The 6 Types of Content Will Boost Your Traffic and Engagement. How can you create content with the most efficiency and ease? Are you challenging yourself to come up with new ideas and new ways of imparting information about your business? Are you experimenting with the different forms of content that your customers may like to read? We’d love to help you get there. The 2015 edition of the annual B2C Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends—North America report put together by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs found that while 69% of marketers are creating more content than they were a year ago, only 27% have a strategy that is documented. That said, content is booming with 65% of respondents saying they’re better converting visitors on their websites and 62% saying they’re creating more engaging and higher-quality content. Here at Buffer, we’ve frequently talked about creating quality headlines, working with images, and exploring different social media channels.
Today, let’s talk about your blog. 1. 2. 3. 4. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. How Much Should Your Content Marketing Really Cost? Businesses interested in leveraging the many benefits of content marketing seem to have an ever-growing list of solutions and content strategies to choose from. They can hire freelancers, outsource their content to an agency; or they can even onboard and train their own in-house teams. With so many options, it can be hard to decide which is best for you. Understanding how each of these solutions can best align with your overarching business goals, budgeting restrictions and the needs of your customers is a necessary step before you promote your brand with a content driven strategy—especially when on a tight budget. While many of these strategies can prove successful for a variety of business models, not every tactic is going to be effective for your specific company needs. Learn how to identify the content needs of your business and about the pros, cons, and costs associated with multiple content marketing solutions to better inform your budgeting decisions.
Identifying Your Content Needs. Brand Management - Five Things That Successful Brand Managers Do. I have good news for people who explore a career in brand management: Good brand managers will continue to be a hot commodity. Last year, Procter & Gamble, the company that defined the term "brand management," announced that its entire marketing function became brand management, with "single-point responsibility for the strategies, plans, and results for the brands.
" The P&G announcement marks an undeniable shift in a business's go-to market strategy. Now, branding will be the epicenter of the efforts to compete in a super-crowded business environment. Marketing equals branding Building trust in a brand and managing its reputation is becoming much more important than managing the classic 4 Ps of marketing (product, placement, price, and promotion). A strong brand offers a business the luxury of putting the classic 4Ps of marketing on autopilot. Let's take products, for example. Distribution has also become more accessible, in large part due to the explosion of e-commerce. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Uk.businessinsider. Zero UI — The Future of Interfaces. By Jenna Palermo Are we in the era of Zero UI? Not quite, but we’re getting close. Zero UI is the concept of removing the barrier between user and device, and having a more seamless interaction with technology. Industry advancements are moving towards not only more intuitive and integrated pieces of tech, but also an environment that creates less disconnect from our world, providing authentic, meaningful interactive spaces.
Zero UI is all about how we as the user interact with our content. While a world completely devoid of physical interfaces may never be a reality, being less tied to our devices may be in the cards. At the helm of this transition are gesture-based user interfaces. More recently, Google has announced an advancement to gesture control through Project Soli, a chip that will allow users to gesture above a device without needing to touch the screen directly. Machine-learning technologies employed by companies like Nest are helping to further the idea of touchless interfaces. An Updated Guide to the Marketing in the Big 6 Social Networks.
Everyone likes to talk about “the Big 6” as if you could go into a job interview and say, “I’m proficient in the Big 6” and walk away with the job. But what does being proficient mean? What exactly do you have to understand about the Big 6? And is the Big 6 a static entity? We’ll get to the other questions in a minute, but as for that last one, the answer is a big NO. To think that the “Big 6” will stay the same 6 networks is to misunderstand the fluidity and agility of social media entirely. Things change in social, and they change fast. Facebook The birthplace of social marketing remains a player in the game, despite constant moaning about its pitfalls (I confess to doing some of that complaining myself.) Advertising: Boosted posts do really well if you simply want your posts to appear more frequently in the news feed of your existing fans or their friends. Do: use photos. Don’t: ignore negative comments. Twitter Do: try Twitter for good-natured news-jacking.
Don’t: get too automated. PredictSpring Helps Brands Embrace Mobile Shopping. Longtime Googler Nitin Mangtani (manager for a number of products including Google Shopping) has founded a startup of his own, PredictSpring, where he’s working to help brands and retailers get up-to-speed with mobile commerce. To illustrate why PredictSpring is necessary, Mangtani pointed to numbers from comScore showing that while 60 percent of retail browsing happens on mobile devices, those devices only account for 15 percent of dollars spent. “The experiences on mobile haven’t caught up with the consumer demand,” he said. “The consumer is ready to do commerce on mobile.” To create those experiences, PredictSpring has created a mobile app development platform that allows businesses to create shopping-enabled apps without writing any code. PredictSpring has also raised $2 million in funding from investors including fashion tycoon Silas Chou’s Novel TMT Group and Beanstalk Ventures.
