Your content is really only as good as its context. Would you read something about a 2012 political election, or best practices for using MySpace? Probably not. Humans have an innate craving for trending news and breaking stories. Being able to blend your branded messaging with relevant topics will significantly increase the virality of your content marketing. However, as content marketing expert Marcus Sheridan believes, “many businesses…are missing the mark big time.”
While Google’s Authorship markup has been available to content creators since June 2011, adoption rates remain low.
While it’s challenging to develop an accurate gauge of engagement on Google+, studies indicate that user engagement with the platform is weak, especially compared with social media giants Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.
Thanks to the Internet, your ideal customers are looking for you and researching your products online. So how do you get their attention over the competition? Inbound marketing, of course. While you can use traditional marketing and advertising to find customers, the new style of marketing online is more efficient, more cost-effective, and customers actually like it.
So what is inbound marketing?
Email should be the power player of your inbound marketing strategy.
In case you haven’t heard, it’s still an incredibly effective method of connecting with consumers. The Direct Marketing Association reports that email drives more ROI than any other form of outreach for 67% of companies, and it’s the top source for new sales for 30% of marketers.
It’s so easy to get caught up in content envy. Big companies worldwide are gaining attention, fans and customers for quality content efforts. Remember when Oreo tweeted a humorous custom image during the Super Bowl blackout in January, revealing they had a Photoshop-savvy employee armed and waiting?
It’s no secret that content marketers don’t always get the best rap.
In a recent satire on Huffington Post, marketer Keith Blanchard stated their “writing is exclusively consumed by other content marketers.” While his comment was in jest, there was some truth behind his words.
Writing effective sales copy is like holding the reader’s hand and leading them gently and firmly to the solution to their problem. Along the way, a professional copywriter will paint a picture of how awesome life will be without it. Here are the seven steps to writing a copy that sells.
Have you heard that 90% of companies are using custom content for marketing? Or that consumers believe that blogs are the most useful form of content? There’s a lot of compelling reasons to blog starting yesterday, not the least of which is that it’s no longer a differentiating factor. There are now nearly 7 million blogs on the internet, a meteoric increase over the 100,000 that existed a decade ago. From increased brand awareness to thought leadership to positive SEO, the reasons to blog are nearly endless. We’ve highlighted 25 of our favorites below:
Great SEO isn’t really a standalone practice anymore. In fact, it’s really difficult to seperate search engine optimization from social media and content marketing, because these three factors form the pillar of a modern inbound marketing strategy. Keyword research and optimization can improve the performance of your SEO blog posts in search, while social media shares send a clear message to Google that your content is quality. You won’t get far without the putting effort into all three legs of the contemporary marketing triad!
Not convinced you need to optimize your blog for SEO?
89% of modern consumers use search engines to make purchase decisions, and 75% of search users never click beyond the first page of search results. Your website needs to rank well in Google, Bing, and Yahoo to capture the attention of your future customers. Fortunately, publishing fresh content regularly is one of the best ways to build positive SEO for your business.