report on needs to have an adequate sample size. While there is no hard and fast rule as to what constitutes an adequate sample, aim for at least 100 participants.

Example: With the workflow software company research, the segmenting goal is to understand the differences between marketers who consider themselves productive versus those who do not. You also could compare the habits between those who use a workflow management tool versus those who rely on email.

Step 6: Analyze the findings by dimension and segment

Once you have the data, your goal is to identify the story. As Rachel Haberman, content marketing manager at Skyword, told me:

Don’t fall into the trap of simply presenting your data as is. Find the story behind your data – that’s what’s meaningful. Numbers alone are forgettable, but when you use them to tell a story, they reinforce an emotional appeal with data-driven evidence. It’s the best of both worlds.

Find the story behind your data – that’s what’s meaningful, says Rachel Haberman @Skyword. Click To Tweet

Because you have gone through these steps, it will be easier to identify what your story is. Go back to your dimensions and organize the results in these categories. Does the data support your hypothesis or were you surprised?

Keep a list of the insights and ideas you uncover, looking at the dimensions as a whole and through individual questions. You can use these later.

Step 7: Create a home base for your findings

When it’s time to publish your findings, decide on one spot on your website where you will consistently point all traffic from your research. Not only does this keep things simple, but it is key to help get backlinks, which is a huge benefit of using your research in multiple ways.  (In fact, as Aleh Barysevich uncovered in the study SEO PowerSuite’s Link Building in 2017, SEO professionals consider research to be the most efficient type of content for getting backlinks.)

Publish findings in a dedicated spot on your website & consistently point all traffic to it. @MicheleLinn Click To Tweet

If you aren’t familiar with backlinks, understand this: the more backlinks to a page, the more authority it will have and the more likely it is to rank in search engines. Yet, our research with BuzzSumo found only 49% of marketers earn backlinks from their research — a missed opportunity.

Your research home base can take any number of forms, but if you’re getting started, create a blog post that details your findings, such as this one from Orbit Media’s 4th Annual Blogger Study or this one from Buffer covering The State of Remote Work. Alternatively, consider a landing page like this one from Upwork.

Step 8: Brainstorm the type of content you can create

You can create many types of content from your research findings, including:

Doing more with your research is a substantial opportunity. Not only will this help you get backlinks (remember to point to your home base), but it also helps you tell a more cohesive story.

If you are at a loss of what to do with your research, consider these 13 examples. I’ll get specific in the next step, but it’s helpful to understand the general type of content you can create:

SlideShare presentations

Blog posts on your website

Articles on other websites

Additional reports

Webinars and presentations

Infographics

Standalone data graphics

Video of high-level findings

Video series digging into findings

Online assessment

Podcasts

Twitter chat

Gated guides and e-books

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 10 (Mostly) Quick Wins to Steal for Your Original Research Project

Step 9: Track your story ideas

Armed with the general ideas of the type of content you can create as well as the insights you documented when you were analyzing your results (see Step 6), it’s time to get specific.

I use this template to track my brainstorming and story ideas from a research study.

Of course, the template can be customized, but I track:

Content type: Blog post, guest post, webinar, etc. (See ideas in Step 8.)

Content idea: What is the basic idea? Briefly explain why someone will care about this.

Data point: What stat(s) does this story relate to?

Notes: What else would you or someone reviewing this benefit from knowing?

Publication/platform: Where will you publish?

Priority: As your ideas grow, which ones do you want to execute first?

Owner/responsibility: Who will oversee this?

Attachments: What links or files do I need?

As part of this process, you also can include a list of content to be updated with a link to your research. For example, have you published any blog posts that would benefit from one of the stats?

TIP: I use Airtable for this, but you can use a spreadsheet or other format to capture your thoughts. In Airtable, you can create a tab that stores all the stats. You can link the stat to the story — and in turn, when you view all stats, you’ll see the stories using them.

Step 10: Incorporate your ideas into your editorial calendar

As DivvyHQ uncovered in its annual content planning survey, only a quarter of marketers plan several months in advance. You may feel overwhelmed by the idea of planning out a year’s worth of content with one survey.

While your process and cadence will vary, consider these ideas to make it manageable:

Focus in depth on one dimension each quarter. (You could even consider each dimension as a topic cluster.)

Determine a regular cadence to publish blog posts that delve into research findings, such as one article per month.

Have a library of data graphics to share on social. When possible, link to content that talks about the story behind the data.

Look at the presentations in the coming year and see if any of them can incorporate a tie-in to your data.

Share data graphics on social & link to #content that talks about the story behind data. @MicheleLinn Click To Tweet

Even if you are an ad-hoc planner (is that an oxymoron?), your idea tracker will still be incredibly valuable for your content planning. Continually refer to it as you decide which content to tackle next.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

Want Content That’s More Usable & Reusable? Chunk It

Editorial Calendar Tools and Templates

Summary

By using the system above, your research can become the glue that holds together your editorial. Remember, if you plan well, you can create a survey from which you can tell many stories in many ways.

I’d love to hear from you. Do you have any examples of brands who are using their research to tell rich, continual stories? Share in the comments.

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

You can learn more about how research is the unsung hero in content marketing from Michele Linn during her presentation at Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7 in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today and use the code BLOG100 to save $100. 

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

from http://bit.ly/2KhY1lO

[hotspreadpage]

How to Plan a Year’s Worth of Content With One Original Research Survey

When you look at the library of content you publish, is it a string of somewhat-related blog posts, videos and more — or do all the pieces work together to tell a better, broader story?

Of course (to poorly paraphrase Robert Rose), you want your editorial to tell one story instead of each piece being disconnected from the rest.

Your editorial should tell 1 story instead of many disconnected pieces, says @MicheleLinn. Click To Tweet

While there are many ways to do this, one approach that works well is to use a survey-based research project to bring focus to all of your editorial. That research can serve as your keystone from which spring many assets and related stories.

This article walks you through the steps of designing and publishing survey-based original research to make it the cornerstone for your editorial plan.

But, before I begin, an important note: The goal of your research is to be able to tell a compelling story validated with data. The quality of your data is, of course, important, but it needs to relate to a broader story. Constantly ask yourself: Why will someone care?

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Thinking of Creating Original Research? 8 Things to Consider

Step 1: Choose a topic

Spending time deciding on the area of focus is even more important when you plan to use your survey as your editorial glue.

The best research topics check three boxes. They need to:

Interest your audience (Note: This, of course, requires you to define your audience. Customer? Prospects? Media or influencers?)

Align with your brand story

Focus on an area not yet covered with research

If you are in a new space or trying to create a new category, an original research project on the state of the industry could be ideal. YOU become the source of authority and you are what people link to because you have the stats — especially if you repeat this study annually to show trends.

If you are in a crowded industry, such as, ahem, content marketing, focus on a niche. What is that thing you want to be known for?

This is a challenge Brody Dorland and team faced when embarking on their research project in 2017. Their tool, Divvy HQ, helps content marketers, but as Brody explains:

We did not want to do a state of content marketing report because others had already done so. Instead, we decided to focus specifically on content planning, which is something that had not been covered – and it’s something our business directly helps marketers with. This research was a way for us to better understand the challenges our customers face, validate the direction of our product roadmap, and provide insights that marketers can use to benchmark their own content planning process.

TIP: Answer this question: How do you want your audience to think or act differently as a result of reading this research?

Do you want to validate current thinking? Challenge a belief or assumption? Reveal an opportunity? Keep your reasoning top of mind.

Example: Let’s say you work for a workflow software company, and you want more content marketing teams using your platform. Studying team productivity is too broad, so you focus your research on how content marketing teams operate and whether their processes are working.

Step 2: Pinpoint the survey ‘dimensions’

Once you know your general topic, identify the specific topics you want your research to cover. I call these areas of focus “dimensions” — the key categories you want the research to study. Think of these dimensions as a table of contents. You can see how CMI’s annual content marketing research easily falls into a table-of-contents format.

Think about a table of contents when you structure your #research dimensions, says @MicheleLinn. Click To Tweet

Dimensions serve as a way to organize your thinking, prioritize the questions you want to ask, and provide structure for your data analysis. (I’ll explain all of these steps in more detail as we go through the process.)

Example: Continuing the workflow platform solution company example, to study content marketing teams, you choose these dimensions:

Team composition: Which people and skills do people have on their teams? Are people in-house or outsourced?

Communication: How are teams communicating with each other — and what’s working? 

TIP: The example only looks at a subset of topics. As a rule of thumb, identify three to five dimensions.

Step 3: Hypothesize your story for each dimension

Once you know the key dimensions, hypothesize what the results will tell you.

Now, this is important: You aren’t designing the research to end up with a specific angle. You are using your research to test your hypothesis.  

If the results differ from what you expect, that’s OK. In fact, that may be a story.

It’s OK if your #research findings differ from your hypotheses. That could even be a story, says @MicheleLinn. Click To Tweet

CoSchedule embraced this hypothesis vs. results idea in its State of Marketing Strategy in 2018. I love how the team details what it expected the data to show and the actual findings.

Example: The chart illustrates the hypotheses for each dimension established for the workflow software company.

Step 4: Draft questions to test your hypotheses

Next, draft the questions for each dimension to test your hypotheses.

How the questions are asked is incredibly important. (If you are unfamiliar with survey design, consider getting help with this step of the process, including these pointers.)

Example: Add a column to the table for “possible questions.” As you see, the questions you ask will help you determine whether your hypothesis is correct.

TIP:  Ask only questions that will provide insight. Continually ask, “How will I use the data from this question?” If you are uncertain, chances are you don’t need to ask the question.

Step 5: Identify key segments for comparison

If you want to do comparisons, looking at the data through that lens will offer more opportunities to tell the story in a nuanced and useful way. Salesforce does a great job comparing segments in its research, as you can see in State of Service.

TIP: Any segment you report on needs to have an adequate sample size. While there is no hard and fast rule as to what constitutes an adequate sample, aim for at least 100 participants.

Example: With the workflow software company research, the segmenting goal is to understand the differences between marketers who consider themselves productive versus those who do not. You also could compare the habits between those who use a workflow management tool versus those who rely on email.

Step 6: Analyze the findings by dimension and segment

Once you have the data, your goal is to identify the story. As Rachel Haberman, content marketing manager at Skyword, told me:

Don’t fall into the trap of simply presenting your data as is. Find the story behind your data – that’s what’s meaningful. Numbers alone are forgettable, but when you use them to tell a story, they reinforce an emotional appeal with data-driven evidence. It’s the best of both worlds.

Find the story behind your data – that’s what’s meaningful, says Rachel Haberman @Skyword. Click To Tweet

Because you have gone through these steps, it will be easier to identify what your story is. Go back to your dimensions and organize the results in these categories. Does the data support your hypothesis or were you surprised?

Keep a list of the insights and ideas you uncover, looking at the dimensions as a whole and through individual questions. You can use these later.

Step 7: Create a home base for your findings

When it’s time to publish your findings, decide on one spot on your website where you will consistently point all traffic from your research. Not only does this keep things simple, but it is key to help get backlinks, which is a huge benefit of using your research in multiple ways.  (In fact, as Aleh Barysevich uncovered in the study SEO PowerSuite’s Link Building in 2017, SEO professionals consider research to be the most efficient type of content for getting backlinks.)

Publish findings in a dedicated spot on your website & consistently point all traffic to it. @MicheleLinn Click To Tweet

If you aren’t familiar with backlinks, understand this: the more backlinks to a page, the more authority it will have and the more likely it is to rank in search engines. Yet, our research with BuzzSumo found only 49% of marketers earn backlinks from their research — a missed opportunity.

Your research home base can take any number of forms, but if you’re getting started, create a blog post that details your findings, such as this one from Orbit Media’s 4th Annual Blogger Study or this one from Buffer covering The State of Remote Work. Alternatively, consider a landing page like this one from Upwork.

