Heading into the New Year with a resolution to step up your marketing efforts? If you didn’t get the results you wanted in 2016, here’s a quick checklist you can use to identify weak spots in your content marketing. Assuming you’ve made some effort to publish content during 2016, here are the four top mistakes we see that diminish the results: 1. Putting Little Effort into Content Creation With so much content online, if you’re not making a big effort to create content that hits home with your audience, you might be wasting your time creating content at all. Short shallow articles that state the obvious won’t hold audience attention even if a catchy headline entices people to click through to read it. And what’s the point of attracting visitors to your website or LinkedIn article if they’re going to roll their eyes and click the back button? The bad news: good content takes time and effort to create. The good news: even one or two excellent articles a month, properly promoted on social channels, can increase your audience, and help you connect with prospective clients. If your team can’t devote the time, there are content writing services who will be happy to help! 2. Failing to promote content on social media Many business owners believe that simply publishing regularly on their blog will drive additional traffic to their websites and deliver extra business. If you undertake your keyword research and publish well optimised posts, you might indeed garner some extra traffic to your website. But you’ll bring in more if you’re drawing people’s attention to your content via social...
Having recently written about the content creation processes that agencies need to produce quality blog content for their clients, I realised that many business owners would benefit by understanding some of those processes too. It’s likely there’s much more to it than you thought, so here are some of our relevant processes. Most will be relevant to you whether you’re creating your content in-house or outsourcing the task to professional content writers. Defining your audience It’s the first hurdle, and many fall here. It’s often because the business concerned has more than one target market and so they either create content that attempts to address both, or they only think to address one audience, which may or may not be the one that brings in the most revenue. The audience split might be something like residential/commercial,direct client/agency, or business/individual, or it could be split across industries, sectors, or even age groups or other personal factors. The split usually means that your audience groups have slightly different interests, and different factors that will motivate their purchase decisions. It stands to reason that you need to understand the interests and motivating factors for each important audience group, and tailor content that speaks well to that audience. When you create one-size-fits-all content, you risk not capturing anyone’s interest. Creating buyer personas can be a very helpful exercise. Understanding the steps of their buyers’ journey The ‘buyers journey’ might sound like marketing speak, but not taking it into consideration can also result in creating content that doesn’t appeal. But if you’ve been in business for a while, it’s likely you’ll be able to...
As a content marketing tool, blogging can be very good for just about any type or size of business. Business blogging can help you to better connect with your customers, to provide them with valuable information on a topic, and to inject fresh content into your website. However, while just about anyone can write a few paragraphs on a topic, successful blogging involves a great deal more than that. Business blogging must be planned well, done wisely, and provide real value to target audiences. MORE: Choosing the Best Channels for Promoting Business Content In the sections below we cover some of the benefits of blogging, and provide tips on how to blog successfully. Keep in mind that if you don’t have blog writers on your in-house team, it’s possible to engage a professional business blog writing service. 7 Benefits of business blogging Creates fresh content: Search engines make a point of giving preference to quality websites that show signs of being active. This means that while you are not likely to update or change your web pages very often, blogging can give you the opportunity to regularly inject new, relevant content on your site and create new pages for search engine indexing and ranking. This can help to increase the likelihood of your content showing up in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) than if your website was just left to go ‘stale’. Better connect with customers: Blogging allows you to create content that offers value to your target audiences and customers, and to connect with them by allowing comments, interaction and feedback. Provides opportunities for sharing and promotion: Your blogs can...
Blogging is easy. Doing it in a way that gets results is trickier. If you’ve wasted time or money creating blog content that isn’t yielding results for your business, it’s likely due to a simple gap in your understanding of the art (and science) of business blogging. Here are some fundamentals that could shed some light on why your current approach isn’t working. Cut your own path. Don’t assume that your competitors who publish frequently are getting it right and try to imitate their strategy. Only a tiny percentage of them are likely to be achieving significant results. Learn how to excel – the rewards really are there for the taking. The content bar is much higher than most people think it is. Informative style articles on your blog offering a few basic tips might seem perfectly acceptable in terms of quality, but in reality it’s mediocre to poor in its capacity to generate engagement and leads. If you want outstanding results, your blog writers need to be producing outstanding content – the type of content that’s so amazingly useful to your target audience that some will share it with their contacts and colleagues. It also needs to be a ‘good read’ in terms of structure, pace and flow. Publish and promote. Posting an article on your blog and hoping people find it while searching for information on that topic might bring you some site visitors, but you’ll be missing the bigger opportunity. You need to promote the article by linking to it from your social media accounts, and using an update teaser that’s good enough to compel people...
At its best, business blogging is an art AND a science. The art is taking readers on a journey that both soothes their headaches and inspires their ambitions. The science is showing a clear path to where they want to go. Great art understands what an audience feels and makes an emotional connection. Sound science stands up to robust examination and creates new opportunities. In blogging, one won’t survive the acid test without the other. Achieve both and the possibilities are exhilarating. Finding the sweet spot We live in exciting times for businesses of all sizes to connect with clients in ways not thought possible a few short years ago. Some have mastered the art of communication. Others grasp the science of forging new relationships by freely sharing their skills and knowledge. Both get a tick from me. Ultimately, employing one technique or the other works to a point but soon runs out of steam. Few successfully blend both because, in business, finding good storytellers who also have an impressive story to tell is rare. Why does it all go wrong? Impatience, greed, poor advice, lack of planning, no strategy? Take your pick. They all apply. MORE: Why Your Content Marketing Strategy Isn’t Working For You The times are changing As one of the cornerstones of content marketing, blogging for business remains an ever-moving target and your content team and blog writers need to keep up. What works this year might not work as well next year. Constantly raising the bar is critical. Michael Stelzner, the founder of Social Media Examiner, explains. “You have to accept the fact that this (content...
Long before the word blog had any currency, one man predicted the rise of the information economy and understood its commercial potential better than anyone. Content, he wrote, was where “much of the real money will be made on the internet”. His March 1996 “essay” explained: “Over time, the breadth of information . . . will be enormous, which will make it compelling. Those who succeed will propel the internet forward as a marketplace of ideas, experiences and products – a marketplace of content.” Those words were penned by none other than Bill Gates – the head of the world’s biggest corporation who had just closed a deal with a US broadcast giant to create MSNBC. The rest, as they say, is history. Content is King Many of Gates’ predictions in the essay he titled Content is King not only came true, they are shaping the lives of almost everyone on our connected planet every day. Thanks to Smartphones, content can literally be in the palm of our hands wherever we are, whenever we want it. When he wrote this prophetic piece, Gates probably had no idea that soon all businesses would be communicating with their customers in a similar way – regardless of their size and advertising budgets. But he did forecast the rise of online advertising, the decline of traditional publishing empires, a surge in electronic subscription services, and the popularity of personalised and niche content providers who could grow large audiences to monetise their services. So what can today’s business leaders learn from the master? Not only does content remain king in 2015, marketing guru Seth...
