Once again, it’s been a pretty wild ride through the marketing news arena in November. The little app that could, Snapchat, shocked almost everyone when they refused to sell for the staggering sum of $3 billion, leaving it clear that we’re moving towards a new era of mobile messaging. Major research firms revealed that email usage is slipping, and brands are struggling to find talent to hack their analytics.
Over 392 million people worldwide view more than 13.3 billion pages each month – and that’s just on WordPress-hosted blogs! The concept of publishing content in real-time to the web has gone from an obscure pastime in the late 1990’s to the formidable force it is today. Content is an incredibly effective way to drive ROI for your company’s marketing budget, but you won’t see great results if you simply publish articles without a distribution or promotion plan in mind. Business blog marketing is a critical part of a modern content marketing strategy, and we’ve detailed 7 of the best ways to see better results here.
The marketing industry is diverse and ever changing, and one of the easiest ways to stay on top is to read the most relevant and pertinent blogs. There are thousands of marketing blogs out there that focus on different aspects of the marketing industry from optimization, conversion, advertising, and content.
Everyone can have happy and successful careers as content creators, if they adopt positive working habits. According to Pearson, the right habits can be the difference between successfully achieving goals and having work-life balance, or struggling to simply meet expectations. While procrastination is among the worst things you can do on a daily basis, especially when you’re striving to meet deadlines, small changes in other areas can yield remarkable results.
To understand “agile marketing,” you must first understand the whole agile methodology. Introduced first for software development, this method focuses on using new work cadences, sometimes known as “sprints,” to prepare for an unpredictable workflow. The traditional method is known as the “waterfall” method, or put simply, taking on each task as it comes, even if it’s piled on top of something you’re already working on.
Marketers worldwide are still buzzing about Inbound 13, the world’s largest inbound marketing conference. HubSpot’s annual gathering, held in Boston, drew an astounding 5,300 marketing professionals from 34 countries worldwide. Between over 100 amazing speakers like Seth Godin and Arianna Huffington, an on-site concert and tons of networking opportunities, it’s no surprise the designated hashtag of #Inbound13 was trending on Twitter for much of the conference.
Whether you were lucky enough to score a spot at the show, or you’re curious about some of the incredible inbound marketing lessons learned during the four-day event, we’ve compiled a list of brilliant takeaways from the conference.
What do manufacturing best practices have in common with content marketing? Turns out, more than you might think. While the concept may have been developed in the late 1980’s to describe how auto manufacturer Toyota conducted business, lean principles offer valuable lessons for individuals in any industry. As the Lean Enterprise Institute highlights, lean isn’t a solution to a specific problem, but rather a “way of thinking and acting for an entire organization.” While cutting back on your time spent creating content is likely to lead to a drop in quality, analyzing your marketing processes to eliminate waste and increase efficiency could have exactly the opposite effect. Becoming more efficient at meeting your buyer personas’ needs could mean a higher-velocity of incredible content. And what content marketer doesn’t want that?
The small business landscape is arguably tougher than ever before. A recent Constant Contact survey found that 59% of SMB CEOs feel it’s harder to run a business than it was 5 years ago, a factor which can primarily be attributed to quickly-changing technology and marketing best practices. The difficulty of success means that competitive marketing analysis is more crucial than ever.
“If you write great content, people will find it.” While that’s certainly an idyllic thought of a world in which marketers can just focus on creating outstanding content, it’s just not accurate anymore.
Over 2 million blog posts are published to the web each day. Call it an era of abundance, information obesity, or the content arms race, but the truth is that it’s much harder than it used to be to build an audience.
Startup expert Neil Patel recently stated that content creation is only half the battle – the rest is gaining notice.
Due to the increasing weight of social signals in SEO rankings, social distribution can even be a precursor to gaining the search rankings you need for organic traffic. That being said, there’s a very fine line between effective content promotion and alienating your potential audience by being a spammer.
Did you know Google’s search algorithm changes 500 or 600 times a year? Updates to the world’s largest search engine can range from massive to minimal, but a single day rarely goes by without an update. Back in February 2011, Google introduced their Panda update, which affected around 23% of websites, devastated a number of small businesses, and changed the fact of SEO as we know it. It’s unfortunate that many marketing professionals today are a little wary of future algorithm changes, so Google’s Matt Cutts sat down a few weeks ago to reveal some insights on what we can expect this summer: