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How to Boost Employee Content Marketing and Leverage It

Looking for an effective way to humanize your brand, engage your audience, and connect with customers?

Employee content marketing just might be the missing link to meet all these demands – and many more. People buy from people – not brand names and logos. This is often accomplished through employee generated content.

Take this stat on video marketing, for example. 54% of customers say they’d like to see more video content from brands – more than any other type of content.

Source: Hubspot

Video also increases conversion rates on landing pages by 80% while 90% of customers say video helps guide their buying decisions.

Video gives your company a human face.

That’s why employee content marketing is so important. While it takes many forms, content marketing from your team breaks down the logo and creates face-to-face interactions between your audience and the people behind your brand.

Today we’ll explain why it’s so important for connecting with your audience online and highlight some ways to make it work for your company.

Quick takeaways:

  • Employee content marketing can involve user-generated content, interviews, quotes, podcasts, and more. The goal is to make your employees the public face of your company and encourage them to engage with your brand’s audience.
  • People don’t trust brands. They’re more likely to engage with someone from your company online than your brand’s official page content.
  • Find an employee content marketing strategy that works for you. Choose employees that reflect your values and audience segments and experiment with unique tactics.

Here’s a quick video from Carla Johnson to catch you up:

What is Employee Content Marketing?

At its most basic, employee generated content marketing is content created and shared by your employees rather than your brand. You might share employee-created content from a special page and ask employees to share it from their personal pages for the most impact.

HubSpot, for example, has a dedicated page called HubSpot Life where they share user-generated content on their team members:

Source: @Hupspotlife on Instagram

Your employee content marketing can take on many shapes and forms. Here are some of the most common ways top brands already put it to work.

Webinars or Q&As

Semrush and countless other companies understand the value of making employees the human face of their brand via webinars.

Source: Semrush

In fact, Semrush makes sure to highlight the people running their webinars by including their pictures in the featured photos. They know that virtual events are important for forming human connections so they prioritize that every step of the way.

User-Generated Content on Employee Lives

Each of your employees lives a unique life with personal interests, hobbies, likes, dislikes, and values. Companies like HubSpot share granular stories on their employees to help followers connect with their team on an individual level.

Editorial Blog Categories

Just like news outlets have an op-ed or opinion section, you can give employees their own place to sound off in your blog. They can share their thoughts on things like:

  • Industry changes and what’s in store for the future
  • Their personal experience working at your company or in the industry
  • What they bring to the industry and company culture
  • Why they work for your company and what impact they hope to have
  • How they connect with customers and build relationships
  • How they spend their day-to-day

Video Hosting and Narration

Why hire out for a video host when you have a team full of employees to be the public face of your company? Plus, they already meet your brand’s culture.

Look how Salesforce centers both their own team members and guests in their YouTube channel. Their header photo even looks like a cast lineup from an NBC show and reflects the diversity of their audience:

Source: YouTube

Sharing Content Marketing to Personal Profiles

You might also simply encourage your employees (or specific employees) to share your brand’s content marketing material with their audience.

Just as you would for an influencer, consider running analyses of your employees’ social media profiles focusing on their followers. Pick the employees with followers who most accurately reflect your target audience and reach out to them about sharing your content on a regular basis.

Why Bother with Employee Content Marketing?

If you hadn’t noticed, most leading brands already use employee content marketing tactics – if not run entire strategies.

Do you think they’d put so much time and effort into this if it didn’t produce results? Nope. Here’s why they’re dedicated to the cause and why you should get on board too.

People Don’t Trust Brands but They Do Trust People

96% of consumers don’t trust ads. If that’s any indication, your B2B buyers don’t trust branded content either. In fact, ask your buyers what they want and they’ll probably tell you more transparency.

36% of buyers say vendors have absolutely no influence on their final decision while 44% said vendors were only “somewhat” influential.

Take the hint.

They don’t want to hear from your brand. They want to hear from other humans like your customers and employees. Your employees might be attached to your brand, but it’s still better than just shouting from a logo.

Employee Content Marketing Can Attract Better Job Applicants

Companies that invest in employer branding are three times more likely to hire quality employees than those that don’t.

Employee content goes beyond marketing to your customers – market to future employees too. If you struggle to attract job applicants who meet your company values and can’t put your finger on why, here’s your sign.

That’s why you see so many leading companies run career pages on Instagram. Here’s a look at how Whole Foods expresses their culture and tries to attract the right kind of employees for their brand:

Source: @wholefoodscareers on Instagram

Employees Tend to Have More Followers Than Brand Pages

Did you know employees tend to have 10x more followers on social media than the official pages of the companies they work for?

You can’t convince every employee with a huge following to transform their personal page into a brand page. However, you can encourage the right employees to share more content from your brand if their audience matches your target demographics.

Personal Employee Accounts Enjoy Better Engagement Than Company Pages

Not only do employees tend to have larger audiences but they also get better engagement than their associated company’s official page – 8x more to be precise.

Plus, any leads you acquire through your employees’ social media activities are 7x more likely to convert than leads you find anywhere else.

Employees give leads a peek into your company culture and who you are. Again, it’s hard to stress enough how people want to buy from other people – not brands. You can’t go wrong developing a content marketing strategy for your employees.

Employee Content Marketing Can Reinforce Your Brand’s Culture

You can shout about your corporate culture from the rooftops all you want but unless people can physically see your team living it, it’s just words on a screen.

People want to see the people behind the words. What do the values actually mean in practice?

71% of consumers say they prefer buying from brands that align with their personal values. Why should you expect B2Bs to prefer anything different? Their jobs and livelihood are on the line with every vendor decision. Your values are arguably much more important to B2B buyers than consumers buying skincare products or coffee.

Employee Content Marketing Gives Your Brand a Human Face

You just can’t ignore the importance of seeing human faces on the screen staring back at you.

Logos are just drawings. Your employees, however, are real people with families, pets, interests, likes, and dislikes.

With employee content marketing, your brand stops being a logo and becomes a group of people with shared values. Considering that 31% of adults in the United States admit they’re “almost always” online, you can’t neglect the importance of people-to-people marketing.

8 Strategies to Encourage Employee Content Marketing and Leverage It

Like any other type of content marketing, employee content requires a specific strategy. Don’t jump in without carefully planning who should be involved and what they should share. Remember, these employees will be the public face of your company, so you want to get this right.

1. Form a Group of Employees That Reflects Your Brand’s Audience

Get strategic. You don’t want just any employee sharing your brand’s content or creating content for your brand. Treat your employees like influencers here. Ask yourself things like:

  • Does their social media audience accurately reflect our target audience?
  • Do they live our brand’s values and company culture?
  • Is their audience engaged and generally pleased with what they post?
  • Would we want them representing our company publicly?

