Tips To How to Master Your Content Curation Strategy – Brendan Schneider

On By marketingscoopsIn Content Blogger Tool, Content Building Tools, Content Curation Apps, Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Content Strategy/Generating Content, Content TargetingLeave a comment

Do you always find yourself not having enough time to create content for your blog? Or maybe you are short on writers who can publish articles regularly.

Then, it’s time to consider content curation as part of your marketing strategy!

Content curation is the process of discovering and selecting content that is relevant to a particular subject or area of interest for your target audience. Curata defined content curation as:

Performed by a person, not simply a computer algorithm.
Being discerning, discriminative, and selective.
Added value. You offer perspective, insight, guidance.
Not a one-time event or activity.
Informed by a laser focus on your audience.

If you’re interested in implementing content curation, find out how these experts are doing it successfully.

Create a Curated Newsletter

I position my Weekend Update Newsletter as my reader’s “weekly professional development required reading.” The newsletter is simply a curated email of written content, audio content, and questions from my private Facebook Group that I determine are the most important for my readers to consume.

I’ve been creating my newsletter for years, and the three most important lessons I’ve learned are:

While this might go without saying, you absolutely need to understand who your reader is and what their challenges are.
You need to be a consumer of content yourself. You need to read, listen, and watch as much content as you can from the industry you are trying to curate.
You need to have your content organized, and I use and recommend the RSS reader Feedly. Good luck and happy curating!

Set Your Goals

It’s very important to establish from the start what exactly you want to achieve with content curation:

more influence in your niche,
promoting your business,
generating more followers and engagement, etc.

This will help you decide what channels to use, what types of content to share, and what content formats to use in order to ultimately achieve your goals.

Another important part: don’t just share links and be done with it. Give your input, make a comment on what you’ve read or seen, explain why people should check out that piece of content, be funny – that makes the difference between simply sharing content and curating content.

While content curation is good for SEO and the marketing of your business, you’ll get more long-term results if you remember that your audience is not there to help you. Everything you write, curate and promote must be of the greatest value of the readers or viewers. Make it all about them and they will reward you with attention and interest.

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How a Few Pages Can Make or Break Your Website – Jeff Baker

On By marketingscoopsIn Affiliate Marketing Study/Strategies, Computer Tech, Content Blogger Tool, Content Building Tools, Content Curation Apps, Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Content Strategy/Generating Content, Content Targeting, Educational Technology, Internet Tools, Learning/Knowledge, Marketing Strategy, Website Builder AppLeave a comment

A prospect unequivocally disagreed with a recommendation I made recently. I told him a few pages of content could make a significant impact on his site. Even when presented with hard numbers backing up my assertions, he still balked. My ego started gnawing: would a painter tell a mathematician how to do trigonometry?

Unlike art, content marketing and SEO aren’t subjective. The quality of the words you write can be quantified, and they can generate a return for your business.

Most of your content won’t do anything

In order to have this conversation, we really need to deal with this fact.

Most content created lives deep on page 7 of Google, ranking for an obscure keyword completely unrelated to your brand. A lack of scientific (objective math) process is to blame. But more on that later.

Case in point: Brafton used to employ a volume play with regard to content strategy. Volume = keyword rankings. It was spray-and-pray, and it worked.

Looking back on current performance for old articles, we find that the top 100 pages of our site (1.2% of all indexed pages) drive 68% of all organic traffic.

Further, 94.5% of all indexed pages drive five clicks or less from search every three months.

So what gives?

Here’s what has changed: easy content is a thing of the past. Writing content and “using keywords” is a plan destined for a lonely death on page 7 of the search results. The process for creating content needs to be rigorous and heavily supported by data. It needs to start with keyword research.

1. Keyword research:

Select content topics from keywords that are regularly being searched. Search volume implies interest, which guarantees what you are writing about is of interest to your target audience. The keywords you choose also need to be reasonable. Using organic difficulty metrics from Moz or SEMrush will help you determine if you stand a realistic chance of ranking somewhere meaningful.

2. SEO content writing:

Your goal is to get the page you’re writing to rank for the keyword you’re targeting. The days of using a keyword in blog posts and linking to a product landing page are over. One page, one keyword. Therefore, if you want your page to rank for the chosen keyword, that page must be the very best piece of content on the web for that keyword. It needs to be in-depth, covering a wide swath of related topics.

How to project results

Build out your initial list of keyword targets. Filter the list down to the keywords with the optimal combination of search volume, organic difficulty, SERP crowding, and searcher intent. You can use this template as a guide — just make a copy and you’re set.

Get the keyword target template

Once you’ve narrowed down your list to top contenders, tally up the total search volume potential — this is the total number of searches that are made on a monthly basis for all your keyword targets. You will not capture this total number of searches. A good rule of thumb is that if you rank, on average, at the bottom of page 1 and top of page 2 for all keywords, your estimated CTR will be a maximum of 2%. The mid-bottom of page 1 will be around 4%. The top-to-middle of page 1 will be 6%.

In the instance above, if we were to rank poorly, with a 2% CTR for 20 pages, we would drive an additional 42–89 targeted, commercial-intent visitors per month.

The website in question drives an average of 343 organic visitors per month, via a random assortment of keywords from 7,850 indexed pages in Google. At the very worst, 20 pages, or .3% of all pages, would drive 10.9% of all traffic. At best (if the client followed the steps above to a T), the .3% additional pages would drive 43.7% of all traffic!

Whoa.

That’s .3% of a site’s indexed pages driving an additional 77.6% of traffic every. single. month.

How a few pages can make a difference

Up until now, everything we’ve discussed has been hypothetical keyword potential. Fortunately, we have tested this method with 37 core landing pages on our site (.5% of all indexed pages). The result of deploying the method above was 24 of our targeted keywords ranking on page 1, driving an estimated 716 high-intent visitors per month.

That amounts to .5% of all pages driving 7.7% of all traffic. At an average CPC of $12.05 per keyword, the total cost of paying for these keywords would be $8,628 per month.

Our 37 pages (.5% of all pages), which were a one-time investment, drive 7.7% of all traffic at an estimated value of $103,533 yearly. Can a few pages make or break your website? You bet your butt.

If everyone who read the articles and like it, that would be favorable to have your donations – Thank you.

How to Use Keyword Gap Analysis to Land High-Quality Guest Posts – Dustin Christensen

The days of guest blogging strictly for SEO purposes may be over – Google long ago called out the tactic – but it is still a great way to build rapport with your industry. Guest posting is also an ideal way to provide value to your audience without having a large platform yourself, which is often the case with new brands or websites.

One of the most challenging parts of this process is finding the right topic to pitch to your target sites. This can be particularly difficult when approaching large sites that have hundreds or thousands of published articles spanning many years. The chance that your topic has already been covered may be high.

Recently, I discovered an easy way to find potential topics for your guest posts that can nearly guarantee you will pitch something they haven’t covered before. It takes some research, but can dramatically improve your success rate when it comes to editors accepting your ideas.

Here is how it works:

1. Find a website you’d like to write for and identify their main organic competition.

2. Use the SEMrush Keyword Gap Tool to find keywords that the competition ranks for, but your target site does not.

With this data, you will have plenty of topics that your target site hasn’t sufficiently covered, and with the right approach, you can craft a pitch that is tailored to that site’s focus and audience. This doesn’t mean you will automatically get your idea published, but it will help you avoid pitching topics they have already discussed.

In your pitch, you can also allude to the fact that their closest competitors have covered the topic, which may help your case.

I recently used this strategy to write a contributor post for Foundr.com; a site focused on early-stage entrepreneurship. Here is a look at the process I used, and how you can apply this to your guest blogging campaigns.

Find Your Target Website

Many websites still accept guest posts or editorial submissions, so building your potential prospect list should be straightforward. I began by looking for entrepreneurship, business, and marketing sites that seemed accessible, and made a list of 5 – 10 websites I wanted to pitch.

From there, I started with Foundr.com because the site met my criteria and includes a contributor page with information on how to submit content ideas. When a site offers this info, it is much easier to adapt your pitch to exactly what they are looking for.

foundr contributor form

Aside from being a fan of Foundr’s podcast, I also spent some time browsing their recent and most popular blog articles to get an idea of the site’s tone, voice, and style. Once I was comfortable knowing I could pitch a topic that would be valuable to their audience, I began researching the site’s organic competition.

Identify the Organic Competition

The SEMrush Organic Competitors report identified more than 7,500 domains that had keywords in common with Foundr.com, including large sites like Forbes.com, Entrepreneur.com, and Medium.com.

foundr organic competition

When choosing domains to run through the Keyword Gap Analysis, however, I like to use sites that aren’t too large – otherwise, you will get a lot of keywords and topics that aren’t necessarily related to your target site.