Step 8: Brainstorm the type of content you can create

You can create many types of content from your research findings, including:

Doing more with your research is a substantial opportunity. Not only will this help you get backlinks (remember to point to your home base), but it also helps you tell a more cohesive story.

If you are at a loss of what to do with your research, consider these 13 examples. I’ll get specific in the next step, but it’s helpful to understand the general type of content you can create:

SlideShare presentations

Blog posts on your website

Articles on other websites

Additional reports

Webinars and presentations

Infographics

Standalone data graphics

Video of high-level findings

Video series digging into findings

Online assessment

Podcasts

Twitter chat

Gated guides and e-books

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 10 (Mostly) Quick Wins to Steal for Your Original Research Project

Step 9: Track your story ideas

Armed with the general ideas of the type of content you can create as well as the insights you documented when you were analyzing your results (see Step 6), it’s time to get specific.

I use this template to track my brainstorming and story ideas from a research study.

https://airtable.com/embed/shrHHRSQ7TTHLsvR6?backgroundColor=cyan&viewControls=on

Of course, the template can be customized, but I track:

Content type: Blog post, guest post, webinar, etc. (See ideas in Step 8.)

Content idea: What is the basic idea? Briefly explain why someone will care about this.

Data point: What stat(s) does this story relate to?

Notes: What else would you or someone reviewing this benefit from knowing?

Publication/platform: Where will you publish?

Priority: As your ideas grow, which ones do you want to execute first?

Owner/responsibility: Who will oversee this?

Attachments: What links or files do I need?

As part of this process, you also can include a list of content to be updated with a link to your research. For example, have you published any blog posts that would benefit from one of the stats?

TIP: I use Airtable for this, but you can use a spreadsheet or other format to capture your thoughts. In Airtable, you can create a tab that stores all the stats. You can link the stat to the story — and in turn, when you view all stats, you’ll see the stories using them.

Step 10: Incorporate your ideas into your editorial calendar

As DivvyHQ uncovered in its annual content planning survey, only a quarter of marketers plan several months in advance. You may feel overwhelmed by the idea of planning out a year’s worth of content with one survey.

While your process and cadence will vary, consider these ideas to make it manageable:

Focus in depth on one dimension each quarter. (You could even consider each dimension as a topic cluster.)

Determine a regular cadence to publish blog posts that delve into research findings, such as one article per month.

Have a library of data graphics to share on social. When possible, link to content that talks about the story behind the data.

Look at the presentations in the coming year and see if any of them can incorporate a tie-in to your data.

Share data graphics on social & link to #content that talks about the story behind data. @MicheleLinn Click To Tweet

Even if you are an ad-hoc planner (is that an oxymoron?), your idea tracker will still be incredibly valuable for your content planning. Continually refer to it as you decide which content to tackle next.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

Want Content That’s More Usable & Reusable? Chunk It

Editorial Calendar Tools and Templates

Summary

By using the system above, your research can become the glue that holds together your editorial. Remember, if you plan well, you can create a survey from which you can tell many stories in many ways.

I’d love to hear from you. Do you have any examples of brands who are using their research to tell rich, continual stories? Share in the comments.

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

You can learn more about how research is the unsung hero in content marketing from Michele Linn during her presentation at Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7 in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today and use the code BLOG100 to save $100. 

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How to Plan a Year’s Worth of Content With One Original Research Survey appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

How to Plan a Year’s Worth of Content With One Original Research Survey syndicated from https://hotspread.wordpress.com

[lucyariablog]

6 Ways to Use Reviews in Your Content and Pitfalls to Avoid

Want a shortcut to creating content that will convert, resonate with your customers, and save you time?

Enter third-party review websites.

For content marketers, reviews are like an unending recipe book. They are your golden ticket to efficient content that converts. (A 2017 study by the Spiegel Research Center reports that displaying reviews can increase conversion rates by up to 270%.)

Displaying reviews can increase conversion rates by up to 270% via @SpiegelResearch. Click To Tweet

Let’s explore six ways to incorporate reviews into your content marketing strategy and how to avoid the pitfalls.

1. Spark content ideas

Review sites can be a springboard for content ideas – ideas that already reflect something your audience thinks, whether it’s about how to use your product, what features matter, or pain points to overcome.

Review sites can be a springboard for #content ideas, says @AusmericanGirl. Click To Tweet

This Yelp review for the Tortoise Supper Club in Chicago is full of content ideas. Its marketers could create content about pre-show restaurants, the role of staff in creating ultimate dining experiences, or even the evolution of mom’s meatloaf.

You also can use these reviews as a source to find your brand advocates, who may be willing to work with you to create trustworthy content that converts, such as case studies.

TIP: Use widgets to embed reviews from a third-party platform on your site, which allows consumers to know the review is unaltered.

2. Add credibility to website and landing pages

Incorporate reviews and recognition from review websites on your site. Content from third-party review sites adds a level of credibility. Focus on landing pages with the most traffic or the best leads to conversions.

#Content based on third-party review sites adds a level of credibility, says @AusmericanGirl. Click To Tweet

In B2C service reviews, TripAdvisor and Yelp allow you to embed reviews at no charge. Embedding from B2B review sites may be open only to paid customers.

Julie’s Park Café & Hotel in Door County, Wisconsin, uses its TripAdvisor reviews on its site:

Another Door County hotel, the Bay Shore Inn, uses its TripAdvisor recognition, an instant stamp of approval, on its site:

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How Content Influences the Purchasing Process: Tips for Content Marketers [Research]

3. Craft celebratory blog posts

You know those reports and best-of lists created by review sites? As soon as you discover your brand is on the list (yay!), write a blog post displaying the evidence of your new acclaimed status.

Many B2B software providers do this, such as in this example from Kareo, when its all-in-one medical software product was ranked highest in customer satisfaction based on user reviews submitted through G2 Crowd (my employer).

TIP: You also can use reviews to identify keywords to elevate in your blog posts.

4. Watch for videos

As the rise of video reviews continues, keep an eye out for ways to incorporate them in your video content.

For example, if you’re a dog lover like me, you can turn to YouTube for reviews of a pet toy’s durability. Introducing the Tough Toy Tryouts channel. Pet lovers can actually see what happened with the KONG Goodie Bone & Stuff’N Dog after 3-year-old Story put it to the test.

YouTube is a growing source for reviews and Amazon is exploring video reviews too.

5. Share on social media

From LinkedIn to Twitter, reviews give you a great snippet to summarize your story to social media followers. Whether you take a review and turn it into a Twitter testimonial or share on LinkedIn your ranking on a B2B review site, the brief, easy-to-create pieces of content grab attention and drive potential customers to your website.

Create #content snippets from customer reviews to grab attention from #socialmedia followers. @AusmericanGirl Click To Tweet

Author Lilly Adam took an Amazon review of her book and turned it into a GIF for Twitter:

What a great story of the life of the two girls. It was like a suspense story with all the challenging happenings. Thank you Lilly. NOW ONLY 99p – Amazon Review #mustread #allauthor available at Amazon –> https://t.co/608J23uqgM pic.twitter.com/WnZADMa4L8

— Lilly Adam (@lillya1960) June 17, 2018

6. Print signage

You can use non-verbal review recognition with customers who interact with your brand on location. Yelp, for example, gives businesses the ability to fill out a form and request a Find Us On Yelp sticker. It also automatically sends a People Love Us On Yelp window cling to small businesses that qualify.

Chicago bar Jazz Showcase makes the most of these review site clings:

B2B companies can use their awards and recognition at trade shows and expos as Terminus did at the 2018 Marketo Summit:

Avoid these pitfalls

For your review-based content to be credible, the reviews must be credible too – 100% authentic (i.e., the reviewer has used the product or service) and unbiased (i.e., the reviewer wasn’t incentivized or a friend/family member of the business’s employees).

Only use reviews that are 100% authentic and unbiased, says @AusmericanGirl. Click To Tweet

Some fake reviews are obvious, some not so much. A 2017 BrightLocal study shows 79% of surveyed consumers say they’ve spotted a fake review in the past year. However, 84% of respondents concede they can’t always recognize a fake review.

79% of surveyed customers say they’ve spotted a fake review in the past year via @bright_local. Click To Tweet

Smart and ethical marketers know they should only use authentic reviews, but even the less ethical should care about the truth. They are more likely to get caught today, as companies are being created or offering services to analyze how trustworthy a review is. For example, ReviewMeta.com was created to evaluate Amazon customer reviews.

TIP: Don’t give away product in exchange for reviews. Invite all your paying customers to write reviews, not just the ones you think will give a positive one. (The Spiegel Research Center study reveals that a perfect or close-to-perfect review score is not perceived as ideal. That number falls between 4.2 and 4.7 on a 5-point scale.)

Don’t assume you have the marketing rights

Just because someone has written a review about your product or service, you don’t automatically have the rights to it.

Some sites allow you to use customer reviews in your marketing materials. Others don’t permit it or charge a fee to do so. You often can find an abundance of information by going to the website where the review was written. Yelp supports businesses using its reviews in their content as long as the community guidelines are followed:

If you’re not sure, reach out and ask about the usage guidelines, terms, and conditions for the site. Emailing the company that hosts the reviews is a great way to get clarification in writing.

TIP: Follow the law too. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is cracking down on misleading or untruthful endorsements (and that includes failing to disclose if the reviewer was incentivized).

In closing

Once you reflect, it becomes apparent how dependent consumers have become on peer opinions. The good news is your brand can use this feedback. The process of implementing a review strategy (and getting all those reviews!) can take time, but the payoff is worth it.

And imagine how review content can help give you an endless bounty of new content to kick-start ideas and build on content you already have.

Editor’s note: We appreciate G2 Crowd’s support of Content Marketing Institute as a paid benefactor. This article was reviewed and edited independently to ensure that it adheres to the same editorial guidelines as all blog posts.

Please note:  All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team.  No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

See who’s using reviews on-site (and learn a lot) at Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7. Register today and use code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post 6 Ways to Use Reviews in Your Content and Pitfalls to Avoid appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

from https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2018/06/reviews-content-pitfalls/

[webanalytics]

How to Know If Your Content Marketing Just Isn’t Working

Content is king.

And content marketing in 2018 remains a brilliant and cost-effective method for engaging with leads and customers, spreading brand awareness, and getting around the increasing use of ad-blockers.

Whether it’s an email newsletter, social media post, or blog on your own or someone else’s website, people want to see your stuff. They accept it. Approve it. Whitelist it. Because it’s the user him or herself clicking on it, there are no concerns of spam complaints, or annoying the recipient, or ending up in the junk folder.

It’s popular, powerful, and for all intents and purposes, perfect. If you’re online in any professional capacity, you’re already using it.

Google “content marketing” and you’ll uncover millions (78,200,000 when I did it just now) of results, everything from definitions to how-to guides to case studies. You can quickly and easily pick up the how, why, when, what, and where of content marketing. Every online marketing personality and business has their own advanced guide or step-by-step guide, allowing anyone to grasp, experiment, and eventually master the subtle art of content marketing.

“Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left.” ~ Seth Godin

Strikingly, the only thing you won’t see much of in those millions upon millions of links is how to know when your content marketing isn’t working.

Because there’s a lot more to successful content marketing than just traffic and clicks, and a hell of a lot more than just likes, shares, and retweets. Those are simply vanity metrics that don’t tell you anything of importance by themselves…although it sure does feel nice to see people are loving your stuff.

Now, vanity metrics can be used to find actionable insight, but that’s the subject of another post on another day. Suffice to say, if you’re gauging the success of your content campaigns on likes and shares alone, you’re doing it wrong and wasting your time and energy.

Instead of focusing on the vanity metric, use it to inform your marketing decisions. Dig deeper. Find the corresponding actionable metric.

Content marketing is an active endeavor, and most of the hard work starts after you hit publish. It’s not about reaching people; it’s about reaching the right people.

How do you know when you’re not doing that?