If you want to drive value from employee content and reap the benefits mentioned above, you need to make sure the employees you pick live your company culture.

2. Create Dedicated Social Media Pages for Employee-Generated Content Marketing

Lots of brands have two dedicated social media pages for their employee content: one for general employee life and another to market careers.

The HubSpot Life page on Instagram gives nearly 30k followers a peek into the day-to-day and personal lives of the people behind the brand:

Look at the Story highlights – they’re so personal. It feels like someone sharing updates directly to their personal followers. This content feels nothing like official content from a brand. It’s too real.

3. Ask for Employee Input on Your General Content Marketing Material

Employee content marketing can also take another form on the backside of things. Make sure key employees who reflect your brand’s values or target audience are keenly involved in your content creation process.

Ask them things like:

  • What topics they’re reading this week
  • What their friends are complaining about on social media
  • How to create better content than your competitors

Just make sure you’re prepared to hear the answers and genuinely consider them as part of your content marketing strategy. You might even go so far as to assign employee liaisons to your content marketing team or ask them to supply quotes for certain topics.

4. Tag Certain Employees in Your Content Marketing Posts

Do your employees provide input or quotes for your content? Did they inspire certain pieces of content?

When you share new pieces of content on social media, tag employees who come to mind. Whether you just think they’d like to read it or they played a role in creating it, encourage them to share it with their followers.

5. Launch a Hashtag Dedicated to Employee Content Marketing

You’ve seen branded hashtags for customers to share pictures, videos, and links of their experiences with brands. Why not do the same for your employees?

Your customers can search the hashtag and see what life is like behind your logo. You can also scan the hashtag for user-generated content to share on your page.

Regardless, make sure your house is clean before going this route. You need a strong culture and dedicated team before you can open the floor to UGC.

Semrush does this and the results are incredible:

6. Have Employees Run Webinars and Q&As

Your team should already reflect your brand’s culture and values. That’s why they’re the perfect hosts for your Q&As and webinars. At this point, almost any company with the budget to run webinars has a dedicated set of employees to host the events and answer questions.

Brandwatch takes a slightly more professional approach than HubSpot or Semrush (compared to casual) but real human employees are still the focus, nonetheless.

Source: Brandwatch

7. Get Leadership Involved

82% of customers are more likely to trust your company when senior leadership is active on social media. Now, not everyone should follow the lead of John Legere of T-Mobile with weekend chili cookoffs. You should, however, find a strategy that works for you.

Mailchimp brings their co-founders into the Instagram conversation with fun Zoom video clips. Followers can see the human faces of the people leading the company so they know they’re in good hands.

8. Incentivize Employees to Share or Participate in Content Marketing

Finally, if you want to treat your employees like influencers or content creators, you have to incentivize them like you would for other influencers or content creators.

This can mean different things depending on the employee and what they’re bringing to your content marketing.

Webinar, podcast, or YouTube hosts might deserve specific promotions or raises. User-generated personal stories, however, might only require one-time bonuses or perks. Meanwhile, others can share special links or discount codes too.

The main point is to show your employees you value their contribution to your content marketing strategy – because they already know what you get from it, and they deserve something too.

Where Does Your Employee Content Marketing Stand?

Do you feel inspired after reading about how other companies already use employee content marketing to boost their bottom line or are you left feeling overwhelmed?

Don’t stress yourself out too much. Unless you’ve had years to hone your tactics, employee generated content is uncharted territory and requires careful consideration before you can launch a full strategy.

Give yourself some time to figure out how it can serve your brand and, most importantly, your audience.

Need some insight into creating a new content strategy for your employees? Our workshops can help you assess your competitors and where you stand in the landscape so you can move forward with the knowledge you need.

The post How to Boost Employee Content Marketing and Leverage It appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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The Ultimate Guide to Paid Content Marketing

Congrats, your content marketing efforts have been implemented and you have a steady stream of content in the pipeline. Creating ideas isn’t easy, but through planning and implementation you feel okay about how you’re performing so far.

But what if I told you there’s a way to give your content marketing a little boost in views and engagement? How, you ask?

Enter: paid content marketing.

Paid content marketing is how you can artificially push your existing efforts in front of your customers’ eyes in the online spaces they frequent.

Here’s a quick brush up on content marketing and digital marketing strategy from our friends at Semrush.com:

Quick Takeaways:

  • Companies spend A LOT (even too much) on advertising at launch
  • Content marketing is a sustainable way to create new traffic to your website and draw new eyes to your new product, but you can boost your views with paid content marketing
  • Starting off strong can build your organic audience over time can be more efficient and better for your bottom dollar than exclusively using paid advertising to promote products and services

Paid content marketing only works if you already have good content marketing practices, so let’s start with why you should be using content marketing in the first place.

Why content marketing in the first place?

You need to adopt a solid content marketing strategy to maximize the eyes on your product. It’s easy to forget about in the hussle, but crucial to your short and long term sales goals for your business.

On average, it takes about 3-4 months of consistent, quality content to see larger yield. One article per week is a solid start, but getting into a daily rhythm of publishing will give you the quickest result over a shorter period of time. This process is especially beneficial for businesses that expect their prospects to seek education and information before they purchase. Creating context about why they need your item and leading them to the conclusion is key.

For example, let’s say your new product is an air purifier. Writing articles like The health benefits of having an air purifier, or Best appliances for your room will lead prospects directly to your site, right where you’re selling what they need!

Forms of paid content marketing

Paid social media promotion

How’s your social media presence? If your answer is we have none or not great, chances are your visibility is low. Being plugged into your target communities builds brand recognition and trust with prospects.

If your answer is pretty good, actually, paid social media promotion might be one of your best options when considering your paid content marketing strategy.

All of the more popular social media platforms have their own take on promotional advertising. Twitter and Instagram use advertisements that are camouflaged into user’s timelines.

While anyone paying mild attention knows the difference between an advertisement and a real post, the post still inserts itself right in the middle of their screen.

These companies have their own algorithms and targeting practices so that you know your advertisements are reaching your target audience and buyer personas. By paying your way in with your social media content you can gain followers and engagements on your posts to attract new customers.

Influencer marketing

How about a different way to advertise on social media? Influencer marketing is sending money to users with prominent follower counts to demonstrate or promote your product or service.

Source: Marketing Charts

Let’s borrow from the gaming industry for our example. When Respawn Entertainment launched their free-to-play title Apex Legends Battle Royale they targeted popular Twitch and YouTube streamers who played similar titles to play their game on opening day.

The result? 122.1 million hours of live viewership, with 657K max concurrent viewers in their first month of launch. With a little bit of advertising money they were able to get their game in front of hundreds of thousands of their target audience.

The point? People like seeing their favorite social media stars showcasing products and their favorite companies. Lately companies like Hello Fresh and BetterHelp have seen record sign-up numbers with targeting paid advertising on successful podcast channels of diverse genres.

Influencer marketing may be new to the fold but it’s definitely here to stay. How can your company utilize it?

Paid SEO

Google something. Anything. Chances are that the top 2 or 3 sites are promoted, or paid to be ranked that high. Companies in every industry often commit funds to put their sites above the competition.

Google ads sponsors their own form of an auction that you can bid on. Typically you’d bid on keywords that are relevant to your topic or business’ product or service.

Wordstream.com lists the typical list of criteria that contribute to the likelihood of your link getting promoted:

  • The relevance of your ad to the search query
  • The relevance of the keyword to your ad group
  • The relevance of your ad to its landing page
  • The historical PPC click-through rate (CTR) of the ad and its ad group
  • Overall historical account performance

This goes back to what we were saying earlier, you already need to have a solid content marketing foundation to thrive under paid promotion. Costs for this service vary, but it often depends on cost per click and keyword popularity.

Source: Wordstream.com

Depending on what kind of business you’re in and the size of your competition, this could be lighter or heavier on your budgeting wallet than you expected. This is why proper strategy and market analysis are needed when considering paid content marketing.

Wrap up

Paid content marketing is a great way to get that extra edge on your existing content marketing efforts that you’ve been looking for. But don’t forget, paid promotion works best when you’re already putting the work in. It isn’t a get out of jail free card, it’s meant to enhance great work you’ve already done!

You’re equipped with the know-how, start planning out where the best places are for your company to implement a paid content marketing strategy!

Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? Marketing Insider Group has a team of 35+ experienced writers ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weekly blog content service or schedule a free consultation. 

The post The Ultimate Guide to Paid Content Marketing appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/?p=2696

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The Complete Guide to Fintech Content Marketing

complete guide to fintech

The financial technology market is in a golden-age, a renaissance if you will. It’s the 21st century and everyone wants in on the next big advancement in tech. But just like every other industry, the key to business growth lies in content marketing.

If you aren’t effectively using content marketing – check out this graphic from Codefuel.com. Some studies suggest digital ad spending will soar to $242.80 billion by 2024.

Source: eMarketer

If you aren’t using content marketing, you’re behind the times and this is your sign to catch up!

If you are using content marketing already let’s get a little honesty going… No one is perfect – and there are things to keep in mind when improving the content you’re putting out on your website.

Here’s a quick brush up on the basics from Intrinio:

Quick Takeaways:

  • If you aren’t using content marketing, it’s time to get with it
  • Building an organic audience over time can be more efficient and better for your bottom dollar than 100% paid advertising
  • Maintaining a consistent and quality content marketing schedule is crucial to your bottom line

We’ve thrown a list together of helpful tips for your brand to maximize the value of your content marketing efforts for your Fintech business:

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a cost efficient way to get your name in front of prospects most likely to convert.  By creating and publishing your own content using proper SEO practices, you can cut down your overall marketing costs for good.

You need to adopt a solid content marketing strategy to maximize the eyes on your product or service. It’s easy to forget about in the hussle, but crucial to your short- and long-term sales goals for your business.

This guiding star is especially beneficial for businesses that expect their prospects to seek education and information before they purchase. In Fintech, this is most of your base, so creating context about why they need your item and leading them to the conclusion is key. Why is your app the next Robinhood?

So is content marketing that difficult? Well, it can be – but it is worth the effort. Content marketing is sustainable and gives the benefit of offering exponential growth to your brand. Here are the definitions you need to know:

Traffic:

Source: Growth Badger

Traffic is about pageviews and users. Services like google analytics can give you an accurate read of this data. It also helps you see exactly where your views are coming from.

Conversions:

Views are great, but what happens after the initial click? Is the reader just leafing through your website? Are they sharing it? Are they actually purchasing your product or scheduling your services?

Conversion rate shows how many prospects are becoming customers. This metric is the real shining gem of your content marketing efforts! Converting prospects should be your number one goal with content marketing.

SEO:

Seeing how your organic search rankings are performing is crucial to a healthy content marketing strategy. Keywords drive your content, because the higher you rank with keywords, the higher you are on Google’s search results. Be honest, when was the last time you clicked the seventh link down?

So, what does quality content look like? Well, if you’re looking for blogging advice, we’ve got you covered with our guide to the perfect blog post. But for good measure, here’s some quick pointers for publishing content on your website.

1. Keep your word count between 1000 – 1800 words

Google likes articles within this range. Too little or too many might keep your hard work from ranking where it should!

2. Know your keywords

SEO/SEM is most successful when you know what words are the most important to what you talk about. Back to our tech example, words like tech, wearable, watch, would likely contribute best to a higher ranking among similar articles.

3. Have a compelling meta description

The hook is everything, right? Having a good description under your article title will be the blurb prospects read. If it’s boring or irrelevant to them, why would they click on your article?

Tips for Content Marketing Your Fintech Business

Know your audience

Any great piece of content starts with a firm understanding of what your audience needs from an article. Naturally, you’re trying to get them to your site to buy into your product or service, but the key part of that is getting them to your site.

As mentioned, in Fintech this is most of your base, so creating context about why they need your item and leading them to the conclusion is key.

Imagine for example, you’re looking to sell your new mobile budgeting app. Creating content focused around keywords like budgeting or financial will bring your target demo (budgeters) to your site. Things like Top 10 Financial Assistance Apps or Best Ways to Invest will draw them into your site.

Use Good Sources

Good sources are important. Being able to show legitimacy in what you’re saying improves trust with the reader, making them more likely to convert. Think about it this way – using someone else’s credibility to prove your point is not just okay to do, it’s the smart thing to do.

The big sites to avoid? The same ones that your high school teachers used to yell at you for (We’re looking at you Wikipedia).

This also includes citing data.

ConvinceandConvert.com says:

Ground your content in facts: Data, research, and numbers are the foundation for any story. Your ideas and opinions and spin might be part of that story—or they might not be, depending on what you are trying to convey.

They’re right! Data drives your legitimacy and your points home to the reader, especially to those in your industry who rely on numbers and trends.

Hire Great Writers

If your operation is expanding or you’re running out of time to properly handle your content marketing efforts, it might be time to hire some help!

There’s two options for this that yield similar results. You can either hire experienced content writers that have experience in SEO writing, or – hire a content marketing agency to do the research, writing, and publishing.

If you look to hire individual writers, try to find those not just with SEO experience but also Fintech experience in general. Having specialists on your team that have been brought up in the industry can provide excellent viewpoints and content for your website.

There’s benefits to both, but with a consultancy you often gain access to resources and experience you can’t always get with individual writers. Doing your research on both is important to finding what’s best for your business.

Optimize for SEO

Source: Marketing Charts

Seeing how your organic search rankings are performing is crucial to a healthy content marketing strategy. Keywords drive your content, because the higher you rank with keywords, the higher you are on Google’s search results. Be honest, when was the last time you clicked the seventh link down?

There’s tons of automated SEO tools that can make your life much easier when optimizing your content.

Publish Consistently

This should be a no-brainer, but sometimes things slip through the cracks. But the reality of content marketing is that for your efforts to be successful you need quality content as close to daily as possible.

On average, it takes about 3-4 months of consistent, quality content to see larger yield. One article per week is a solid start, but getting into a daily rhythm of publishing will give you the quickest result over a shorter period of time.

Distribute on Social Media

How’s your social media presence? If your answer is we have none or not great, chances are your visibility is low. Being plugged into your target communities builds brand recognition and trust with prospects.

If you haven’t been already, you should be publishing your content across all of your social media channels in your brand voice to give your traffic that extra boost.

Distribute to Mail Lists

Who can forget services like MailChimp and Constant Contact? Creating subscriber lists out of customers and prospects that visit your site creates an easy line of communication. Sending out daily articles straight to their emails is a no-nonsense way of getting your information out there.

These sites also have built-in analytics pages to give you the best overview of your distribution efforts. Things like open rate, best time of day to send, and percentage of links being clicked.

Use Analytics

Analytics should drive your content. Using Google Analytics and other internal analytics tools from the resources you already use will give you insight into where your content does best.

Additionally, analytics tell you where your content could use some work. If certain pieces aren’t drawing many eyes or have the lowest conversion rates, it might be time to experiment with other types of content.

Optimize For Mobile

This seems like an obvious one, but when was the last time you opened your website on your phone? Mobile viewability is not only necessary but a must have when publishing content. More than half of all content is viewed on a phone. If your website isn’t optimized for it, you’re only making yourself look bad! Especially in the Fintech world where technological development increases your credibility. This is one of those things that is perfectly acceptable to hire contractors or consultancies for.

Repurpose Your Content

We didn’t forget about all that hard work you’ve already put in! Your best performing articles don’t need to sit on your website rotting to the webpages of time.

Articles that once brought in great traffic eventually fall out of touch with the ever changing world of search engine optimization. Not to mention, the actual content can become irrelevant to today’s world. This happens all the time in the ever-changing world of financial technology.

SocialMediaToday.com says:

Marketers can turn an article into a video, or an infographic – or the opposite in each case as well. They can reuse tips in an article by breaking them down into a series of posts or Stories frames, or they might post soundbites from a podcast directly to their social channels.

Having your writers restructure your content into different forms can be the gift that keeps on giving. Even a quick freshening up of an old article from a few years ago with modern information can be the makeover your content needs to be back on top of the page!

Ways of Using Paid Content Marketing

Paid SEO

Google something. Anything. Chances are that the top 2 or 3 sites are promoted, or paid to be ranked that high. Companies in every industry often commit funds to put their sites above the competition.

Google ads sponsors their own form of an auction that you can bid on. Typically you’d bid on keywords that are relevant to your topic or business’ product or service.

The point? People like seeing their favorite social media stars showcasing products and their favorite companies. Lately companies like Hello Fresh and BetterHelp have seen record sign-up numbers with targeting paid advertising on successful podcast channels of diverse genres. Next time you’re listening to your favorite tech podcast, listen to what’s being marketed to you.

Paid social media promotion

How’s your social media presence? If your answer is we have none or not great, chances are your visibility is low. Being plugged into your target communities builds brand recognition and trust with prospects.

If your answer is pretty good, actually, paid social media promotion might be one of your best options when considering your paid content marketing strategy.

These companies have their own algorithms and targeting practices so that you know your advertisements are reaching your target audience and buyer personas. By paying your way in with your social media content you can gain followers and engagements on your posts to attract new customers.

Influencer marketing

How about a different way to advertise on social media? Influencer marketing is sending money to users with prominent follower counts to demonstrate or promote your product or service.

Many financial-centered apps have found their way onto sites like Twitch and YouTube, hiring popular personalities to showcase and promote their products. Look into Marques Brownlee for examples of this – companies will send him tech to showcase to his 10 million viewers!

Influencer marketing may be new to the fold but it’s definitely here to stay. How can your company utilize it?

Wrap Up

Content marketing, while rewarding, can be difficult to keep up with and regularly maintain for your Fintech business. By using some of the tips we’ve provided, you can get and stay on track to blow past your conversion goals for your content marketing efforts!

Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? Marketing Insider Group has a team of 35+ experienced writers ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weekly blog content service or schedule a free consultation.

The post The Complete Guide to Fintech Content Marketing appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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5 Essential Content Engagement Strategies You Need for 2023

5 Essential Content Engagement Strategies You Need for 2023

Content marketing is a huge part of most digital marketing strategies, but it’s more than shooting out a few blog posts or articles into the void.

What’s the point of having an article if no one is reading it?

Having words on the page is only the start – content marketing is all about engagement.

What is Content Engagement?

Put simply, content engagement is what you have when users do something with your content, whether it’s sharing it, commenting on it, or taking some kind of action.

It’s the difference between someone reading your content and then forgetting about it and someone who reads it and then interacts with it in some way.

Your content engagement strategy is vital to the success of content marketing because it’s a key metric that shows you whether or not your content is resonating with your audience. It’s one thing to have a lot of traffic to your content, but if that traffic isn’t engaging with the content or buying your product, then it’s not doing its job.

How do we measure content engagement?

We live in a data-based world, and content marketing is no different.

To get accurate metrics on your content, you need to work with tools that gather and analyze the data. Google Analytics is a great place to start, as it’s free and relatively simple to use.

Some metrics to pay attention to are:

  • Time on page
  • Bounce rate
  • Scroll depth
  • Number of social shares
  • Number of comments

Time On Page

Analytics can tell you how long someone spent viewing your page. This is an important indication of whether your content is engaging and relevant to your audience.

Google Analytics Time on Page

(Source: Global Media Insights)

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate measures the proportion of people who access your page and then leave without clicking on anything else. A high bounce means that your page isn’t converting visitors into engaged readers.

Don’t take this metric in isolation, though. The difference between good and bad bounce rates differ depending on the type of website.

Bounce Rate based on Website Categories

(Source: Backlinko)

Scroll Depth

Scroll depth measures how far down people scroll on your page. The further they scroll, the more they see. This metric can be used with time on a page to get an idea of how much content people are consuming.

Number of Social Shares and Comments

The number of social shares and the number of comments are both indicators of how viral your content is. If people are sharing and engaging with your content, it’s a good sign that they’re finding it valuable.

If you’re not using data to inform your digital marketing strategy, you’re shooting in the dark.

Once you understand which pages and content types drive most of your engagement, you can plan and adjust your strategies to target the type of interactions you want to get out of your content.

5 Strategies to Boost Content Engagement

Content engagement strategies are always evolving, but a few foolproof principles are central to every novel approach.

1. Know your audience

It seems obvious, but this step is the most important of any content engagement strategy.

You need to analyze your target audience beyond simply their demographics. Try constructing buyer personas that consider factors like:

  • Their content consumption habits
  • Their interests
  • Their needs
  • Their pain points

From there, you can start customer segmentation to break your audience down into smaller, distinct groups. Doing this allows you to better focus your content marketing strategy around your prospective customers.

“It’s one thing to write content that appeals to a general audience, but it’s much more effective to create content specifically for the people who are most likely to buy your product.” – Steve Pogson, Founder @First Pier

Buyer Persona

(source: The Power Business School)

2. Create useful content

“Valuable and engaging content is the key to successful content marketing – without it, your content strategy will fail.” – Mark Buff, Founder @Profit Frog

Your content needs to answer your audience’s questions, solve their problems, or educate them on something they’re interested in. And if it’s good content, your audience will share it.

How do you know what content will be most useful to your audience? Look at the data!

What topics are trending in the industry? What questions are people asking?

Do your research to see what keywords and topics are being searched for most often and are trending on social media, then create content that covers those topics.

Your content should be comprehensive and well-researched to give users the information they need. But it also needs to be engaging. Otherwise, people will click away.

Try different content formats

You don’t have to be tied to the blog post format. Don’t be afraid to experiment with new content formats to keep things fresh.

If you’re stuck in a rut, try something new, like:

  • A podcast
  • An infographic
  • A video
  • A webinar
  • A case study
  • An e-book

The Video Format in Marketing

The short video format is particularly effective on social media. In fact, as of 2021, the average person watches 19 hours of online videos a week. That’s an average of 2.5 hours a day.

Average hours of online video watched per week

(Source: Wyzowl)

People love watching videos because they’re easy to consume and usually entertaining. If you can make your content entertaining as well as informative, you’ll be sure to engage your audience. They are also two times more likely to share video content with friends than any other type of content.

Consider the type of content you want to make and your goals.

For example, Ovira, a company producing period care products, aims to raise general awareness of women’s health and bodies. As part of their social media engagement, they produce short videos on Instagram to educate and inform.

The visual medium for this type of topic and brand is a lot more effective than written content or just photos. They’re able to demonstrate how their product works and break the stigma of talking openly about a woman’s period – which is aligned with their brand vision. 

Their engagement strategy is wildly successful – their content has a “viral” element to it – which gets them eyeballs on their brand and product. 

Don’t be afraid to experiment 

Trying new content formats isn’t just for B2C brands, either. Single Grain, a digital marketing agency, launched a creative, interactive marketing firms directory to help companies to find agencies that fit their project needs. No matter your industry, it’s worth testing new formats.

A caveat – some formats won’t make sense depending on your business or brand. When you’re trying new formats, make sure to test them and keep an eye on their performance through your analytic tools. Be ready to re-strategize or tweak the approach if it’s not getting the engagement you want.

Want to give video marketing a try? Here’s how you can start generating leads using video content!

3. Design an experience

“Your user’s journey towards conversion doesn’t start and end with a blog post. It starts way before they even think about your product when they’re just beginning to realize they have a problem that needs solving.” – Tiffany Homan, Editor @ Rental Property Calculator

Consider each stage and roll out the red carpet for them.

Interface

How easy is it to navigate your website? How easy is it to find the content they’re looking for?

You can use heat maps and user testing to see where users click and how long they spend on each page.

If you see a high drop-off rate on a particular page or content type, that’s an indication that the user experience could be improved.

You want to make it as easy as possible for people to find and consume your content. Otherwise, they’ll go somewhere else.

Build your brand’s visual language

Make sure to define your brand’s colors, fonts, and overall visual style.

Your content should look like it belongs on your website and help users associate your brand with quality content.

It’s also a good idea to build up a bank of graphics and icons that you can use in your content. This will help the content creators in your marketing team stay consistent while making your content more visually appealing.

Tap into emotion

Think about how you want someone to feel when they’re consuming your content, and then design the content and user experience around that feeling.

For example, if you want users to feel inspired, your content might focus on success stories or case studies.

Your content might be data-driven or include expert opinions if you want users to feel informed.

(Here’s a short guide on how to make content that prioritizes user experience with more details.)

The content you create and the way you present it should align with your brand’s overall tone and voice. If you’re unsure what that is, look at your existing content and see what themes and topics are repeated most often.

Optimize for different channels

Optimize for different channels

“Different channels have different audiences. That’s why your content strategy needs to take into account the different channels where your content will live.” – Andy Kolodgie, Co-Founder @ Sell My House Fast

Each channel has its strengths and weaknesses, so you need to tailor your content to make the most of each.

The difference between social media channels 

For example, if you’re using Facebook to promote your content, you’ll want to use visuals and posts that are easy to consume quickly.

If you’re using LinkedIn, on the other hand, you might want to focus on longer-form content that’s more informative and data-driven.

The way you promote your content will also differ depending on the channel. For instance, you’ll use different hashtags on Twitter than you would on Instagram.

Keep in mind that social media engagement can look different and indicate different things on each platform.

On LinkedIn, a like might indicate that the content is interesting and worth reading. Whereas on Instagram, a like might just mean that the content is visually appealing.

Social media is the center of exclusive internet culture. If you don’t speak the language, you don’t have a seat at the table. Here are some things not to do when you’re doing social media engagement.

Make sure that you’re familiar with the content that performs well on each channel and adjust your social media engagement strategies accordingly.

(Not engaging with your audience on social media? Here’s why you should be: Your customers are talking about you online right now.)

4. Encourage expression

You don’t have to do all the work yourself. Encourage your audience to do it with you.

User-generated content (UGC) is a great way to get more content while giving your audience a chance to express themselves.

Some things that encourage audiences to engage with your brand include:

  • Hashtags – Invite your audience to share content using a specific hashtag. This is a great way to track content and see what’s resonating with your audience. Coca-Cola’s #shareacoke campaign is a great example of hashtags used well.

Share a Coke Hashtag

  • Contests – Run a contest where to enter, participants share or create content featuring your brand material. This is a great way to get more content while also promoting your brand.
  • Questions – Ask your audience questions and encourage them to answer in the comments. This is a great way to start a conversation and get to know your audience better.
  • Interactive content – Giving your audience fun interactive materials like games and quizzes is a tried and tested way to boost audience engagement. If you want to really stand out from the crowd, try an interactive video. Here’s how you can incorporate interactive videos into your marketing strategy.
  • Showcase faces – Show your brand’s employees, customers, and partners. This gives your brand a human face and a testimonial in one go.