If I were to run YouTube and Foundr through the analysis, for example, I would get thousands of keywords YouTube ranks for that are unrelated to Foundr.

It helps to identify sites of the same relative size and scope of your target site, and this will make the next step easier when choosing keywords and potential content topics. In my research, I found one site that seemed to have a large amount of data to work with, but was focused enough to provide targeted results, and that was Harvard Business Review.

foundr competition

Harvard Business Review covers everything from entrepreneurship to leadership, management, and marketing. The site seemed a good fit because Foundr takes a decidedly young approach to entrepreneurship, where HBR is a decades-old non-profit whose goal is “to improve the practice of management in a changing world.” They may cover similar topics, but their philosophies are different, and I believed I could use this to my advantage when crafting article ideas.

The next step was to find keywords and topics that HBR ranked for that Foundr did not.

Use Keyword Gap Analysis to Find Relevant Keywords

Using the Keyword Gap tool, I entered HBR.org as the first domain and Foundr.com as the second. In between, I chose the “Unique to the first domain’s keywords” option. This gave me more than one million keywords.

foundr gap analysis tool

To clean things up, I narrowed down the results by volume (keywords between 80 and 500 searches) and keyword difficulty (less than 85). This gave me a more manageable starting point of about 150,000 keywords.

how to build resilience at work keyword

Next, I began going through the keywords to see if there was anything I could use as the seed of an article for Foundr. Here is where critical thinking comes into play, and although it is not always fun to work through hundreds of keywords, the time you put into this stage can make or break your pitches down the road.

Many keywords were related to careers and management, including:

How to tell someone they are being laid off
Office politics hbr
How to write short cover letter

Some of these may be good long-tail topics, but Foundr is about early-career entrepreneurs and founders – not traditional career advice. After some research, one of the top keywords stood out:

how to build resilience at work

That was something that applied to entrepreneurship because of the immense obstacles and challenges facing those looking to build businesses. Resilience isn’t just helpful for founders – it is practically a requirement.

After doing further research on Foundr’s content, including a Google “site:” search, I found no other article that seemed to hit on the same topic. I had a winner.

Tailor Your Keyword with an Appealing Angle

Once you have your keywords in mind, it is not enough to simply pitch that search query as your topic. You will want to craft an angle that is specific to your target site’s audience and goals. For Foundr, it was not a stretch to relate resilience and entrepreneurship, but I needed to refocus the keyword to be more focused on their brand and business goals.

In my submission, I described “how entrepreneurs can build world-class resiliency by rethinking the way they approach their struggles and challenges.” I explained that for entrepreneurs, resilience is often more important than more concrete skills that are easier to quantify.

The search “how to build resilience at work” then became the topic of how to build resilience while building a business.

I sent the pitch and the next day received an email from the editor saying they were interested in the article. Several drafts, revisions, and months later, the article was published and shared more than 70 times.

building resilience article

Conclusion

For many writers and marketers, finding a good angle for content is often harder than the writing itself. Using the SEMrush Gap Analysis tool, I was able to cut hours of time from my prep work by focusing on topics I knew websites would be more likely to publish. It is not a fool-proof method to landing guest posts, but it can make the outreach process much more efficient.

In the end, the success of your guest post campaigns comes down to your ability to provide real, practical value to your audience, and the right keyword research can help you demonstrate that value front and center starting with your guest blog pitch.

If everyone who read the articles and like it, that would be favorable to have your donations – Thank you.

8 Ingredients Every Piece of Shareable Content Has – Rob Steffens

On By marketingscoopsIn Content Building Tools, Content Curation Apps, Content Marketing, Content Strategy/Generating Content, Content Targeting, Data Sharing Strategy, Digital Marketing, Marketing StrategyLeave a comment

In an ideal world, every piece of content you create would get shared. Here on the Web in 2018, though, things are a little bit … different.

With millions of websites already active and countless thousands of new content pieces going live every day, though, even the best content needs every advantage it can get to become truly shareable.

Luckily, the most successful shareable content all has certain traits in common. If you develop all of your content with these in mind, you’ll enjoy much more social engagement now and later.

Let’s take a gander at the seven top traits of the most shareable content:

1. A Compelling Headline

Your headline is the most important part of any piece of content – it determines whether users will click.