Look for these five red flags before and during the push.

Content Marketing 101

But before we get to that, let’s review some basics.

If you remember only one thing about content marketing, make it this: write your strategy down. Be explicit, detailed, and clear about goals (use SMART goals and stretch goals if applicable), tactics, channels, and how you’re going to measure success.

What will “success” look like? How will you measure return-on-investment? Make sure you and everyone on your team knows and understands.

How often will your marketing team meet? The most successful meet regularly to evaluate, tweak, and manage as necessary. Your content marketing should not be set-it-and-forget-it.

Target your ideal customers. Segment your audience. A/B test. Monitor your efforts. Create evergreen content. Measure the return-on-investment to maximize your budget. Look at your competitors and industry to see what’s working, what’s not, and what others are and are not doing.

In their 2018 annual report on content marketing, CMI discovered that only 38% of B2C businesses have a documented strategy. That’s appallingly low.

Document your strategy. Do that, and you’re ahead of 62% of the competition.

Diversify your tactics and channels. The same report found that B2C marketers:

Use an average of five social media platforms, with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram the top five choices.

Use and average of four formats for distribution, with social media, email, blogs, in-person events, and print the five most popular.

Use an average of five different types of content, with social media posts, pre-produced videos, illustrations/photos, infographics, and interactive tools like quizzes and calculators rounding out the top five most used.

The tricks and tips and hacks for better content marketing are many. Read some. Read many.

“We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.” ~ Craig Davis, former Chief Creative Officer at J. Walter Thompson

And that brings us back full-circle. Knowing when your content marketing isn’t working is as important as knowing when it is…if not more so.

How can you tell if you’re on the wrong track and heading in the wrong direction?

Watch for (and respond!) to these five signposts along the way.

Signpost #1: The Wrong People Are Signing Up

Consider this hypothetical scenario: you launch an aggressive content campaign, complete with blog and social media posts, videos, and infographics, to promote your new SaaS product launch.

Everything has a rock-solid call-to-action inviting people to a free 7-day trial. They click the CTA button, are transported to a well-crafted landing page, and sign up.

That’s an undeniable content marketing win, right?

Wrong. It could be a win…depending on who is signing up. Numbers alone don’t answer that question. Even if you’re looking at an insane 60% conversion rate, it’s meaningless if those signing up are the wrong people.

So who are the “wrong” people? Anyone that’s not within your target market. They may be interested in your content for a wide variety of reasons – research, curiosity, education – but they’re not necessarily interested in your product or service.

Now, far be it for me to suggest that you shouldn’t ever target outside your market. I’m not, and you should. Sometimes your best customers down the road are the ones you’re not even considering at the moment.

A portion of signups outside your target audience is not only nothing to worry about, but a positive and worthwhile goal.

That said, if 50%, 60%, or 70%+ of your leads are falling outside of those you were targeting – wrong geographic location, industry, background, profession, income level, interests, or whatever – something’s wrong. If the majority of those signing up for your email newsletters, gated content, or free trials are nowhere near your ideal fit, your content marketing isn’t working.

Before you write a single line of blog post or send a single tweet, you need to be crystal-clear on your ideal customer. Get to know him or her. You’ve no doubt heard about the importance of buyer or customer personas. Build and use them to guide your content efforts. Do that, and the likelihood of the “wrong” people coming to your content goes down exponentially.

Why? Because a detailed persona allows you to reverse engineer your content specifically for them: their wants, needs, pain points, values, and more. That’s more than half the battle.

If you’re just starting out, this is a bit more difficult, but not impossible. If you have existing customers and sales data to work with, though, you can zero in on the best of the best. According to Duct Tape Marketing:

Identify your most profitable customers.

Identify those who refer within that group.

Identify the common traits and characteristics within that small group.

Create a customer persona based on that data.

That’s your ideal, most profitable customer. Create content for him or her. Share it on the platforms he or she uses and spends the most time on.

Social platforms typically have built-in capabilities, such as Twitter Analytics audience insights dashboard.

If you’re targeting English-speaking men over the age of 50, and your Analytics report shows most of your visitors are females under the age of 25 and from Italy, all those conversions – sign-ups, downloads, or otherwise – probably aren’t going to amount to much with your bottom line.

The sooner you know that, the sooner you can fix it. If the wrong people are signing up or downloading your lead magnets, you have to change direction. And fast.

Know exactly who you’re targeting, and give them exactly what they want and where they want it. Then monitor to make sure it’s drawing them in.

Signpost #2: Incompatible Backlink Profile

Backlinks are still important for your search engine optimization. In fact, many would argue that they’re the key to your overall SEO success. Quality backlinks from respected sites is a surefire indicator to Google and the rest of the search engine overlords that your content is valuable, useful, and worth a read. It’s a vote of confidence.

And that can translate into a big jump on the SERPs. The closer you are to that coveted top spot, the better the chance someone will click on your link. Increased traffic means increased leads, which means increased revenue. Google is happy, the users are happy, and you’re happy.

Backlinks and SEO go hand-in-hand. But backlinks can also tell you if there’s something amiss with your content marketing.

Imagine if your backlink profile – a report on which external sites are linking to your stuff – is populated with websites you wouldn’t expect your target market to visit. Good? Bad?

It depends on your criteria. If those sites are quality sites, those backlinks are still going to give you a healthy SEO boost. That’s good.

However, it may be evidence that your content is not resonating with your ideal customers. And that’s very, very bad. Your content, after all, is how you introduce yourself to them, educated them on your products and services, and persuade them to open their wallets. If it’s missing that mark, you’re failing at the marketing game. It’s the difference between leaving a flyer on hundreds of windshields in a mall parking lot, and hand-delivering to prospects you know would benefit from what you have to offer.

Luckily, generating a backlink profile and conducting a link audit is fast and easy, and there are many tools to assist with it.

To get a basic list, log in to Google Search Console. Click “Search Traffic” on the left-hand menu, and then select “Links to Your Site”. You’ll get a quick n’ dirty report with the total number of links, and the sites who link the most.

Now, you can determine if the sites linking back to your content are within your “demographic”. Some you might recognize by name, others you may have to visit and evaluate.

For a more detailed analysis, you can try a dedicated backlink tool. Some of the best include:

Majestic

Ahrefs

Moz

SEMrush

Bing Webmaster Tools

If your target is recent university graduates, and you’re receiving backlinks from retirement agencies, there’s a mismatch. You’re not producing the right content to connect with those just entering the workforce.

If you’ve done your homework, you should have detailed customer personas. You should know not only who they are, but also what they need, and where they are. Too many people outside those parameters linking to your content is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not going to generate massive sales and revenue.

The sites linking to you are an indicator of who your content is reaching. If you’re targeting professionals, but most of your links are coming from gossip sites, stop. If you’re after grandparents, but Millennial Now is your biggest external source, halt.

Check your link profile. Ensure most of them are coming from sites your target audience would frequent to increase your exposure with them.

If not, re-evaluate. Switch tracks. Create more of what they want, need, and desire. Align your content with your customer.

Signpost #3: No One Is Sharing

Yes, I did tell you at the beginning of this post that shares and likes are a vanity metric. That’s still true. But do you know what else is true?

Great content gets shared.

If people are reading your content but not sharing it, then you’re not producing quality content and your marketing is failing. Period.

This is especially true with influencers in your niche. If you create enough fantastic content, eventually some influencers in your market will share that content. If they aren’t, that’s trouble.

Think about your own online behavior. When you read or encounter a great blog post, infographic, or video, you share it with your own fans, followers, friends, and family. It’s almost automatic. Every platform has the ability built-in, and third-party tools like Hootsuite and sharing plugins make it effortless and convenient.

We read or watch it, we instinctively share it. You want your content to be shared. You need your content to be shared.

Every time you create something, you want it to go viral. That kind of reach and exposure is the dream. While it may not happen for you, consistent social sharing increases your exposure exponentially. One retweet puts your content in front of a whole new set of eyes. It gets people talking about you and your brand. And the cycle repeats if only one person from that new group shares it again, and so on.

First, you need to track how many shares you’re getting with your existing content.

Tools like Hootsuite can monitor your mentions across social media, Google Alerts can notify you when your tracked keywords and phrases are used, Likealyzer analyzes your Facebook Page, Snaplytics provides data on both Snapchat and Instagram Stories, BuzzSumo shows you how content on your site is doing on social media, Google Analytics can report on how much traffic to your site is coming from social channels (under Acquisition > Social > Overview), SharesCount displays social shares based on individual URLs, and all-in-one management platforms like Sprout Social can monitor most of the major platforms from one dashboard.

If you have no shares, you have some serious work to do. If you have some shares, more is always better. If you’re happy with the shares you’re seeing, you’re selling yourself and your content short.

“It’s not the best content that wins. It’s the best promoted content that wins.” ~Andy Crestodina

More shares, more exposure. More exposure, more leads. More leads, more conversions. So, do everything you can to increase the amount of social sharing you’re already seeing:

Produce only incredibly high quality and valuable content. Share nothing but the best you have to offer.

Spend more time on your headline than you do on the rest of the piece. Your headline needs to hook them and force them to click, read, or watch.

Write on topics that are both relevant and timely. What’s trending in your niche?

Try tools like Click-To-Tweet or a scrolling share bar like AddThis to remove friction and allow your readers to share what and when they want.

Make it easy to share with conveniently located share buttons at the top and/or side and/or bottom.

Ask them to share. Remind them to share.

Use compelling visuals.

Create evergreen content.

Increasing your social shares should be part of your content marketing strategy regardless of how many you’re currently seeing. Step 1: monitor your shares. Step 2: increase your shares.

None, few, or lots, more are better.

Signpost #4: Your Leads Aren’t Talking About Your Content

This one is reactive. You won’t know until you start generating some quality leads. It requires asking or surveying them about where and how they heard about you, your brand, and your products.

It might be a simple question in your email series or while talking to them on the phone, or a follow-up online survey, or a fill-in field on an opt-in form. “How did you hear about us?” is profitable and relevant data to collect.

The answers should be varied if you’ve diversified your marketing efforts. Some might say it was a referral from a friend, another might mention an online review or recommendation, while others may have clicked a PPC ad, or read a newspaper feature, or googled your targeted keyword.

But some of them will hopefully talk about your content. In a perfect world, they’ll bring it up without any solicitation from you, choosing to mention how much they loved your blog post on X, or how helpful they found your infographic on Y. That’s when you know your content marketing is crushing it.

Great content with great promotion should elicit great (and unsolicited) feedback.

“What you do after you create your content is what truly counts.” ~Gary Vaynerchuk

If none of your leads are talking about your content, that’s a major red flag. If none of them mention “content” when you ask, that’s a neon signpost. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

Ask. And if the answer is anything and everything but content, you know you need to head back to the drawing board. Don’t stop whatever is working, of course, but tidy up your content efforts at the same time. It’s just too lucrative a tactic to allow it to fail so miserably.

Ask yourself: what do my ideal customers most need? What do they struggle with? How can I better/simplify/improve their lives?

Answer those questions and more with the content you create, and tongues will be wagging.

Signpost #5: Your Leads Want What You Can’t Do

Lead generation is a major part of any business plan. A steady stream of leads going in at the top of your sales funnel means a steady – albeit smaller – stream of customers and advocates exiting at the bottom.

But all leads are not created equal.

Picture this: the leads that are reaching out to you are asking about things you can’t or don’t do. Once or twice is an anomaly. But if it happens on a regular basis then your content is likely at fault.

Leads asking for something other than what you do is often a symptom of creating content that is not directly tied to the business.

If you’re in the analytics business, you should write about analytics. If you produce quality content on SEO as an extension of that, don’t be surprised if people contact you asking for SEO advice and solutions.

If leads are asking about things you can’t, don’t, or won’t do, you aren’t creating the right content for your business. Content marketing is supposed to introduce you as an expert and authority in your field. It’s supposed to initiate a discussion between you and those in need of what you have or do.