On the other hand, apps created on the PredictSpring platform are supposed to be “100 percent native.” A Content Marketer’s Guide to Podcasting. Sometimes I make content marketing strategy decisions based on intuition. Sometimes, I win and sometimes I lose. When I launched my first podcast show in 2009 I had no plan. It was one of those “ready, fire, aim” content marketing initiatives. Actually, it was mostly just “fire.” In those days, podcast listening wasn’t mainstream. Fast forward to 2015 and podcasting in content marketing has come of age! In this post, you will learn: How I got started in podcastingWhat a podcast is and what it isn’tWhy podcasting makes sense for content marketersHow to create a podcast monetization strategyHow to choose a podcast show formatAn overview of podcasting toolsContent marketing podcasting best practices In 2014 I began to get the urge to launch another podcast to up my content marketing game.
And, I knew that more and more marketers were taking interest in learning about podcasting as a content medium. (Image source: 2015 Social Media Marketing Industry Report: Michael Stelzner) Bernie Borges. 5 Content Marketing Problems That Keep Me Up at Night. When you work at a successful startup, one of the main perks of coming to work is the unbridled bubble of optimism and ambition that covers the whole office while employees chant startup catchphrases: Fail fast and often!
Make awesome stuff! Make the world a better place! That last startup-ism was lampooned last year in an episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley when dozens of startups paraded on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to explain how they were making the world a better place: through software-defining data centers for cloud computing; through canonical data models that communicate between n-plugs; by revolutionizing the way you report bugs on your mobile platform.
It’s a damn perfect parody, as evidenced by the fact that we have our own rah-rah maxim here at Contently: to build a better media world. Two years in, is this a realistic vision? I think so. But while content marketing has positive momentum, it remains an experimental line item for most brands. 1. All comics by Martin Kozlowski. It’s All In The Mix: How To Create The Perfectly Blended Social Media Campaign. As with so many things in life, social media marketing is all about getting the balance just right. Too much of one thing and not enough of another can leave your campaigns seeming amateurish, annoying, or otherwise just tasteless or plain bad. Think about them in terms of cooking up a tasty broth for your loved ones – all of your ingredients need to be balanced perfectly to avoid disaster and please those hungry tummies.
Too much salt and the dish becomes unpalatable. Not enough liquid, and your broth will boil dry and burn on the pan. If you don’t use a good stock as the base, then there will simply be no meat to your offering (regardless of whether it’s a vegetarian option or not). Under season and the soup will be bland. Over season and it will be ghastly. Balance. Marketing Campaigns: How Do You Like Yours Cooked? The cooking analogy is nothing new, it seems.
Many a time have us carnivores been asked: “And how do you like your steak cooked, sir/madam?” Where, How Much, and How Often? Marketing Speakers - CMWorld. Making Sense of Your MarTech Stack page 2. By separating out these layers, application developers are able to reduce complexity, increase scalability, make it easier to design and implement, make upgrading and adding additional functionality much easier, and increase maintainability. Hey, these all sound like pretty good benefits! How can we apply this to our MarTech stack? If we think about the different functions that are necessary to create good marketing, we can begin to see some natural layers in our ecosystem. Here is my take on the different layers of our MarTech stack: The diagram above shows how different applications within the ecosystem occupy different layers depending on their functionality.
A more specialized application like a brand survey is found only within a couple layers of the stack: The survey is in the Research Layer, and the reporting and analysis of the survey is in the Reporting and Analytics Layer. Now, what does this tell us about our MarTech stack? Another good example is at the Content Layer. How Data Visualization Is Changing Digital Marketing. As consumers have caught on to the gimmicks and pitches so prevalent in traditional advertising, marketers have had to adapt. Now data visualization is forcing them to adapt again. Once upon a time, marketing meant advertising. It was simple. If you had a better ad than your competitor, it magically turned into an increase in sales. Today’s consumers aren’t quite so suggestible.
Thanks to an increasingly accessible Internet, even the least-educated consumers today are more wary of advertising than the best-educated consumers of two decades ago. What is data visualization? When we think of data, we picture spreadsheets, charts, and graphs. What it does for customers and clients For customers, data visualization helps guide them through the sales funnel. It’s no wonder marketers use data visualizations as much as possible in their reports to clients: the knock on marketing for many years has been the inability to quantify it in terms of ROI.