The best way to brainstorm here is to whip up a batch of ten headlines or so before you pick one. A/B testing the headlines on your posted content can also help.

2. Visuals and More Visuals

Experts claim that when it comes to shareable content, infographics win hands down: They’re shared about 3X more than other content types.

Even conventional blog posts benefit from eye-catching imagery, embedded video, and other non-text touches.

3. A Worthwhile Hook

When you clicked on this article, you knew what you were getting: Tips on shareable content.

Readers need to know at a glance how each piece of content will help them, so make it easy for them. Avoid clever headlines and long, meandering introductions.

4. Strong Organization

Most shareable content is very easy to scan, because, well, people don’t read on the Internet.

They want to be able to skip straight down to the most valuable information for them. List-based posts with bullet points or short paragraphs are the most effective here.

5. Readable Text

Content can be interesting without being Shakespeare. Generally speaking, you should keep things simple and use jargon only when you have to.

It doesn’t hurt to have a little variety in your sentences, but your meaning should always be obvious.

6. A Call to Action

Most people simply won’t take the next step – whatever it might be – unless it’s spelled out. Your content should always have a clear call to action.

To maximize the power of your shareable content, that CTA should focus on … you guessed it … sharing.

7. An Easy Way to Share

Hopefully, your prospects are logged into LinkedIn or Twitter all the time. Still, you should make sharing as easy as possible for them.

The fewer clicks, the better. There are many great ways to incorporate social sharing buttons into your site design – just be sure they’re not too intrusive.

8. Some Social Media Backing

Okay: Your shareable content doesn’t need to have a whole social campaign behind it. But it helps, since people are more likely to share content they encounter on their own social feed.

Sharing content to influencers the day of its release and a week later can supercharge your shares.

So, there you have it: 8 quick and dirty techniques for more shareable content.

Even if social sharing isn’t exactly the cornerstone of your inbound marketing campaign, it’s still worthwhile to consider it in your content planning. Even a marginal increase in social shares can add thousands of hits to your content every quarter.

Just like organic search traffic, this social traffic compounds over time to provide momentum and visibility to your future content marketing campaigns. Plus, social signals are growing in importance in SEO and other measures of website success.

If everyone who read the articles and like it, that would be favorable to have your donations – Thank you.

8 Deadly Content Marketing Mistakes – Steve Cartwright

On By marketingscoopsIn Content Curation Apps, Content Marketing, Content Strategy/Generating Content, Marketing Hacks/Proposals, Marketing StrategyLeave a comment

Want to make sure your content marketing is profitable?

Avoid these 8 common content marketing mistakes….

Assuming – Don’t assume what your audience wants. Do research instead.

Inconsistency – Make your content consistent by sticking to an editorial calendar.

Selling – Don’t just sell to your customers, help them with valuable content.

More is Better – Focus on quality rather than quantity of content.

SEO’d to Death – Rather than stuffing content with keywords and links, choose just a few.

Post and Forget – Always check back for comments and reply to them.

Invisibility – – Promote your content consistently for the best results.

Exclusivity – Use a few good marketing channels rather than just one.

Above all, remember that your content is there to help, inform, or entertain.

When you provide valuable content, people keep coming back for more.

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A New Approach To Personalized Learning Reveals 3 Valuable Teaching Insights – Thomas Arnett

On By marketingscoopsIn Classroom Management/Teacher Reasearch, Communication Tech, Content Curation Apps, Content Marketing, Content Strategy/Generating Content, Educational Learning Tools, Educational Technology, Learning/Knowledge, Teaching InnovationsLeave a comment

Personalized learning’s rationale has strong intuitive appeal: We can all remember feeling bored, confused, frustrated, or lost in school when our classes didn’t spark our interests or address our learning needs. But an intuitive rationale doesn’t clearly translate to effective practice. For personalized learning to actually move the needle on improving student experiences and elevating student outcomes, the question of how schools and teachers personalize is just as important as why.

So how do schools effectively personalize learning? Is it through online learning? mastery-based learning? project-based learning? exploratory learning? Each of these common approaches offers a unique dimension of “personalization.” Yet one of the most important ways to personalize learning may be easily overlooked in the quest for new and novel approaches to instruction.