In your content efforts, stick to only those topics and sub-topics that are directly related to your product or service. Write only about those subjects. Talk, share, comment, and engage only in those areas.

Everything else is just noise.

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

Conclusion

No traffic. No clicks. No leads. No ROI. Those are a few common reasons your content marketing isn’t working for you. Those are easy to recognize and relatively easy to correct. Jay Baer suggests four categories to fix a broken campaign:

Fix your topic(s).

Fix your amplification and promotion.

Fix your format(s).

Fix your creators.

But content marketing can fail in many less obvious ways. It’s your job to watch, monitor, and manage those silent killers.

The five discussed here are far from exhaustive. The list of potential content assassins is long. You’ve got to stay vigilant.

It is possible to get and stay on the right track heading in the right direction.

Over to you. What other ways have you found your content marketing falling short? What hiccups have you stumbled upon in your marketing? What red flags are you always on the look for?

About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.

from Search Results for “analytics” – The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/2CvAwSv #Digital #Analytics #Website

[samiam03x]

How to Know If Your Content Marketing Just Isn’t Working

Content is king.

And content marketing in 2018 remains a brilliant and cost-effective method for engaging with leads and customers, spreading brand awareness, and getting around the increasing use of ad-blockers.

Whether it’s an email newsletter, social media post, or blog on your own or someone else’s website, people want to see your stuff. They accept it. Approve it. Whitelist it. Because it’s the user him or herself clicking on it, there are no concerns of spam complaints, or annoying the recipient, or ending up in the junk folder.

It’s popular, powerful, and for all intents and purposes, perfect. If you’re online in any professional capacity, you’re already using it.

Google “content marketing” and you’ll uncover millions (78,200,000 when I did it just now) of results, everything from definitions to how-to guides to case studies. You can quickly and easily pick up the how, why, when, what, and where of content marketing. Every online marketing personality and business has their own advanced guide or step-by-step guide, allowing anyone to grasp, experiment, and eventually master the subtle art of content marketing.

“Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left.” ~ Seth Godin

Strikingly, the only thing you won’t see much of in those millions upon millions of links is how to know when your content marketing isn’t working.

Because there’s a lot more to successful content marketing than just traffic and clicks, and a hell of a lot more than just likes, shares, and retweets. Those are simply vanity metrics that don’t tell you anything of importance by themselves…although it sure does feel nice to see people are loving your stuff.

Now, vanity metrics can be used to find actionable insight, but that’s the subject of another post on another day. Suffice to say, if you’re gauging the success of your content campaigns on likes and shares alone, you’re doing it wrong and wasting your time and energy.

Instead of focusing on the vanity metric, use it to inform your marketing decisions. Dig deeper. Find the corresponding actionable metric.

Content marketing is an active endeavor, and most of the hard work starts after you hit publish. It’s not about reaching people; it’s about reaching the right people.

How do you know when you’re not doing that?

Look for these five red flags before and during the push.

Content Marketing 101

But before we get to that, let’s review some basics.

If you remember only one thing about content marketing, make it this: write your strategy down. Be explicit, detailed, and clear about goals (use SMART goals and stretch goals if applicable), tactics, channels, and how you’re going to measure success.

What will “success” look like? How will you measure return-on-investment? Make sure you and everyone on your team knows and understands.

How often will your marketing team meet? The most successful meet regularly to evaluate, tweak, and manage as necessary. Your content marketing should not be set-it-and-forget-it.

Target your ideal customers. Segment your audience. A/B test. Monitor your efforts. Create evergreen content. Measure the return-on-investment to maximize your budget. Look at your competitors and industry to see what’s working, what’s not, and what others are and are not doing.

In their 2018 annual report on content marketing, CMI discovered that only 38% of B2C businesses have a documented strategy. That’s appallingly low.

Document your strategy. Do that, and you’re ahead of 62% of the competition.

Diversify your tactics and channels. The same report found that B2C marketers:

Use an average of five social media platforms, with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram the top five choices.

Use and average of four formats for distribution, with social media, email, blogs, in-person events, and print the five most popular.

Use an average of five different types of content, with social media posts, pre-produced videos, illustrations/photos, infographics, and interactive tools like quizzes and calculators rounding out the top five most used.

The tricks and tips and hacks for better content marketing are many. Read some. Read many.

“We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.” ~ Craig Davis, former Chief Creative Officer at J. Walter Thompson

And that brings us back full-circle. Knowing when your content marketing isn’t working is as important as knowing when it is…if not more so.

How can you tell if you’re on the wrong track and heading in the wrong direction?

Watch for (and respond!) to these five signposts along the way.

Signpost #1: The Wrong People Are Signing Up

Consider this hypothetical scenario: you launch an aggressive content campaign, complete with blog and social media posts, videos, and infographics, to promote your new SaaS product launch.

Everything has a rock-solid call-to-action inviting people to a free 7-day trial. They click the CTA button, are transported to a well-crafted landing page, and sign up.

That’s an undeniable content marketing win, right?

Wrong. It could be a win…depending on who is signing up. Numbers alone don’t answer that question. Even if you’re looking at an insane 60% conversion rate, it’s meaningless if those signing up are the wrong people.

So who are the “wrong” people? Anyone that’s not within your target market. They may be interested in your content for a wide variety of reasons – research, curiosity, education – but they’re not necessarily interested in your product or service.

Now, far be it for me to suggest that you shouldn’t ever target outside your market. I’m not, and you should. Sometimes your best customers down the road are the ones you’re not even considering at the moment.

A portion of signups outside your target audience is not only nothing to worry about, but a positive and worthwhile goal.

That said, if 50%, 60%, or 70%+ of your leads are falling outside of those you were targeting – wrong geographic location, industry, background, profession, income level, interests, or whatever – something’s wrong. If the majority of those signing up for your email newsletters, gated content, or free trials are nowhere near your ideal fit, your content marketing isn’t working.

Before you write a single line of blog post or send a single tweet, you need to be crystal-clear on your ideal customer. Get to know him or her. You’ve no doubt heard about the importance of buyer or customer personas. Build and use them to guide your content efforts. Do that, and the likelihood of the “wrong” people coming to your content goes down exponentially.

Why? Because a detailed persona allows you to reverse engineer your content specifically for them: their wants, needs, pain points, values, and more. That’s more than half the battle.

If you’re just starting out, this is a bit more difficult, but not impossible. If you have existing customers and sales data to work with, though, you can zero in on the best of the best. According to Duct Tape Marketing:

Identify your most profitable customers.

Identify those who refer within that group.

Identify the common traits and characteristics within that small group.

Create a customer persona based on that data.

That’s your ideal, most profitable customer. Create content for him or her. Share it on the platforms he or she uses and spends the most time on.

Social platforms typically have built-in capabilities, such as Twitter Analytics audience insights dashboard.

If you’re targeting English-speaking men over the age of 50, and your Analytics report shows most of your visitors are females under the age of 25 and from Italy, all those conversions – sign-ups, downloads, or otherwise – probably aren’t going to amount to much with your bottom line.

The sooner you know that, the sooner you can fix it. If the wrong people are signing up or downloading your lead magnets, you have to change direction. And fast.

Know exactly who you’re targeting, and give them exactly what they want and where they want it. Then monitor to make sure it’s drawing them in.

Signpost #2: Incompatible Backlink Profile

Backlinks are still important for your search engine optimization. In fact, many would argue that they’re the key to your overall SEO success. Quality backlinks from respected sites is a surefire indicator to Google and the rest of the search engine overlords that your content is valuable, useful, and worth a read. It’s a vote of confidence.

And that can translate into a big jump on the SERPs. The closer you are to that coveted top spot, the better the chance someone will click on your link. Increased traffic means increased leads, which means increased revenue. Google is happy, the users are happy, and you’re happy.

Backlinks and SEO go hand-in-hand. But backlinks can also tell you if there’s something amiss with your content marketing.

Imagine if your backlink profile – a report on which external sites are linking to your stuff – is populated with websites you wouldn’t expect your target market to visit. Good? Bad?

It depends on your criteria. If those sites are quality sites, those backlinks are still going to give you a healthy SEO boost. That’s good.

However, it may be evidence that your content is not resonating with your ideal customers. And that’s very, very bad. Your content, after all, is how you introduce yourself to them, educated them on your products and services, and persuade them to open their wallets. If it’s missing that mark, you’re failing at the marketing game. It’s the difference between leaving a flyer on hundreds of windshields in a mall parking lot, and hand-delivering to prospects you know would benefit from what you have to offer.

Luckily, generating a backlink profile and conducting a link audit is fast and easy, and there are many tools to assist with it.

To get a basic list, log in to Google Search Console. Click “Search Traffic” on the left-hand menu, and then select “Links to Your Site”. You’ll get a quick n’ dirty report with the total number of links, and the sites who link the most.

Now, you can determine if the sites linking back to your content are within your “demographic”. Some you might recognize by name, others you may have to visit and evaluate.

For a more detailed analysis, you can try a dedicated backlink tool. Some of the best include:

Majestic

Ahrefs

Moz

SEMrush

Bing Webmaster Tools

If your target is recent university graduates, and you’re receiving backlinks from retirement agencies, there’s a mismatch. You’re not producing the right content to connect with those just entering the workforce.

If you’ve done your homework, you should have detailed customer personas. You should know not only who they are, but also what they need, and where they are. Too many people outside those parameters linking to your content is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not going to generate massive sales and revenue.

The sites linking to you are an indicator of who your content is reaching. If you’re targeting professionals, but most of your links are coming from gossip sites, stop. If you’re after grandparents, but Millennial Now is your biggest external source, halt.

Check your link profile. Ensure most of them are coming from sites your target audience would frequent to increase your exposure with them.

If not, re-evaluate. Switch tracks. Create more of what they want, need, and desire. Align your content with your customer.

Signpost #3: No One Is Sharing

Yes, I did tell you at the beginning of this post that shares and likes are a vanity metric. That’s still true. But do you know what else is true?

Great content gets shared.

If people are reading your content but not sharing it, then you’re not producing quality content and your marketing is failing. Period.

This is especially true with influencers in your niche. If you create enough fantastic content, eventually some influencers in your market will share that content. If they aren’t, that’s trouble.

Think about your own online behavior. When you read or encounter a great blog post, infographic, or video, you share it with your own fans, followers, friends, and family. It’s almost automatic. Every platform has the ability built-in, and third-party tools like Hootsuite and sharing plugins make it effortless and convenient.

We read or watch it, we instinctively share it. You want your content to be shared. You need your content to be shared.

Every time you create something, you want it to go viral. That kind of reach and exposure is the dream. While it may not happen for you, consistent social sharing increases your exposure exponentially. One retweet puts your content in front of a whole new set of eyes. It gets people talking about you and your brand. And the cycle repeats if only one person from that new group shares it again, and so on.

First, you need to track how many shares you’re getting with your existing content.

Tools like Hootsuite can monitor your mentions across social media, Google Alerts can notify you when your tracked keywords and phrases are used, Likealyzer analyzes your Facebook Page, Snaplytics provides data on both Snapchat and Instagram Stories, BuzzSumo shows you how content on your site is doing on social media, Google Analytics can report on how much traffic to your site is coming from social channels (under Acquisition > Social > Overview), SharesCount displays social shares based on individual URLs, and all-in-one management platforms like Sprout Social can monitor most of the major platforms from one dashboard.

If you have no shares, you have some serious work to do. If you have some shares, more is always better. If you’re happy with the shares you’re seeing, you’re selling yourself and your content short.

“It’s not the best content that wins. It’s the best promoted content that wins.” ~Andy Crestodina

More shares, more exposure. More exposure, more leads. More leads, more conversions. So, do everything you can to increase the amount of social sharing you’re already seeing:

Produce only incredibly high quality and valuable content. Share nothing but the best you have to offer.

Spend more time on your headline than you do on the rest of the piece. Your headline needs to hook them and force them to click, read, or watch.

Write on topics that are both relevant and timely. What’s trending in your niche?

Try tools like Click-To-Tweet or a scrolling share bar like AddThis to remove friction and allow your readers to share what and when they want.

Make it easy to share with conveniently located share buttons at the top and/or side and/or bottom.

Ask them to share. Remind them to share.

Use compelling visuals.

Create evergreen content.

Increasing your social shares should be part of your content marketing strategy regardless of how many you’re currently seeing. Step 1: monitor your shares. Step 2: increase your shares.

None, few, or lots, more are better.

Signpost #4: Your Leads Aren’t Talking About Your Content

This one is reactive. You won’t know until you start generating some quality leads. It requires asking or surveying them about where and how they heard about you, your brand, and your products.

It might be a simple question in your email series or while talking to them on the phone, or a follow-up online survey, or a fill-in field on an opt-in form. “How did you hear about us?” is profitable and relevant data to collect.

The answers should be varied if you’ve diversified your marketing efforts. Some might say it was a referral from a friend, another might mention an online review or recommendation, while others may have clicked a PPC ad, or read a newspaper feature, or googled your targeted keyword.

But some of them will hopefully talk about your content. In a perfect world, they’ll bring it up without any solicitation from you, choosing to mention how much they loved your blog post on X, or how helpful they found your infographic on Y. That’s when you know your content marketing is crushing it.

Great content with great promotion should elicit great (and unsolicited) feedback.

“What you do after you create your content is what truly counts.” ~Gary Vaynerchuk

If none of your leads are talking about your content, that’s a major red flag. If none of them mention “content” when you ask, that’s a neon signpost. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

Ask. And if the answer is anything and everything but content, you know you need to head back to the drawing board. Don’t stop whatever is working, of course, but tidy up your content efforts at the same time. It’s just too lucrative a tactic to allow it to fail so miserably.

Ask yourself: what do my ideal customers most need? What do they struggle with? How can I better/simplify/improve their lives?

Answer those questions and more with the content you create, and tongues will be wagging.

Signpost #5: Your Leads Want What You Can’t Do

Lead generation is a major part of any business plan. A steady stream of leads going in at the top of your sales funnel means a steady – albeit smaller – stream of customers and advocates exiting at the bottom.

But all leads are not created equal.

Picture this: the leads that are reaching out to you are asking about things you can’t or don’t do. Once or twice is an anomaly. But if it happens on a regular basis then your content is likely at fault.

Leads asking for something other than what you do is often a symptom of creating content that is not directly tied to the business.

If you’re in the analytics business, you should write about analytics. If you produce quality content on SEO as an extension of that, don’t be surprised if people contact you asking for SEO advice and solutions.

If leads are asking about things you can’t, don’t, or won’t do, you aren’t creating the right content for your business. Content marketing is supposed to introduce you as an expert and authority in your field. It’s supposed to initiate a discussion between you and those in need of what you have or do.

In your content efforts, stick to only those topics and sub-topics that are directly related to your product or service. Write only about those subjects. Talk, share, comment, and engage only in those areas.

Everything else is just noise.

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

Conclusion

No traffic. No clicks. No leads. No ROI. Those are a few common reasons your content marketing isn’t working for you. Those are easy to recognize and relatively easy to correct. Jay Baer suggests four categories to fix a broken campaign:

Fix your topic(s).

Fix your amplification and promotion.

Fix your format(s).

Fix your creators.

But content marketing can fail in many less obvious ways. It’s your job to watch, monitor, and manage those silent killers.

The five discussed here are far from exhaustive. The list of potential content assassins is long. You’ve got to stay vigilant.

It is possible to get and stay on the right track heading in the right direction.

Over to you. What other ways have you found your content marketing falling short? What hiccups have you stumbled upon in your marketing? What red flags are you always on the look for?

About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.

http://ift.tt/2sCWkMh from MarketingRSS http://ift.tt/2CwymC9 via Youtube

[marie85marketing]

How to Know If Your Content Marketing Just Isn’t Working

Content is king.

And content marketing in 2018 remains a brilliant and cost-effective method for engaging with leads and customers, spreading brand awareness, and getting around the increasing use of ad-blockers.

Whether it’s an email newsletter, social media post, or blog on your own or someone else’s website, people want to see your stuff. They accept it. Approve it. Whitelist it. Because it’s the user him or herself clicking on it, there are no concerns of spam complaints, or annoying the recipient, or ending up in the junk folder.

It’s popular, powerful, and for all intents and purposes, perfect. If you’re online in any professional capacity, you’re already using it.

Google “content marketing” and you’ll uncover millions (78,200,000 when I did it just now) of results, everything from definitions to how-to guides to case studies. You can quickly and easily pick up the how, why, when, what, and where of content marketing. Every online marketing personality and business has their own advanced guide or step-by-step guide, allowing anyone to grasp, experiment, and eventually master the subtle art of content marketing.

“Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left.” ~ Seth Godin

Strikingly, the only thing you won’t see much of in those millions upon millions of links is how to know when your content marketing isn’t working.

Because there’s a lot more to successful content marketing than just traffic and clicks, and a hell of a lot more than just likes, shares, and retweets. Those are simply vanity metrics that don’t tell you anything of importance by themselves…although it sure does feel nice to see people are loving your stuff.

Now, vanity metrics can be used to find actionable insight, but that’s the subject of another post on another day. Suffice to say, if you’re gauging the success of your content campaigns on likes and shares alone, you’re doing it wrong and wasting your time and energy.

Instead of focusing on the vanity metric, use it to inform your marketing decisions. Dig deeper. Find the corresponding actionable metric.

Content marketing is an active endeavor, and most of the hard work starts after you hit publish. It’s not about reaching people; it’s about reaching the right people.

How do you know when you’re not doing that?

Look for these five red flags before and during the push.

Content Marketing 101

But before we get to that, let’s review some basics.

If you remember only one thing about content marketing, make it this: write your strategy down. Be explicit, detailed, and clear about goals (use SMART goals and stretch goals if applicable), tactics, channels, and how you’re going to measure success.

What will “success” look like? How will you measure return-on-investment? Make sure you and everyone on your team knows and understands.

How often will your marketing team meet? The most successful meet regularly to evaluate, tweak, and manage as necessary. Your content marketing should not be set-it-and-forget-it.

Target your ideal customers. Segment your audience. A/B test. Monitor your efforts. Create evergreen content. Measure the return-on-investment to maximize your budget. Look at your competitors and industry to see what’s working, what’s not, and what others are and are not doing.

In their 2018 annual report on content marketing, CMI discovered that only 38% of B2C businesses have a documented strategy. That’s appallingly low.

Document your strategy. Do that, and you’re ahead of 62% of the competition.

Diversify your tactics and channels. The same report found that B2C marketers:

Use an average of five social media platforms, with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram the top five choices.

Use and average of four formats for distribution, with social media, email, blogs, in-person events, and print the five most popular.

Use an average of five different types of content, with social media posts, pre-produced videos, illustrations/photos, infographics, and interactive tools like quizzes and calculators rounding out the top five most used.

The tricks and tips and hacks for better content marketing are many. Read some. Read many.

“We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.” ~ Craig Davis, former Chief Creative Officer at J. Walter Thompson

And that brings us back full-circle. Knowing when your content marketing isn’t working is as important as knowing when it is…if not more so.

How can you tell if you’re on the wrong track and heading in the wrong direction?

Watch for (and respond!) to these five signposts along the way.

Signpost #1: The Wrong People Are Signing Up

Consider this hypothetical scenario: you launch an aggressive content campaign, complete with blog and social media posts, videos, and infographics, to promote your new SaaS product launch.

Everything has a rock-solid call-to-action inviting people to a free 7-day trial. They click the CTA button, are transported to a well-crafted landing page, and sign up.

That’s an undeniable content marketing win, right?

Wrong. It could be a win…depending on who is signing up. Numbers alone don’t answer that question. Even if you’re looking at an insane 60% conversion rate, it’s meaningless if those signing up are the wrong people.

So who are the “wrong” people? Anyone that’s not within your target market. They may be interested in your content for a wide variety of reasons – research, curiosity, education – but they’re not necessarily interested in your product or service.

Now, far be it for me to suggest that you shouldn’t ever target outside your market. I’m not, and you should. Sometimes your best customers down the road are the ones you’re not even considering at the moment.

A portion of signups outside your target audience is not only nothing to worry about, but a positive and worthwhile goal.

That said, if 50%, 60%, or 70%+ of your leads are falling outside of those you were targeting – wrong geographic location, industry, background, profession, income level, interests, or whatever – something’s wrong. If the majority of those signing up for your email newsletters, gated content, or free trials are nowhere near your ideal fit, your content marketing isn’t working.

Before you write a single line of blog post or send a single tweet, you need to be crystal-clear on your ideal customer. Get to know him or her. You’ve no doubt heard about the importance of buyer or customer personas. Build and use them to guide your content efforts. Do that, and the likelihood of the “wrong” people coming to your content goes down exponentially.

Why? Because a detailed persona allows you to reverse engineer your content specifically for them: their wants, needs, pain points, values, and more. That’s more than half the battle.

If you’re just starting out, this is a bit more difficult, but not impossible. If you have existing customers and sales data to work with, though, you can zero in on the best of the best. According to Duct Tape Marketing:

Identify your most profitable customers.

Identify those who refer within that group.

Identify the common traits and characteristics within that small group.

Create a customer persona based on that data.

That’s your ideal, most profitable customer. Create content for him or her. Share it on the platforms he or she uses and spends the most time on.

Social platforms typically have built-in capabilities, such as Twitter Analytics audience insights dashboard.

If you’re targeting English-speaking men over the age of 50, and your Analytics report shows most of your visitors are females under the age of 25 and from Italy, all those conversions – sign-ups, downloads, or otherwise – probably aren’t going to amount to much with your bottom line.

The sooner you know that, the sooner you can fix it. If the wrong people are signing up or downloading your lead magnets, you have to change direction. And fast.

Know exactly who you’re targeting, and give them exactly what they want and where they want it. Then monitor to make sure it’s drawing them in.

Signpost #2: Incompatible Backlink Profile

Backlinks are still important for your search engine optimization. In fact, many would argue that they’re the key to your overall SEO success. Quality backlinks from respected sites is a surefire indicator to Google and the rest of the search engine overlords that your content is valuable, useful, and worth a read. It’s a vote of confidence.

And that can translate into a big jump on the SERPs. The closer you are to that coveted top spot, the better the chance someone will click on your link. Increased traffic means increased leads, which means increased revenue. Google is happy, the users are happy, and you’re happy.

Backlinks and SEO go hand-in-hand. But backlinks can also tell you if there’s something amiss with your content marketing.

Imagine if your backlink profile – a report on which external sites are linking to your stuff – is populated with websites you wouldn’t expect your target market to visit. Good? Bad?

It depends on your criteria. If those sites are quality sites, those backlinks are still going to give you a healthy SEO boost. That’s good.

However, it may be evidence that your content is not resonating with your ideal customers. And that’s very, very bad. Your content, after all, is how you introduce yourself to them, educated them on your products and services, and persuade them to open their wallets. If it’s missing that mark, you’re failing at the marketing game. It’s the difference between leaving a flyer on hundreds of windshields in a mall parking lot, and hand-delivering to prospects you know would benefit from what you have to offer.

Luckily, generating a backlink profile and conducting a link audit is fast and easy, and there are many tools to assist with it.

To get a basic list, log in to Google Search Console. Click “Search Traffic” on the left-hand menu, and then select “Links to Your Site”. You’ll get a quick n’ dirty report with the total number of links, and the sites who link the most.

Now, you can determine if the sites linking back to your content are within your “demographic”. Some you might recognize by name, others you may have to visit and evaluate.