Integrating interactive content into your content marketing strategy is a great way of generating engagement. And if you make it fun to interact with, you can potentially build a self-sustaining content generation machine out of your audience.

5. Incentives

You can also give your audience a little push to interact.

Providing rewards and incentives is a great way to increase content engagement.

We’ve already talked about contests, but you can also offer your audience rewards for leaving a review, taking a survey, or sharing content.

These incentives can be anything from coupons and discounts to free products and services.

Many e-commerce sites like wish.com are already using this approach, giving buyers coupons and store credits for leaving a review with a photo.

Rate Your Order IncentiveEcommerce Wish Reward Incentive

This is a great way to increase content engagement while also getting valuable feedback and product photos that can be used in future marketing campaigns.

All done? Think again! Test, test, test!

Engagement is fickle.

What works today might not work tomorrow. The key is to constantly experiment and see what gives you the best results.

There are a few different ways you can go about testing your content engagement strategy:

  • A/B Testing – Try different content formats, headlines, and calls to action to see which performs best.
  • Social Media Insights – Use the insights function on each social media platform to see which content is performing well and adjust your strategy accordingly.
  • Google Analytics – Check the relevant data and see what is performing and what isn’t.

Start with the data, and make sure to check in often to see how your content marketing strategies perform in action. Performing regular audits and refining your content approach will help make sure that your engagement rates stay healthy.

You don’t want to be following behind in marketing. Lead the pack! Keep your nose to the ground and your strategies up to date, and you’ll be building customer relationships that last.

The post 5 Essential Content Engagement Strategies You Need for 2023 appeared first on Convince & Convert.

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The Super-Smart Guide to Content Optimization

Your content marketing efforts are one of the most important facets of your digital marketing strategy. Because you follow a distribution plan, your content is plastered everywhere.

This is great news! After all, the more platforms your content is shared on, the more chances it has to fall in front of prospective clients’ eyes. But believe it or not – not all content is created equal.

GrowthBadger.com defines content optimization as “the process of improving your content to get better results, like driving more traffic, users, leads or revenue.”

Basically, you have to optimize the content you are putting out so that it ranks higher on search engines.

Here’s a quick video from Teach Me Money Methods on the ins and outs of content optimization.

Quick Takeaways

  • If you aren’t using content marketing, it’s time to get with it
  • Maintaining a consistent and quality content marketing schedule with social media is crucial to your bottom line
  • Content optimization determines how well you’re ranking in SEO

Why content optimization in the first place?

Content optimization can make or break the content you’ve worked so hard to make excellent. Without following the many rules of SEO, your content can get lost into the search engine void without a trace.

Obviously, this isn’t an acceptable outcome for your digital marketing efforts. By creating content that keeps what the search engines like to see in mind, you can give yourself (and your content) the best shot at hitting the top of the search results page.

How to optimize your content for SEO

Writing better content

Seeing how your organic search rankings are performing is crucial to a healthy content marketing strategy. Keywords drive your content, because the higher you rank with keywords, the higher you are on Google’s search results. Be honest, when was the last time you clicked the seventh link down?

Source: FinancesOnline

So what does better content look like? Well if you’re looking for blogging advice, we’ve got you covered with our guide to the perfect blog post. But for good measure, here’s some quick pointers for publishing content on your website.

Keep your word count between 1000 – 1800 words

Google likes articles within this range. Too little or too many might keep your hard work from ranking where it should!

Know your keywords

SEO/SEM is most successful when you know what words are the most important to what you talk about. Back to our tech example, words like tech, wearable, watch, would likely contribute best to a higher ranking among similar articles.

Have a compelling meta description

The hook is everything, right? Having a good description under your article title will be the blurb prospects read. If it’s boring or irrelevant to them, why would they click on your article?

Internal Links

Internal links are hyperlinks in your blog content that link to other pages within your domain. You should include 1-2 internal links in every blog post.

Call to Action (CTA)

CTAs tell readers what their next step is for interacting with your brand, and they can increase conversion rates by 121%. CTAs are the get up and do this part of your article, and are crucial to getting shares and engagement from your readers.

Include calls to action like starting a free trial, subscribing to an email list, or scheduling a free consultation. Don’t leave your readers hanging and give them something to do next.

Repurpose your content that performs well

Don’t forget about all that hard work you’ve already put into past content! Your best performing articles don’t need to sit on your website rotting to the webpages of time.

Articles that once brought in great traffic eventually fall out of touch with the ever changing world of search engine optimization. Not to mention, the actual content can become irrelevant to today’s world. This happens all the time in the ever-changing world of financial technology.

SocialMediaToday.com says:

Marketers can turn an article into a video, or an infographic – or the opposite in each case as well. They can reuse tips in an article by breaking them down into a series of posts or Stories frames, or they might post soundbites from a podcast directly to their social channels.

Having your writers restructure your content into different forms can be the gift that keeps on giving. Even a quick freshening up of an old article from a few years ago with modern information can be the makeover your content needs to be back on top of the page!

Optimize For Mobile

This seems like an obvious one, but when was the last time you opened your website on your phone? Mobile viewability is not only necessary but a must have when publishing content. More than half of all content is viewed on a phone.

If your website isn’t optimized for it, you’re only making yourself look bad! This is one of those things that is perfectly acceptable to hire contractors or consultancies for.

Paid content marketing

When all else fails, you can always cut the line! Google something. Anything. Chances are that the top 2 or 3 sites are promoted, or paid to be ranked that high. Companies in every industry often commit funds to put their sites above the competition.

Google ads sponsors their own form of an auction that you can bid on. Typically you’d bid on keywords that are relevant to your topic or business’ product or service.

The point? People like seeing their favorite social media stars showcasing products and their favorite companies. Lately companies like Hello Fresh and BetterHelp have seen record sign-up numbers with targeting paid advertising on successful podcast channels of diverse genres.

Paid social media promotion

How’s your social media presence? If your answer is we have none or not great, chances are your visibility is low. Being plugged into your target communities builds brand recognition and trust with prospects.

If your answer is pretty good, actually, paid social media promotion might be one of your best options when considering your paid content marketing strategy.

These companies have their own algorithms and targeting practices so that you know your advertisements are reaching your target audience and buyer personas. By paying your way in with your social media content you can gain followers and engagements on your posts to attract new customers.

Keep the content coming

Consistency is one of the most important things when considering your content marketing plan. You can follow all of the rules and still fall flat on your face if you aren’t building something your readers will come back to.