Across the K–12 education landscape, teachers have by far the biggest impact on student learning and student experiences. Even in classrooms with the latest adaptive learning technology, an expert teachers’ professional intuition is still the best way to understand and address the myriad cognitive, non-cognitive, social, emotional, and academic factors that affect students’ achievement.

Additionally, one of the most valuable forms of personalization is authentic, personal relationships between students and teachers. It therefore makes sense that any school looking to offer personalized learning should not only explore new technologies and instructional practices, but also think carefully about how to increase students’ connections with great educators.

To that end, over the past year, The Clayton Christensen Institute partnered with Public Impact to study the intersection between personalized learning and school staffing. Our aim was to observe how schools might be using new staffing arrangements to better meet the individual learning needs of their students. Initially, we tapped into our knowledge of schools (via the BLU_ school directory and Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture schools) and recommendations from personalized learning thought leaders to identify schools that were working to personalize learning using both blended learning and innovative staffing arrangements.

We then narrowed our list down to eight pioneering schools and school networks—including district, charter, and private schools—whose practices we documented in a series of case studies. Our latest report, “Innovative staffing to personalize learning: How new teaching roles and blended learning help students succeed,” released last week, documents the findings from this research. Below are brief snippets on three of our most interesting insights.

Team teaching increases supportive relationships

The most common theme across the schools we studied was a shift from one teacher per classroom to teams of educators collaborating to support larger-than-normal classes. At one school, classes of 60 students learned together in a large, open learning space with three team teachers at a time for ELA and math. At another school, students spent part of their day with co-teachers and part of their day in seven- to 12-person groups supported by a teaching fellow.

At a third school, students rotated through in-class stations where they worked part of the time with a teacher and part of the time with a small group instructor. With these new staffing arrangements, schools found that having many eyes on each student helped keep students from falling through the cracks; increased students’ chances of forming a strong, positive connection with at least one adult; and decreased the odds that a student risked going through a year with just one “really bad fit” teacher.

Support staff help schools personalize through small group instruction

At the schools we studied, teaching teams included not only teachers, but also other support staff, such as tutors, teaching fellows, or small-group instructors. These support staff members played a critical role in helping the schools offer their students frequent opportunities for personalized learning in small groups. As one teacher explained, “That small group is meant to look at each student and identify their personal needs and assist them.”

Another teacher at a different school said that, “Sometimes tutors make awesome relationships with students, and the students can’t wait for the tutor to come for that day; so then, I use [the tutors] also to make sure that students know that they’re being watched and that they can always ask for help.” Small groups gave students individualized support and relationships that helped them see success is possible.

Blended learning complements innovative staffing

As schools used new staffing arrangements to personalize their instruction, blended learning gave them increased flexibility in how to best use their educators’ time and talents. By letting online learning provide some instruction, educator teams could focus more on coaching students and addressing their individual needs instead of worrying about covering their course content.

Software also gave educator teams data on student progress that allowed them to make their planning and interventions more targeted to students’ needs. Some schools also used software that recommended student groupings and lesson plans for small group instruction.

All too often, schools may be trying to personalize learning while treating one of their most crucial assets—human capital—as fixed. But as the findings from this report illustrate, many pioneering schools see personalized learning and teacher quality not as separate strategies, but as complementary levers within their broader efforts to better serve their students.

In that light, the findings from this report are a bellwether to the field for showing the alignment between personalized learning and human capital approaches that improve access to quality teaching.

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How to Refocus Your Strategy and Reenergize Your Team – Stanley Meytin

On By marketingscoopsIn Analytics, Assistance Tools, Audience Traffic Tools, Business Assistance/Consultant, Business Assistant Tool, Business Hacks, Business/Customer Care, Classroom Management/Teacher Reasearch, Content Building Tools, Content Curation Apps, Content Marketing, Content Strategy/Generating Content, Corporate Strategy, Customer Care/Orientation, Employee Behaviour/Strategy, Entrepreneurs/Strategies, Learning/Knowledge, Management Hacks, Management StrategyLeave a comment

A person’s passion is the sincerest definition of who they are. Passion can manifest itself in a hobby, an aspiration, or if you’re really lucky, a career. Take two people, Joe and Jane, as an example. Joe has a passion outside of his career. He devotes a lot of his free time to this passion and naturally speaks about it to his peers.

When his peers think of him they probably define him as “person passionate about X.” Now take Jane, one of the lucky few who has made a career out of her passion. She devotes twice the amount of time, twice the amount of energy and twice the amount of conversation to her passion. How do you think her peers define her?