For a more detailed analysis, you can try a dedicated backlink tool. Some of the best include:

Majestic

Ahrefs

Moz

SEMrush

Bing Webmaster Tools

If your target is recent university graduates, and you’re receiving backlinks from retirement agencies, there’s a mismatch. You’re not producing the right content to connect with those just entering the workforce.

If you’ve done your homework, you should have detailed customer personas. You should know not only who they are, but also what they need, and where they are. Too many people outside those parameters linking to your content is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not going to generate massive sales and revenue.

The sites linking to you are an indicator of who your content is reaching. If you’re targeting professionals, but most of your links are coming from gossip sites, stop. If you’re after grandparents, but Millennial Now is your biggest external source, halt.

Check your link profile. Ensure most of them are coming from sites your target audience would frequent to increase your exposure with them.

If not, re-evaluate. Switch tracks. Create more of what they want, need, and desire. Align your content with your customer.

Signpost #3: No One Is Sharing

Yes, I did tell you at the beginning of this post that shares and likes are a vanity metric. That’s still true. But do you know what else is true?

Great content gets shared.

If people are reading your content but not sharing it, then you’re not producing quality content and your marketing is failing. Period.

This is especially true with influencers in your niche. If you create enough fantastic content, eventually some influencers in your market will share that content. If they aren’t, that’s trouble.

Think about your own online behavior. When you read or encounter a great blog post, infographic, or video, you share it with your own fans, followers, friends, and family. It’s almost automatic. Every platform has the ability built-in, and third-party tools like Hootsuite and sharing plugins make it effortless and convenient.

We read or watch it, we instinctively share it. You want your content to be shared. You need your content to be shared.

Every time you create something, you want it to go viral. That kind of reach and exposure is the dream. While it may not happen for you, consistent social sharing increases your exposure exponentially. One retweet puts your content in front of a whole new set of eyes. It gets people talking about you and your brand. And the cycle repeats if only one person from that new group shares it again, and so on.

First, you need to track how many shares you’re getting with your existing content.

Tools like Hootsuite can monitor your mentions across social media, Google Alerts can notify you when your tracked keywords and phrases are used, Likealyzer analyzes your Facebook Page, Snaplytics provides data on both Snapchat and Instagram Stories, BuzzSumo shows you how content on your site is doing on social media, Google Analytics can report on how much traffic to your site is coming from social channels (under Acquisition > Social > Overview), SharesCount displays social shares based on individual URLs, and all-in-one management platforms like Sprout Social can monitor most of the major platforms from one dashboard.

If you have no shares, you have some serious work to do. If you have some shares, more is always better. If you’re happy with the shares you’re seeing, you’re selling yourself and your content short.

“It’s not the best content that wins. It’s the best promoted content that wins.” ~Andy Crestodina

More shares, more exposure. More exposure, more leads. More leads, more conversions. So, do everything you can to increase the amount of social sharing you’re already seeing:

Produce only incredibly high quality and valuable content. Share nothing but the best you have to offer.

Spend more time on your headline than you do on the rest of the piece. Your headline needs to hook them and force them to click, read, or watch.

Write on topics that are both relevant and timely. What’s trending in your niche?

Try tools like Click-To-Tweet or a scrolling share bar like AddThis to remove friction and allow your readers to share what and when they want.

Make it easy to share with conveniently located share buttons at the top and/or side and/or bottom.

Ask them to share. Remind them to share.

Use compelling visuals.

Create evergreen content.

Increasing your social shares should be part of your content marketing strategy regardless of how many you’re currently seeing. Step 1: monitor your shares. Step 2: increase your shares.

None, few, or lots, more are better.

Signpost #4: Your Leads Aren’t Talking About Your Content

This one is reactive. You won’t know until you start generating some quality leads. It requires asking or surveying them about where and how they heard about you, your brand, and your products.

It might be a simple question in your email series or while talking to them on the phone, or a follow-up online survey, or a fill-in field on an opt-in form. “How did you hear about us?” is profitable and relevant data to collect.

The answers should be varied if you’ve diversified your marketing efforts. Some might say it was a referral from a friend, another might mention an online review or recommendation, while others may have clicked a PPC ad, or read a newspaper feature, or googled your targeted keyword.

But some of them will hopefully talk about your content. In a perfect world, they’ll bring it up without any solicitation from you, choosing to mention how much they loved your blog post on X, or how helpful they found your infographic on Y. That’s when you know your content marketing is crushing it.

Great content with great promotion should elicit great (and unsolicited) feedback.

“What you do after you create your content is what truly counts.” ~Gary Vaynerchuk

If none of your leads are talking about your content, that’s a major red flag. If none of them mention “content” when you ask, that’s a neon signpost. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

Ask. And if the answer is anything and everything but content, you know you need to head back to the drawing board. Don’t stop whatever is working, of course, but tidy up your content efforts at the same time. It’s just too lucrative a tactic to allow it to fail so miserably.

Ask yourself: what do my ideal customers most need? What do they struggle with? How can I better/simplify/improve their lives?

Answer those questions and more with the content you create, and tongues will be wagging.

Signpost #5: Your Leads Want What You Can’t Do

Lead generation is a major part of any business plan. A steady stream of leads going in at the top of your sales funnel means a steady – albeit smaller – stream of customers and advocates exiting at the bottom.

But all leads are not created equal.

Picture this: the leads that are reaching out to you are asking about things you can’t or don’t do. Once or twice is an anomaly. But if it happens on a regular basis then your content is likely at fault.

Leads asking for something other than what you do is often a symptom of creating content that is not directly tied to the business.

If you’re in the analytics business, you should write about analytics. If you produce quality content on SEO as an extension of that, don’t be surprised if people contact you asking for SEO advice and solutions.

If leads are asking about things you can’t, don’t, or won’t do, you aren’t creating the right content for your business. Content marketing is supposed to introduce you as an expert and authority in your field. It’s supposed to initiate a discussion between you and those in need of what you have or do.

In your content efforts, stick to only those topics and sub-topics that are directly related to your product or service. Write only about those subjects. Talk, share, comment, and engage only in those areas.

Everything else is just noise.

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

Conclusion

No traffic. No clicks. No leads. No ROI. Those are a few common reasons your content marketing isn’t working for you. Those are easy to recognize and relatively easy to correct. Jay Baer suggests four categories to fix a broken campaign:

Fix your topic(s).

Fix your amplification and promotion.

Fix your format(s).

Fix your creators.

But content marketing can fail in many less obvious ways. It’s your job to watch, monitor, and manage those silent killers.

The five discussed here are far from exhaustive. The list of potential content assassins is long. You’ve got to stay vigilant.

It is possible to get and stay on the right track heading in the right direction.

Over to you. What other ways have you found your content marketing falling short? What hiccups have you stumbled upon in your marketing? What red flags are you always on the look for?

About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.

[sbusinesstechnologylondon]

What is CMI certification - Level 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 & 7 Qualifications

How to improve your career growth through a CMI certification?

Finding a good job these days can be difficult, with more and more people graduating and competing for the same positions. This makes securing a job harder than ever. Employers always search for candidates who develop their careers by continuous learning and improving their skills.

For example, you have good management skills, but earning a CMI certification from CMI- approved centres like SBTL to upgrade them shows employers that you are serious about your career.

What is CMI certification?

The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) is the UK's leading professional body dedicated to promoting high standards in management and leadership. It is basically a UK organisation, and CMI provides a range of qualifications that are recognised globally.

A CMI certification is officially designed to develop and validate a manager’s skills, ensuring they can make strategic decisions for leading teams effectively and driving organisational success.

Different Levels and Qualifications Offered by CMI UK

CMI offers a broad range of qualifications, depending on your current career status and leadership responsibilities. The qualifications range from Level 2 to Level 8.

Level 2 and 3 Qualifications: This is the foundational skill development level for aspiring or junior managers. They provide the skills needed to manage teams and understand basic leadership principles.

Level 4 and 5 Qualifications: These levels are designed for mid-level managers to upgrade their management skills and take on greater responsibilities.

Level 6 Qualifications: These CMI certifications allow experienced managers to upgrade their careers into senior leadership positions. They focus on improving strategic management skills needed for success in CMI Leadership roles.

Level 7 Qualifications: These CMI certifications enable senior managers and directors to improve their skills for senior leadership and executive roles.

Level 8 Qualifications: This is the highest level of CMI leadership certification, specially designed for C-suite executives. It focuses on top-level leadership skills and helps leaders tackle complex challenges.

The Global Reputation of CMI UK

CMI qualifications are highly valued by employers worldwide. CMI is known as the only Chartered body focused on offering the highest accolade in management and leadership. With over 130,000 members worldwide, CMI offers a large professional community. This membership includes managers, leaders, and aspiring professionals from different industries.

How Does CMI Leadership Build Stronger Leaders?

CMI Leadership training helps develop key skills, knowledge, and a mindset focused on growth, innovation, and leadership that make leaders more effective in their roles.

Strategic Thinking

CMI Leadership training teaches leaders to think strategically and helps them to make smart decisions that benefit their teams and the business.

Communication Skills

CMI programs improve leaders communication skills, helping their teams work together more effectively and reducing confusion at work.

How to Get Started with CMI UK

If you’re ready to start with a CMI certification, find a CMI-approved centre. One great option is the School of Business and Technology London (SBTL). SBTL offers a range of CMI qualifications in the UK. They cater to managers at different levels.

Read more: https://sbusinesslondon.ac.uk/how-to-improve-your-career-growth-through-a-cmi-certification

[eelgibbortech-blog]

5 Tips for Creating Excitement (and a Bit of FOMO)

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Next week I’ll join my counterparts from around the world in Berlin to talk about live event experiences. It’s an annual gathering where we can share ideas, successes, and challenges, and learn to better understand each other’s businesses. For many, creating pre-event content to build excitement (and maybe a bit of FOMO [fear of missing out]) for our events is a hot topic.

Regardless of your industry or region of the world, pre-event content is an important element for delivering on an amazing event experience.

While marketing campaigns are often centered on content, event marketers often think about content too late. That’s precisely what UBM found in its Content Connects research among technology brands. Laura Forer of MarketingProfs, UBM’s research collaborator, notes that pre-event content shouldn’t be an afterthought: “Ninety-six percent of attendees look for information prior to attending an event, and 90% continue that search post-event. Effective content before, during, and after an event is vital to the overall experience.”

Effective #content before, during & after an event is vital to attendee experience via @MarketingProfs Click To Tweet

I’ll admit, I’m a bit jealous of the Diner en Blanc events – chic gatherings in beautiful places around the world that rely mostly on secrecy and word of mouth. They don’t have to spend time and budget on creative content – other than a tantalizing invitation – to draw thousands of people to eat, drink, be merry, and wear white.

The rest of us, though, need to be more vocal and consistent to make our events pop with high quality and engaging pre-event content (which, in some cases, can be used on-site and post-event.)

I share five ideas for pre-event content that you are welcome to steal as you plan your next event. And I’d love to hear about some of your favorites in the comments.

1. Create educational and fun videos to define event topics or goals

Short videos can give prospects and attendees a sneak peek at event topics and speakers. The CMI team posted videos before the 2017 Intelligent Content Conference (spoiler alert: we’ll do it again for ICC 2018 because they were effective). The videos were educational, but producer (and CMI Chief Strategy Advisor) Robert Rose also kept them lighthearted and funny to make them worth the three to five minutes people would spend watching them.

Short pre-event #videos helped prospects better understand topics in lighthearted ways, says @EditorStahl. Click To Tweet

They were designed to help marketers better understand tools and innovations behind content strategy – the topic of the conference. Subjects like augmented reality, content audits, localization, and journey mapping were part of the video series that were shared on the ICC event blog, promoted in emails, and posted to YouTube in the months leading up to the event. In each case, the ICC presenter on the topic was mentioned and additional related content was offered.