If your operation is expanding or you’re running out of time to properly handle your content marketing efforts, it might be time to hire some help!

There’s two options for this that yield similar results. You can either hire experienced content writers that have experience in SEO writing, or – hire a content marketing agency to do the research, writing, and publishing.

There’s benefits to both, but with a consultancy you often gain access to resources and experience you can’t always get with individual writers. Doing your research on both is important to finding what’s best for your business.

Don’t forget a distribution plan

Creating content is all well and good, but in the end means less if you aren’t sharing it everywhere you can. A good first step is a social media audit. Where is your company plugged in – more importantly, where do you and don’t you have a voice?

While targeted ads are good for short term engagement, online presence builds organic interaction on your content. With the open forum nature of social media, your customer base can leave comments on your articles and posts, boosting overall engagement.

Not to mention with the advent of viral content being timely by capitalizing on social media trends has never been more important. With an adaptable social media team that understands what’s in and what’s out, you can use whatever today’s trend is to promote your product.

How often should you be sharing your content?

Well, there’s a few factors to consider – like how frequently you’re publishing to your site and which platforms you’re posting on. We’re going to assume you’re pushing out articles daily.

With Twitter, you can share several times a day. Twitter timelines burn through much quicker than other platforms, so oversharing isn’t as easy to do as say, Instagram or Facebook.

Source: Marketing Charts

On more formal platforms like Facebook and Pinterest, once a day works just fine. Remember: the more time you put into cultivating an online community among your customers, the more views you will get on your articles.

You don’t just have to use social media! Content marketing automation has made it easy to send out newsletters across different platforms quickly and easily. Places like Mailchimp and Constant Contact can keep your reader lists organized, not to mention provide excellent metrics for analysis.

CruxFinder.com has a really awesome post about building a content calendar before a product launch that can help you out too.

How to measure your efforts from content optimization

Identifying KPIs:

What’s the point of putting in all this effort if you can’t tell what’s working? When creating your content marketing process, you have to define your key performance indicators (KPIs).

Examples of KPIs include:

  • Measuring how a content marketing campaign impacts your sales team’s productivity
  • Understanding the percentage of customers that were marketing-generated and what business was earned from content marketing
  • Measuring hours of work put into content marketing vs money put into ad spending

KPIs are your benchmarks for success, and every other metric is what defines your KPIs.

Follower and engagement growth

An easy metric to check out the success of your social media is how many followers you are gaining and how many times your posts are being engaged with.

You can check out what posts lead directly to a prospect or customer clicking through to your profile and clicking the follow button to stay up-to-date with your company.

Followers aren’t everything though, engagement is! Engagement is any comment, like, or share that happens to one of your posts. Driving up engagement leads to social media platforms suggesting your content to their users.

Being on the front page of someone’s social media timeline is the golden goose of digital marketing. This is done through quality content appropriate to each platform and consistent monitoring of what is successful and what isn’t.

Conversion rate

Source: Disruptive Advertising

Views are great, but what happens after the initial click? Is the reader just leafing through your website? Are they sharing it? Are they actually purchasing your product and scheduling your services, or are they just browsing?

Conversion rate shows how many prospects are becoming customers. This metric is the real shining gem of your content marketing efforts! Converting prospects should be your number one goal with content marketing.

Oftentimes the places where you are producing and publishing media give you excellent analytics tools to help assess what ads or content is producing the best conversion rate.

By figuring out what content does the best across what platforms, you can make better, more informed decisions on what media to spend the most time on.

Value comparison between efforts

Deciding the best formula of what media to use and how much is the point of analyzing your digital marketing campaign. If your demographics tend to stay on LinkedIn over Twitter and the numbers prove it, put more time into your Twitter account.

This applies to the content you create as well. If your blogging efforts garner three times the attention as, say, your video testimonials, you need to focus your time and resources on your blog.

You can use A/B testing too to see which types of content are performing well on the platforms you distribute on.

Wrap up

Optimizing your content can be tricky even when you’re following the rules. SEO is changing all of the time and it’s important to stay up to date on your knowhow. By being on top of the current best practices, you can keep your content optimized to drive your site to the top of the results page.

Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? Marketing Insider Group has a team of 35+ experienced writers ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weekly blog content service or schedule a free consultation. 

The post The Super-Smart Guide to Content Optimization appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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The Complete Content Marketing Strategy for Product Launches

Congrats, you’ve launched a brand new product and you’re ready to hit the ground running! It’s a tough road ahead, but you know your market like the back of your hand.

Whatever your industry is, it probably has a lot of voices, and it’s easy for your product to fall to the bottom of the charts if you aren’t loud about it.

You need to adopt a solid content marketing strategy to maximize the eyes on your product. It’s easy to forget about in the hustle, but crucial to your short and long term sales goals for your Amazon business.

LaunchMarketing.com says:

Beyond lead generation power, content marketing also allows you to communicate directly with your target buyer audience and explain how your product or service can address their unique pain points.

These benefits can prove especially valuable when it comes to launching a new product or service. Educating potential buyers can promote awareness and begin to cultivate leads that you can nurture.

Using a long-term solution like content marketing in tandem with traditional advertising puts you ahead of the competition that isn’t.

Here’s a video by SemRush to freshen up your content marketing knowledge:

Quick Takeaways:

  • Companies spend A LOT (even too much) on advertising at launch
  • Content marketing is a sustainable way to create new traffic to your website and draw new eyes to your new product
  • Starting off strong can build your organic audience over time can be more efficient and better for your bottom dollar than exclusively using paid advertising to promote products and services

Here are the steps you should take immediately after launching a new product in your market:

Start publishing original content ASAP

Paid advertising is great for a short-term boost, but article publishing and blog creation also helps boost long-term organic engagements from prospects and your current customers.

On average, it takes about 3-4 months of consistent, quality content to see larger yield. One article per week is a solid start, but getting into a daily rhythm of publishing will give you the quickest result over a shorter period of time.

Source: Marketing Insider Group

This process is especially beneficial for businesses that expect their prospects to seek education and information before they purchase. Creating context about why they need your item and leading them to the conclusion is key.

For example, let’s say your new product is a piece of wearable tech. Writing articles like The Top 10 New Products on the Market You NEED to Try, or Tech Recommendations from a Pro will lead prospects directly to your site, right where you’re selling what they need!

So what does quality content look like? Well, if you’re looking for blogging advice, we’ve got you covered with our guide to the perfect blog post. But for good measure, here’s some quick pointers for publishing content on your website.

Keep your word count between 1000 – 1800 words

Google likes articles within this range. Too little or too many might keep your hard work from ranking where it should!