If you’ve read Simon Sinek’s bestseller Start With Why, then Jane will remind you of Herb Kelleher, co-founder of Southwest Airlines, or Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Inc. Joe will remind you of the Wright Brothers. Each of these individuals built empires by undyingly following their passion. Sure, you can claim that these individuals are used as examples because of winner’s bias. But they succeeded because not only were they extremely passionate. They succeeded because they were able to clearly communicate their visions.

I consider myself extremely lucky. Like Jane, I’ve built a career out of my passion. When I first launched my film production company, my team asked the same questions regarding our clients that our competition was asking:

What is this client doing that’s different?
What do they bring to the table?
What problems are they solving for their customers?

While these questions helped us understand our clients, we realized they weren’t getting to the core of what defined them. We were part of the same old convention of business. We were focusing on what our clients were doing and not why they were doing it in the first place. Once we realized this, we began asking ourselves different questions:

How can we harness the passion that defines the client’s company to create a story?
Are their employees inspired by that passion?
Does the story align with their core values?
How can we align the story with the company’s brand mission?
How is that story going to connect with their audience?
How are we going to make the story authentic and engaging?

The biggest takeaway, however, didn’t come in the form of one of our clients’ videos going viral. It came in-house. 2016 was the first year we set a quantitative benchmark for the number of videos we wanted to produce. Not only did we not hit the benchmark, but with all the energy we put into hitting a quota we lost focus on creating a better product. We produced more videos, but they were watered down compared to previous years. We lost our own purpose.

We got rid of all quantity benchmarks in 2017 and as a team, we held a meeting to refocus. In this meeting, we asked ourselves the same questions that we asked our clients. We ended the meeting with a mission to create a video channel to tell impactful and authentic stories that inspire others.

That channel has been a remarkably accurate reflection of the meeting where it was first conceptualized. We’re now using the same techniques that helped us define our purpose in our core business for our corporate clients. Not only has it righted our ship and produced success but it has also provided us with an entirely new set of questions to ask our clients:

Is their organization helping others?
Is their mission connecting with others?
Are their customers genuinely understanding their mission?
Are employees buying into their mission, do they believe their roles play an important part in promoting the mission?
Are they building a community?
Are they staying true to their core values and the values of their customers and employees?

The beauty of these questions is that you can propose them to your clients, to your employees and even to yourself. They’re not specific to video production or any industry for that matter. If you already have the answers, that’s incredible. If not, then use them to refocus your strategy or reenergize your team.

Just swap “their” and “they” for “your” and “you.” Connecting to people on a deeper level, nurturing a human connection, evoking emotion and inspiring are key ingredients to building loyalty and bringing the best out in people.

Note, however, that not all ingredients are created equal. Like apples grown on two separate farms, the ingredients that I listed — those that were seeded and cared for with passion — will always taste better.

If everyone who reads our articles and like it , help to fund it. Our future would be much more secure if you send us your donations…THANK YOU

How to Introduce Content Marketing to Other Business Functions – Gaby Tama

On By marketingscoopsIn Business Hacks, Business Psychology, Campaign Marketing, Content Blogger Tool, Content Building Tools, Content Curation Apps, Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Content Strategy/Generating Content, Content Targeting, Content/Visual, Marketing Hacks/Proposals, Marketing StrategyLeave a comment

In this infographic series, we share the top five trends that will shape content marketing in 2018, as well as key tactics for implementing them into your program to drive the results that matter most to your company. Here’s how to introduce content marketing to other business functions.

Content is key to any company’s success. And as more companies of all sizes realize the impact contact marketing can have on their businesses, they’re increasingly adopting its strategies. From boosting brand awareness to driving leads, sales, and operational efficiencies, content marketing can result in substantial ROI.

Which is why content marketing is moving out of the marketing realm and into all areas of the business.

Consider how a content marketing strategy could benefit your human resources department. In the same way that content marketing is used to target buyers or customers, it can also be deployed to attract and retain top talent. In planning your next recruitment campaign, consider incorporating a full-funnel content marketing strategy to deliver content that engages your target pool of prospective candidates and eventually gets them to apply.