The future of visualized data marketing. Facebook video fight: strong accusations vs. weasel words. YouTube video producer Hank Green says Facebook cheats, lies, and steals. Facebook product manager Matt Pakes responds that everything is fine. He’s not willing to admit that Facebook is the Borg. The question here is simple: If you have a popular video, are you better off uploading and embedding it in Facebook or just linking to it YouTube?
Pakes says upload to Facebook, Green says Facebook sucks. Green published his accusations on Medium. Facebook says it’s now streaming more video than YouTube. If I embed a YouTube video or Vine on Facebook, only a tiny fraction of my audience will actually see it. Facebook counts views significantly before people could be said to be watching the video. . . .Facebook counts the “view” at the three second mark (whether or not the viewer has even turned on the sound) in the midst of a precipitous decline in retention. On making the case, I’d rate this an A. How did Facebook do on the response? [W]e take intellectual property rights very seriously. The Journey from Web CMS to Digital Experience. Where is Web CMS going in this wild ride towards consumer-centric marketing?
As marketers pursue the holy grail of an omnichannel digital experience across the full customer journey, their needs are expanding. CMS vendors have responded with a growing list of capabilities such as personalization, social engagement, mobility, e-commerce and more. That CMS vendors are expanding their offerings beyond basic content management, with some in a metamorphosis to full-on digital experience platform. The spectrum is wide, and the industry experts are mixed as to what is happening, and what should be happening. The Expanding CMS Gartner had its say in this space last week in its Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management, but the more telling report by the Stamford, Conn. Just look at the volume of capabilities Gartner included for content management in that report: But why go so broad?
“It’s gone from efficiency to effect,” MacComascaigh said. “And it’s how that effect is achieved. Don’t Lose the Core. How The Big Shift To Digital And Data Marketing Is Getting Agencies Fired. More Thoughts on Why Web Design is Dead. My recent article declaring Web Design “dead” spurred lots of comments and some really interesting reply posts (one, two, and three) which I absolutely encourage you to read. The counterarguments in these posts and in other comments from readers can be summarized in the following four ideas: We still need lots and lots of Web design. Poorly designed sites are the norm, and people are currently using these sites, on desktops, tablets and mobile. Few businesses can afford to get away without having a Web page. Some of these arguments were already addressed In Conversation with Josh Tyson from UX Magazine, but I’ll go over all of them again, because they certainly deserve attention.
Content Is King, but Content Is Not Tied to Web Anymore Do you use Flipboard? Content (and function in the case of tools) will never die. In this context, Web is just a medium—one that is increasingly losing influence to mobile. This is a logical move for the ecosystem owner: Why not own more of it? Tweet this. BuzzFeed Television? Maybe it's closer than you think. Arianna Huffington built The Huffington Post into a global digital media empire, while Jonah Peretti, who helped found HuffPo, went on to co-found BuzzFeed, turned into a digital juggernaut that could soon be valued at $1.5 billion.
The former colleagues now stand at the vanguard of the new media industry, watched and discussed and speculated about all the time for clues about where digital media is going. But both of digital media's big empire-builders are looking in another direction: Television. Digital media companies, the great disruptors of news and entertainment, are cozying up to television as they look to find cash to justify their lofty valuations. The medium of tomorrow? Not exactly. But TV is still very relevant today. Digital media companies have already been ramping up production of video that can appear appear online.
Ironically, one of the appeals of television is that it has remained resistant to digital media's attempts to kill it. Not exactly a mass exodus. Must see TV. More Thoughts on Why Web Design is Dead. Why Upworthy Is Ditching Aggregation for Original Content—and Why Brands Should Too. Millennials aren't getting cable because they can't afford it. Are you ignoring these Snapchat marketing fundamentals. Adobe's Digital Publishing Solution embraces content marketers. B2C marketing automation vendor BlueShift lets ecommerce marketers reach “segment-of-one” personalization | VentureBeat | Marketing | by Andrew Jones. Agencies vs. Publishers vs. Tech: Who Owns the Future of Content Marketing?
Facebook's second-quarter earnings call points toward focus on video content | Technology. What Facebook's Algorithm Change Means For Brands, Publishers, and the Future of Media. Master the Art of Content Repurposing. Microsoft Project Gigjam Integrated With Cortana Demo At WPC 2015. How to Develop and Maintain a Content Team. 3 Ways To Extend The Half Life Of Your Content With Smart Repurposing – TrackMaven. Erling Amundson on how Symantec organizes their social customer care team.
Building a content strategy for the internet of things | Media Network.