Watch Robert talk about journey mapping – and sing a Journey song. All I can say is don’t stop believing pre-event videos will work. These videos really resonated with the audience and didn’t require extensive time or budget.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 10 Tips (and a Ton of Tricks) to Maximize Your Video Content Investment

2. Send a clever piece of (snail) mail

Yeah, you read that right – send the kind of stuff that shows up in a physical mailbox. In a time when digital is the primary distribution channel, a piece of mail can be a welcome surprise. Just ask Ann Handley, chief content officer at MarketingProfs. “The key is to send something fun, cool, AND that also encourages sharing on social platforms,” she says.

The key to pre-event snail mail is sending something fun that encourages sharing on social, says @annhandley. Click To Tweet

One of MarketingProfs’ most brilliant examples of pre-event snail mail was the creation of the “Flat Handley,” (a take-off on the popular and long-lasting Flat Stanley literacy project).

Image source

“We encouraged people to document their journey to Boston for the B2B Marketing Forum along with Flat Handley,” Ann explains. “Every year we try to outdo ourselves from the previous year.”

In 2017, the MarketingProfs team sent its mascot, Jay Bird, as a traveling buddy for attendees. The language on the back of the cardboard Jay Bird explained what to do – using some hilarious bird puns:

Hi I’m Jay! I excel at flying, and I’m here in your mailbox because it’s almost time for us to take flight for the MarketingProfs B2B Forum! I don’t want you to be owl by yourself; that would be hawkward. Document my journey on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram using the hashtag #MPB2B – it’s a great way to tweet new marketing friends, because more than toucan can play at this! I can help you take your relationships to the nest level.”

This seriously made me laugh out loud. As Ann notes – it’s “FOMO-liscious!”

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Deliver Emails That Will Increase Reach, Impact, and Subscriber Satisfaction

3. Develop original research to be shared with attendees and used by event speakers

Original research is an important part of any content marketing strategy. It’s an opportunity to highlight industry trends, challenges, innovations, and above all, thought leadership. The content team that supports Interop ITX, an event for tech leaders, fields topical research surveys and shares the results with attendees, prospects, and speakers.

For its 2017 event, the team released four reports (IT Salary Survey, State of Cloud, State of DevOps, and State of Data Analytics) and published companion infographics, podcasts, and articles in the months leading up to the live event. The research topics directly reflect the event conference tracks and the Interop team encourages speakers to incorporate the data into their presentations where appropriate. Kelley Damore, executive vice president of content, says, “We – editors and presenters – are all speaking from the same data and highlighting the research.”

.@Interop ties its research reports directly to its event conference tracks, says @EditorStahl. Click To Tweet

The Interop team already released research on the State of Infrastructure that connects to the agenda for 2018.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How Content Influences the Purchasing Process: Tips for Content Marketers [Research]

4. Love your speakers

Your event speakers are your lifeblood. Their expertise makes your event educational and inspiring. Promote them. Celebrate them.

Mike Winkleman, founder of Leverage Media, is a big proponent of featuring speakers in the weeks leading up to an event. One of his favorite examples was a program he launched for Chief Executive Magazine in 2016 which included speaker-focused articles published in its e-newsletters about six weeks before its Talent Summit. The articles reflected thought leadership in key areas and helped promote the speakers’ expertise.

Says Winkleman, “Interviewing the speakers for the e-newsletter articles was combined with prepping them for their talks at the event itself, which gave it added value.” Subsequent post-event coverage in the magazine nicely rounded out the experience.

Visual content can also play a role in promoting speakers – and to have them promote your event. One of my favorite strategies for Content Marketing World comes from our creative genius, Joseph Kalinowski. He creates unique “posters” for all the sessions and speakers reflecting the event theme.

Check out all of the posters from Content Marketing World 2017.

Beautifully designed, they are easily shareable on social media by CMWorld speakers. The printed versions are displayed during the event and are often taken home by speakers as souvenirs. Find ways like this to share the love and speakers will share back.

Create #visual content for sessions & speakers using event theme. It’s great for promotion. @EditorStahl Click To Tweet

I am STOKED for #CMWORLD. Who’s with me? If you aren’t yet, use code SPKR100. Save $. Sign up. Learn more @ 1 event than you might at many. http://pic.twitter.com/cTKnR8BCAp

— MichelleParkLazette (@mp_lazette) August 17, 2017

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 7 Tips to Harness Your Event Superpowers

5. Highlight user-generated content that shows attendees how to make the most of the event and to have fun

When loyal audience members take the time to create content about your event, it’s like winning the lottery. It’s one thing for you and your brand to tout the event, but it is more sincere and meaningful when your audience does so. Embrace it and showcase it.

When audience members create content about your event it’s like winning lottery – showcase it. @EditorStahl. Click To Tweet

In this blog, Unforgettable Value at Your Next Conference Without Being a Speaker, Content Marketing World attendee Aaron Orendorff (@iconiContent) highlights fun aspects of the event (including attendees being photographed in an orange hat and with Lego props), and offers great tips for making the most of the event.

Aaron, with Venngage’s Nadya Khoja, also created this infographic, 26 Headliners on How to Connect With Influencers (at a Conference), to showcase valuable insight on how to connect with conference speakers from CMWorld presenters and industry influencers such as John Hall, Andrea Fryrear, Michael Brenner, Andrew Davis, and others. Their comments are fun and thoughtful, and provide a great way to get the community talking.

Let’s get talking about pre-event content. What are you doing to draw people in for your event or what have you seen others do that you think is – in Ann’s word – FOMO-licious?

Be one of the first to see the pre-event content created by Content Marketing Institute for the Intelligent Content Conference and Content Marketing World. Subscribe to CMI’s free daily newsletter or weekly digest.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Source link

The post 5 Tips for Creating Excitement (and a Bit of FOMO) appeared first on Ebulkemaimarketing Blogs and updates.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2AMutfg via IFTTT

[sbusinesstechnologylondon]

How can you simplify your learning journey with a Finance and Management MSc Top-Up?

Every student has to go through a crucial decision-making process when embarking on their learning journey. Considerations such as personal learning objectives, academic performance, choice of institution, financial constraints, external perceptions, and time allocation all come into play. Whether you're a recent high school graduate, an individual with professional experience, or someone feeling uncertain about their path, enrolling in a Top-Up course offers a faster route to achieving your goals.

Let's explore how you can expedite your learning journey in the dynamic fields of Finance and Management.

What is a Top-Up Degree?

As the name implies, top-up courses involve enhancing your current qualifications with some extra studies. By combining your prior certificates, such as diplomas or advanced diplomas, with a year of intensive full-time learning, you can attain an undergraduate degree. This resultant degree corresponds to the final year of undergraduate study, providing a swifter path to graduation.

So, completing a top-up course within 12 months offers substantial time savings compared to the conventional degree, which typically takes 3-4 years. Additionally, you can leverage your existing certifications to maximise the benefits of this accelerated learning pathway.

Benefits of getting a Top-Up programme

Time-saver

Flexible and efficient pathway to academic success

Recognised and built on previous certifications

Get an undergraduate certificate for just one year of full-time study

Get access to postgraduate programmes 

Expanding knowledge and skillset

Cost-effective

Improved career prospects

Specialisation opportunities

Personal growth.

Do you want to skip the long road?

Given the numerous advantages, a top-up course presents an opportunity to bypass the lengthy conventional route. Presently, many esteemed institutions and online platforms provide the benefit of pursuing a top-up degree. Particularly, courses in financial management are gaining popularity among employed individuals due to the pressing need for a comprehensive understanding of diverse financial principles and methodologies in today's landscape. Those aspiring to enhance their academic and professional pursuits in finance and management can short-cut their educational journey through an MSc Finance and Management Top-Up programme.

Where can you study the (Top-Up) Finance and Management?

Selecting the right educational institution is crucial as it can significantly impact the worth and recognition of your top-up degree. Courses available in conventional universities hold great credibility. However, in recent times, online courses have steadily gained credibility due to their increasing popularity among learners. Recognising this trend, renowned universities have begun offering accredited online courses while ensuring that their credibility matches traditional offline courses.

How about getting the opportunity to study the (Top-Up) Finance and Management accredited by the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN)?

Fast-track your way to a degree with the (Top-Up) Finance and Management at SBTL.

The University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) awards the MSc Finance and Management Top-Up to individuals with a relevant postgraduate diploma. School of Business and Technology London (SBTL) partners with Chestnut Education Group and UCLAN to offer the MSc Finance and Management Top- Up in two phases:  Phase 1: Level 7 Diploma in Accounting and Finance at SBTL (12 months) Phase 2: Finance and Management MSc Top-Up awarded and delivered by the UCLAN

And the perks? Complete the Finance and Management MSc Top-up in just 9 months from UCLAN!

SBTL is committed to providing advanced professional courses accredited by esteemed bodies such as CMI, QUALIFI, BCS, OTHM, ILM (City & Guilds), and TQUK and regulated by Ofqual.gov.uk. SBTL presents this bypass pathway to the Finance and Management MSc Top-up, simplifying and enhancing accessibility for students to seamlessly progress in their educational journey. 

Get in touch with SBTL to learn more about the diploma in phase one!

[a-breton]

6 Ways to Use Reviews in Your Content and Pitfalls to Avoid

Want a shortcut to creating content that will convert, resonate with your customers, and save you time?

Enter third-party review websites.

For content marketers, reviews are like an unending recipe book. They are your golden ticket to efficient content that converts. (A 2017 study by the Spiegel Research Center reports that displaying reviews can increase conversion rates by up to 270%.)

Displaying reviews can increase conversion rates by up to 270% via @SpiegelResearch. Click To Tweet

Let’s explore six ways to incorporate reviews into your content marketing strategy and how to avoid the pitfalls.

1. Spark content ideas

Review sites can be a springboard for content ideas – ideas that already reflect something your audience thinks, whether it’s about how to use your product, what features matter, or pain points to overcome.

Review sites can be a springboard for #content ideas, says @AusmericanGirl. Click To Tweet

This Yelp review for the Tortoise Supper Club in Chicago is full of content ideas. Its marketers could create content about pre-show restaurants, the role of staff in creating ultimate dining experiences, or even the evolution of mom’s meatloaf.

You also can use these reviews as a source to find your brand advocates, who may be willing to work with you to create trustworthy content that converts, such as case studies.

TIP: Use widgets to embed reviews from a third-party platform on your site, which allows consumers to know the review is unaltered.

2. Add credibility to website and landing pages

Incorporate reviews and recognition from review websites on your site. Content from third-party review sites adds a level of credibility. Focus on landing pages with the most traffic or the best leads to conversions.

#Content based on third-party review sites adds a level of credibility, says @AusmericanGirl. Click To Tweet

In B2C service reviews, TripAdvisor and Yelp allow you to embed reviews at no charge. Embedding from B2B review sites may be open only to paid customers.

Julie’s Park Café & Hotel in Door County, Wisconsin, uses its TripAdvisor reviews on its site:

Another Door County hotel, the Bay Shore Inn, uses its TripAdvisor recognition, an instant stamp of approval, on its site:

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How Content Influences the Purchasing Process: Tips for Content Marketers [Research]

3. Craft celebratory blog posts

You know those reports and best-of lists created by review sites? As soon as you discover your brand is on the list (yay!), write a blog post displaying the evidence of your new acclaimed status.

Many B2B software providers do this, such as in this example from Kareo, when its all-in-one medical software product was ranked highest in customer satisfaction based on user reviews submitted through G2 Crowd (my employer).

TIP: You also can use reviews to identify keywords to elevate in your blog posts.

4. Watch for videos

As the rise of video reviews continues, keep an eye out for ways to incorporate them in your video content.

For example, if you’re a dog lover like me, you can turn to YouTube for reviews of a pet toy’s durability. Introducing the Tough Toy Tryouts channel. Pet lovers can actually see what happened with the KONG Goodie Bone & Stuff’N Dog after 3-year-old Story put it to the test.