Bloomberg L.P. shows us what’s possible by using content marketing to foster a culture of diversity and inclusion. The Bloomberg D&I blog features a vast array of articles that highlight the company’s commitment to an inclusive workplace. Anyone who visits the blog can gain a clear understanding of where Bloomberg stands on pertinent D&I issues, and how that stance manifests throughout the entire organization.

A curated, culture-focused blog of this sort could ultimately be what motivates a curious job seeker to fill out an application, or an undecided candidate to accept an offer.

Content marketing can drive business-oriented solutions in all areas of your company, not just your HR department. In the infographic below, we share our tips on how to introduce content marketing to other business functions:

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Visual Content Marketing: Why It Matters and How It Differs from Content Writing – Aby Nicole League

On By marketingscoopsIn Content Blogger Tool, Content Building Tools, Content Curation Apps, Content Marketing, Content Strategy/Generating Content, Content Targeting, Content/VisualLeave a comment

Content is king in digital marketing, with written words still ruling today. But a content marketing trend has become so mainstream it’s hard to ignore its value: visual content.

No wonder Facebook and YouTube are the most popular social networks worldwide. Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest are also catching up. Visual elements like images and videos dominate these social media channels, with some of them getting viral.

All-text-without-visuals is a thing of the past—visuals reign in content marketing nowadays. For your campaigns to stay relevant to the times and your audience’s ever-changing needs, beef them up with the right mix of text and visuals.

Why You Need a Visual Content Strategy

Let’s define first what it means to integrate visuals into a content marketing strategy.

In visual content marketing, you use images, videos, infographics, memes, or other types of visual content (may be accompanied by informative or inspirational text) for your marketing campaigns. Visuals come in an appealing, engaging format to entice people to visit your website, know your brand better, or buy your product or service.

Content marketing becomes successful with the use of well-designed visuals. According to PR Daily, visual content gets viewed 94% times more than content without any visuals.

Marketers see the valuable impact of visual content on growing their business. In the 2018 Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs study, B2C marketers chose pre-produced videos (45%) and illustrations or photos (29%) as among the most effective content marketing types for meeting their company’s specific goals.

In the future, visual content will still be the bread and butter of both B2C and B2B content marketing campaigns. Marketers plan to use more pre-recorded videos (77%), images (68%), and live videos (63%), according to a 2018 Social Media Examiner report.

If your peers in the digital marketing industry can do it, so can you. Here are four specific ways a visual content strategy can help you achieve your business objectives.

Raising brand awareness

According to the Social Science Research Network, 65% of people are visual learners— they can retain information better with images, videos, and other visuals than with written words.

Additionally, the Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing 2018 survey found that 83% of consumers who have watched a branded video would consider sharing it with their friends. More shares mean more visibility for your brand.

Want your audience to remember your brand? Use visual content to increase your brand recognition and recall. For one, you can put a watermark of your brand logo in all the visual assets you use online. When an image gets viral, people can easily associate that with your brand.

Check your company website or e-commerce site, as well as your landing pages. Are they just static? Make your brand easier to remember by updating them with compelling photos, videos, and other visuals. Just don’t overdo it.

Increasing website traffic

By 2021, videos will account for 82% of all consumer Internet traffic worldwide, based on the latest forecast by the Cisco Visual Networking Index.

Video production costs a lot of money, but it’s a necessary investment to attract more people to your website. If you hesitate to make videos a part of your content marketing strategy due to budget concerns, consider how much your business will lose in terms of website traffic. Videos have been the rage these days—embrace it.

Engaging customers through visual storytelling

Adding visuals to written content makes your content marketing campaigns more interesting and keeps your audience engaged. Rather than having long blocks of text, for instance, several images that break them up makes your content easier for people to skim and digest.

According to BuzzSumo data, Facebook posts with images had 2.3 times more engagement than those without. Meanwhile, including images to Twitter updates resulted in 150% more retweets than plain text updates.

Visual content also helps you to keep your site visitors on your landing page. This raises the click-through rates to other parts of your website and the visitor’s engagement with your brand.

Why do people prefer to engage with visual content? With just an image that resonates with your audience, you can elicit joy, sadness, shock, fear or anger. That’s how powerful visual storytelling is.

Improving conversion rates

Ultimately, higher brand awareness, site traffic, and customer engagement from a successful visual content marketing strategy can all lead to increased lead generation and sales.

Video content, for example, is a key driver in the buyer’s journey. The 2018 Wyzowl Video Marketing Statistics Report notes that video has become “a decisive factor” that convinces consumers to purchase or download a product or piece of software.

The report found that a brand’s video influences 81% of viewers to buy a product or service. Also, 95% of people learn more about a product or service by watching an explainer video.

How is Visual Content Marketing Different from Content Writing?

Visual content creation and content writing aren’t mutually exclusive. Together with content planning and promotion, these critical parts make up the content marketing process.

Nevertheless, it helps to know the differences between the two types of content, so you can better strategize your campaigns.

Visual content gets your message across faster

The human brain processes visuals in its visual cortex, a less busy and faster part that’s separate from the busier section that processes words. This is why it’s faster and easier to understand, for instance, a cooking instruction through a video rather than text.

Visuals are easier to remember

Images, videos, and other visuals are processed in the brain’s long-term memory, while words are processed in the short-term memory. When people read text-based information, only 10% to 20% of it gets retained. Add a picture to a written information, and people will recall 65% of it.

Creating visuals is harder than content writing, but not as hard as you think it is

It takes a specialized skill set to produce a stunning infographic or educational video. But even if you’re not a designer, you can still create great visuals. A lot of online visual content marketing tools can help you easily edit images, create memes, and animated GIFs, convert PowerPoint slides to video files, and more.

They’re suitable for different business-customer relationships

Should you use more text or more visuals in your content marketing campaigns? It depends on whether you’re marketing to consumers or to other businesses.

B2C marketers prefer visual content over textual content. The 2018 B2C Content Marketing Report shows that most B2C marketers use pre-produced videos (76%), illustrations or photos (67%), and infographics (59%).

On the other hand, B2B marketers use text-based content more than their B2C counterparts do. According to the 2018 B2B report, B2B marketers use case studies (73%) and ebooks or white papers (71%). Additionally, most B2B marketers said ebooks or white papers (62%) and case studies (47%) were the most effective content marketing type.

Moreover, blogging is more important to B2B (36%) than B2C (22%) marketing, found a recent study by the Social Media Examiner. Meanwhile, more B2C marketers (36%) see the importance of visual content than B2B marketers (25%).

If everyone who reads our articles and likes it, helps fund it, our future would be much more secure by your donations – Thank you.

Visual Content Marketing: Why It Matters and How It Differs from Content Writing – Nicole League

On By marketingscoopsIn Content Curation Apps, Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Content Strategy/Generating Content, Content Targeting, Visual Content/Marketing1 Comment

Content is king in digital marketing, with written words still ruling today. But a content marketing trend has become so mainstream it’s hard to ignore its value: visual content.

Why You Need a Visual Content Strategy

Let’s define first what it means to integrate visuals into a content marketing strategy.

Content marketing becomes successful with the use of well-designed visuals. According to PR Daily, visual content gets viewed 94% times more than content without any visuals.

If your peers in the digital marketing industry can do it, so can you. Here are four specific ways a visual content strategy can help you achieve your business objectives.

Raising brand awareness

According to the Social Science Research Network, 65% of people are visual learners— they can retain information better with images, videos, and other visuals than with written words.

Increasing website traffic

By 2021, videos will account for 82% of all consumer Internet traffic worldwide, based on the latest forecast by the Cisco Visual Networking Index.

Engaging customers through visual storytelling

Visual content also helps you to keep your site visitors on your landing page. This raises the click-through rates to other parts of your website and the visitor’s engagement with your brand.

Improving conversion rates

Ultimately, higher brand awareness, site traffic, and customer engagement from a successful visual content marketing strategy can all lead to increased lead generation and sales.

The report found that a brand’s video influences 81% of viewers to buy a product or service. Also, 95% of people learn more about a product or service by watching an explainer video.

How is Visual Content Marketing Different from Content Writing?

Visual content creation and content writing aren’t mutually exclusive. Together with content planning and promotion, these critical parts make up the content marketing process.

Nevertheless, it helps to know the differences between the two types of content, so you can better strategize your campaigns.

Visual content gets your message across faster

Visuals are easier to remember

Creating visuals is harder than content writing, but not as hard as you think it is

They’re suitable for different business-customer relationships

Should you use more text or more visuals in your content marketing campaigns? It depends on whether you’re marketing to consumers or to other businesses.

If everyone who reads our articles and likes it, helps fund it, our future would be much more secure. For as little as $5, you can donate us – Thank you.

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Category: Content Curation Apps

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