YouTube is a growing source for reviews and Amazon is exploring video reviews too.

5. Share on social media

From LinkedIn to Twitter, reviews give you a great snippet to summarize your story to social media followers. Whether you take a review and turn it into a Twitter testimonial or share on LinkedIn your ranking on a B2B review site, the brief, easy-to-create pieces of content grab attention and drive potential customers to your website.

Create #content snippets from customer reviews to grab attention from #socialmedia followers. @AusmericanGirl Click To Tweet

Author Lilly Adam took an Amazon review of her book and turned it into a GIF for Twitter:

What a great story of the life of the two girls. It was like a suspense story with all the challenging happenings. Thank you Lilly. NOW ONLY 99p – Amazon Review #mustread #allauthor available at Amazon –> https://t.co/608J23uqgM pic.twitter.com/WnZADMa4L8

— Lilly Adam (@lillya1960) June 17, 2018

6. Print signage

You can use non-verbal review recognition with customers who interact with your brand on location. Yelp, for example, gives businesses the ability to fill out a form and request a Find Us On Yelp sticker. It also automatically sends a People Love Us On Yelp window cling to small businesses that qualify.

Chicago bar Jazz Showcase makes the most of these review site clings:

B2B companies can use their awards and recognition at trade shows and expos as Terminus did at the 2018 Marketo Summit:

Avoid these pitfalls

For your review-based content to be credible, the reviews must be credible too – 100% authentic (i.e., the reviewer has used the product or service) and unbiased (i.e., the reviewer wasn’t incentivized or a friend/family member of the business’s employees).

Only use reviews that are 100% authentic and unbiased, says @AusmericanGirl. Click To Tweet

Some fake reviews are obvious, some not so much. A 2017 BrightLocal study shows 79% of surveyed consumers say they’ve spotted a fake review in the past year. However, 84% of respondents concede they can’t always recognize a fake review.

79% of surveyed customers say they’ve spotted a fake review in the past year via @bright_local. Click To Tweet

Smart and ethical marketers know they should only use authentic reviews, but even the less ethical should care about the truth. They are more likely to get caught today, as companies are being created or offering services to analyze how trustworthy a review is. For example, ReviewMeta.com was created to evaluate Amazon customer reviews.

TIP: Don’t give away product in exchange for reviews. Invite all your paying customers to write reviews, not just the ones you think will give a positive one. (The Spiegel Research Center study reveals that a perfect or close-to-perfect review score is not perceived as ideal. That number falls between 4.2 and 4.7 on a 5-point scale.)

Don’t assume you have the marketing rights

Just because someone has written a review about your product or service, you don’t automatically have the rights to it.

Some sites allow you to use customer reviews in your marketing materials. Others don’t permit it or charge a fee to do so. You often can find an abundance of information by going to the website where the review was written. Yelp supports businesses using its reviews in their content as long as the community guidelines are followed:

If you’re not sure, reach out and ask about the usage guidelines, terms, and conditions for the site. Emailing the company that hosts the reviews is a great way to get clarification in writing.

TIP: Follow the law too. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is cracking down on misleading or untruthful endorsements (and that includes failing to disclose if the reviewer was incentivized).

In closing

Once you reflect, it becomes apparent how dependent consumers have become on peer opinions. The good news is your brand can use this feedback. The process of implementing a review strategy (and getting all those reviews!) can take time, but the payoff is worth it.

And imagine how review content can help give you an endless bounty of new content to kick-start ideas and build on content you already have.

Editor’s note: We appreciate G2 Crowd’s support of Content Marketing Institute as a paid benefactor. This article was reviewed and edited independently to ensure that it adheres to the same editorial guidelines as all blog posts.

Please note:  All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team.  No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

See who’s using reviews on-site (and learn a lot) at Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7. Register today and use code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

from http://bit.ly/2tDHVww

[lucyariablog]

Pre-Event Content: 5 Tips for Creating Excitement (and a Bit of FOMO)

Next week I’ll join my counterparts from around the world in Berlin to talk about live event experiences. It’s an annual gathering where we can share ideas, successes, and challenges, and learn to better understand each other’s businesses. For many, creating pre-event content to build excitement (and maybe a bit of FOMO [fear of missing out]) for our events is a hot topic.

Regardless of your industry or region of the world, pre-event content is an important element for delivering on an amazing event experience.

While marketing campaigns are often centered on content, event marketers often think about content too late. That’s precisely what UBM found in its Content Connects research among technology brands. Laura Forer of MarketingProfs, UBM’s research collaborator, notes that pre-event content shouldn’t be an afterthought: “Ninety-six percent of attendees look for information prior to attending an event, and 90% continue that search post-event. Effective content before, during, and after an event is vital to the overall experience.”

Effective #content before, during & after an event is vital to attendee experience via @MarketingProfs Click To Tweet

I’ll admit, I’m a bit jealous of the Diner en Blanc events – chic gatherings in beautiful places around the world that rely mostly on secrecy and word of mouth. They don’t have to spend time and budget on creative content – other than a tantalizing invitation – to draw thousands of people to eat, drink, be merry, and wear white.

The rest of us, though, need to be more vocal and consistent to make our events pop with high quality and engaging pre-event content (which, in some cases, can be used on-site and post-event.)

I share five ideas for pre-event content that you are welcome to steal as you plan your next event. And I’d love to hear about some of your favorites in the comments.

1. Create educational and fun videos to define event topics or goals

Short videos can give prospects and attendees a sneak peek at event topics and speakers. The CMI team posted videos before the 2017 Intelligent Content Conference (spoiler alert: we’ll do it again for ICC 2018 because they were effective). The videos were educational, but producer (and CMI Chief Strategy Advisor) Robert Rose also kept them lighthearted and funny to make them worth the three to five minutes people would spend watching them.

Short pre-event #videos helped prospects better understand topics in lighthearted ways, says @EditorStahl. Click To Tweet

They were designed to help marketers better understand tools and innovations behind content strategy – the topic of the conference. Subjects like augmented reality, content audits, localization, and journey mapping were part of the video series that were shared on the ICC event blog, promoted in emails, and posted to YouTube in the months leading up to the event. In each case, the ICC presenter on the topic was mentioned and additional related content was offered.

Watch Robert talk about journey mapping – and sing a Journey song. All I can say is don’t stop believing pre-event videos will work. These videos really resonated with the audience and didn’t require extensive time or budget.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 10 Tips (and a Ton of Tricks) to Maximize Your Video Content Investment

2. Send a clever piece of (snail) mail

Yeah, you read that right – send the kind of stuff that shows up in a physical mailbox. In a time when digital is the primary distribution channel, a piece of mail can be a welcome surprise. Just ask Ann Handley, chief content officer at MarketingProfs. “The key is to send something fun, cool, AND that also encourages sharing on social platforms,” she says.

The key to pre-event snail mail is sending something fun that encourages sharing on social, says @annhandley. Click To Tweet

One of MarketingProfs’ most brilliant examples of pre-event snail mail was the creation of the “Flat Handley,” (a take-off on the popular and long-lasting Flat Stanley literacy project).

Image source

“We encouraged people to document their journey to Boston for the B2B Marketing Forum along with Flat Handley,” Ann explains. “Every year we try to outdo ourselves from the previous year.”

In 2017, the MarketingProfs team sent its mascot, Jay Bird, as a traveling buddy for attendees. The language on the back of the cardboard Jay Bird explained what to do – using some hilarious bird puns:

Hi I’m Jay! I excel at flying, and I’m here in your mailbox because it’s almost time for us to take flight for the MarketingProfs B2B Forum! I don’t want you to be owl by yourself; that would be hawkward. Document my journey on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram using the hashtag #MPB2B – it’s a great way to tweet new marketing friends, because more than toucan can play at this! I can help you take your relationships to the nest level.”

This seriously made me laugh out loud. As Ann notes – it’s “FOMO-liscious!”

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Deliver Emails That Will Increase Reach, Impact, and Subscriber Satisfaction

3. Develop original research to be shared with attendees and used by event speakers

Original research is an important part of any content marketing strategy. It’s an opportunity to highlight industry trends, challenges, innovations, and above all, thought leadership. The content team that supports Interop ITX, an event for tech leaders, fields topical research surveys and shares the results with attendees, prospects, and speakers.

For its 2017 event, the team released four reports (IT Salary Survey, State of Cloud, State of DevOps, and State of Data Analytics) and published companion infographics, podcasts, and articles in the months leading up to the live event. The research topics directly reflect the event conference tracks and the Interop team encourages speakers to incorporate the data into their presentations where appropriate. Kelley Damore, executive vice president of content, says, “We – editors and presenters – are all speaking from the same data and highlighting the research.”

.@Interop ties its research reports directly to its event conference tracks, says @EditorStahl. Click To Tweet

The Interop team already released research on the State of Infrastructure that connects to the agenda for 2018.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How Content Influences the Purchasing Process: Tips for Content Marketers [Research]

4. Love your speakers

Your event speakers are your lifeblood. Their expertise makes your event educational and inspiring. Promote them. Celebrate them.

Mike Winkleman, founder of Leverage Media, is a big proponent of featuring speakers in the weeks leading up to an event. One of his favorite examples was a program he launched for Chief Executive Magazine in 2016 which included speaker-focused articles published in its e-newsletters about six weeks before its Talent Summit. The articles reflected thought leadership in key areas and helped promote the speakers’ expertise.

Says Winkleman, “Interviewing the speakers for the e-newsletter articles was combined with prepping them for their talks at the event itself, which gave it added value.” Subsequent post-event coverage in the magazine nicely rounded out the experience.

Visual content can also play a role in promoting speakers – and to have them promote your event. One of my favorite strategies for Content Marketing World comes from our creative genius, Joseph Kalinowski. He creates unique “posters” for all the sessions and speakers reflecting the event theme.

Check out all of the posters from Content Marketing World 2017.

Beautifully designed, they are easily shareable on social media by CMWorld speakers. The printed versions are displayed during the event and are often taken home by speakers as souvenirs. Find ways like this to share the love and speakers will share back.

Create #visual content for sessions & speakers using event theme. It's great for promotion. @EditorStahl Click To Tweet

I am STOKED for #CMWORLD. Who’s with me? If you aren’t yet, use code SPKR100. Save $. Sign up. Learn more @ 1 event than you might at many. pic.twitter.com/cTKnR8BCAp

— MichelleParkLazette (@mp_lazette) August 17, 2017

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 7 Tips to Harness Your Event Superpowers

5. Highlight user-generated content that shows attendees how to make the most of the event and to have fun

When loyal audience members take the time to create content about your event, it’s like winning the lottery. It’s one thing for you and your brand to tout the event, but it is more sincere and meaningful when your audience does so. Embrace it and showcase it.

When audience members create content about your event it's like winning lottery – showcase it. @EditorStahl. Click To Tweet

In this blog, Unforgettable Value at Your Next Conference Without Being a Speaker, Content Marketing World attendee Aaron Orendorff (@iconiContent) highlights fun aspects of the event (including attendees being photographed in an orange hat and with Lego props), and offers great tips for making the most of the event.

Aaron, with Venngage’s Nadya Khoja, also created this infographic, 26 Headliners on How to Connect With Influencers (at a Conference), to showcase valuable insight on how to connect with conference speakers from CMWorld presenters and industry influencers such as John Hall, Andrea Fryrear, Michael Brenner, Andrew Davis, and others. Their comments are fun and thoughtful, and provide a great way to get the community talking.

Let’s get talking about pre-event content. What are you doing to draw people in for your event or what have you seen others do that you think is – in Ann’s word – FOMO-licious?

Be one of the first to see the pre-event content created by Content Marketing Institute for the Intelligent Content Conference and Content Marketing World. Subscribe to CMI’s free daily newsletter or weekly digest.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Pre-Event Content: 5 Tips for Creating Excitement (and a Bit of FOMO) appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

from http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/12/pre-event-content/