Know your keywords

SEO/SEM is most successful when you know what words are the most important to what you talk about. Back to our tech example, words like tech, wearable, watch, would likely contribute best to a higher ranking among similar articles.

Have a compelling meta description

The hook is everything, right? Having a good description under your article title will be the blurb prospects read. If it’s boring or irrelevant to them, why would they click on your article?

Create a distribution plan

How’s your social media presence? If your answer is we have none or not great, chances are your visibility is low. Being plugged into your target communities builds brand recognition and trust with prospects.

Creating content is all well and good, but ultimately means less if you aren’t sharing it everywhere you can. A good first step is a social media audit. Where is your company plugged in – more importantly, where do you have a voice?

While targeted ads are great (and necessary), online presence builds organic interaction on your content. With the open forum nature of social media, your customer base can leave comments on your articles and posts, boosting overall engagement.

Not to mention with the advent of viral content being timely with capitalizing on social media trends has never been more important. With a good social media team that understands what’s in and what’s out, you can use whatever today’s trend is to promote your product.

How often should you be sharing your content?

Well, there’s a few factors to consider – like how frequently you’re publishing to your site and which platforms you’re posting on. Let’s assume you’re pushing out articles daily.

With Twitter, you can share multiple times a day. Twitter timelines burn through much quicker than other platforms, so oversharing isn’t as easy to do as say, Instagram or Facebook.

Source: Marketing Charts

On more formal platforms like Facebook and Pinterest, once a day works just fine. Remember: the more time you put into cultivating an online community among your customers, the more views you will get on your articles.

You don’t just have to use social media! Content marketing automation has made it easy to send out newsletters across different platforms quickly and easily. Places like Mailchimp and Constant Contact can keep your reader lists organized, not to mention provide excellent metrics for analysis.

CruxFinder.com has a really awesome post about building a content calendar before your product launch that can help you out too.

Use metrics to drive your strategy

Measuring success is subjective to each content strategy, and key metrics can be extremely different from each other. Do you want to have more overall clicks than last quarter? What about what happens after the viewer clicks your article – are they converting to a new customer? How many are/aren’t?

These are all just examples. Brainstorm what success in a content marketing campaign looks like to YOU. You are the expert, and understanding what success looks like is best left to you!

Here’s a few metrics to look at when measuring the success of your content marketing campaign:

Traffic:

Traffic is about pageviews and users. Services like google analytics can give you an accurate read of this data. It also helps you see exactly where your views are coming from.

Conversions:

Views are great, but what happens after the initial click? Is the reader just leafing through your website? Are they sharing it? Are they actually purchasing your product or scheduling your services?

Conversion rate shows how many prospects are becoming customers. This metric is the real shining gem of your content marketing efforts! Converting prospects should be your number one goal with content marketing.

SEO:

Source: Weidart Group

Seeing how your organic search rankings are performing is crucial to a healthy content marketing strategy. Keywords drive your content, because the higher you rank with keywords, the higher you are on Google’s search results. Be honest, when was the last time you clicked page 3 on Google?

If your product is launching on Amazon, there’s some Amazon-specific tools designed to help you analyze your key metrics and strategy.

JungleScout: 

JungleScout is one of the most-used analytics tools for Amazon FBA businesses boasting an impressive 600,000+ membership number. Here you can analyze all the statistics we just talked about and gain access to live Q&A sessions with their industry professionals.

Marknology:

Marknology is a “brand accelerator”, meant to assist with your advertising metrics specifically. They also offer assistance with advertising campaigns and more for your business.

Helium10:

Helium10 is an all-in-one suite for Amazon sellers with powerful tools and product research methods. They offer assisted maintenance and blogging resources to give you an edge over the competition.

Wrap Up

Launching a product is nerve wracking, even when you’re fully prepared. Setting up a good content calendar before your product hits the shelves (literally or digitally), you can set yourself up for quick and long-term success through content marketing.

Now you have the knowhow, it’s time to get ready for your big launch!

Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? Marketing Insider Group has a team of 35+ experienced writers ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weekly blog content service or schedule a free consultation. 

The post The Complete Content Marketing Strategy for Product Launches appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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9 Impressive Content Marketing Ideas from Brands You Can Consider

9 Impressive Content Marketing Ideas from Brands You Can Consider

It can become increasingly difficult to come up with content marketing ideas as time goes on. This is especially true for businesses that rely on selling services since they won’t have a product line that can be updated or added to.

That’s why some companies spend over 70% of their marketing budget on content marketing. It’s also revealing how well content marketing does since 73% of these companies are very happy with their content marketing performance. 

So, when in doubt, it never hurts to turn to competitors and other businesses to look for inspiration.

In this article, we’ll take a look at 9 impressive content marketing ideas from brands you can consider.

Before we get started, let’s define what content marketing is.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing itself is any content created with the sole purpose of attracting new customers and turning them into leads.

This includes all different forms of content, including videos, educational blogs, and articles as well as social media advertisements and campaigns. 

Content marketing isn’t focused on getting the sale, but on building hype and brand recognition among possible customers.

As mentioned above, companies spend a large amount of their marketing budget on content marketing. This is because content marketing has plenty of advantages.

Content marketing advantages

Here are some of the benefits of content marketing.

  • Content marketing helps boost traffic. Advertisements and ad campaigns will create interest in your brand, resulting in a large boost of traffic to your website.
  • The large increase in interest will also lead to more sales if you’re selling a product, as well as an increase in subscriptions to a service you might offer.
  • You can also use content marketing for other purposes like building an email list by offering something in return for an email address.

What makes a great content marketing strategy?

Content marketing strategies should be original, make use of current technology, as well as be aimed at a target audience. This could be age, gender, or nationality.

Content marketing strategies can also make use of current trends to create more interest, or even create their own trend. Larger companies like Coke have become well known for creating trends to market their products.

If you’re not sure where to get started or how to optimize your current marketing strategy, there are plenty of tools online to help you.

Here are some great content marketing tools to help you:

  • Semrush 
  • Wask
  • Searchmetrics
  • Serpstat
  • Google Keyword Planner

If you want to know more about creating the best content strategy, check out this 6-step guide to creating a B2B content marketing strategy. 

Now that we have an overview of what content marketing is, let’s take a look at 9 impressive content marketing ideas from brands you can consider.

9 Content Marketing Examples

The content marketing examples will have 3 examples of each category:

  • Video marketing
  • Social media marketing
  • Tried and true content marketing

  1. Reddit’s 2021 Super Bowl advert (video marketing)

Placing an ad during the Super Bowl can be costly and hotly contested. 

A single, 30-second ad during the Super Bowl will set your company back $6.5 million.

The latest Super Bowl had 112.3 million viewers. It’s no wonder advertising during the Super Bowl is so expensive.

Some companies have used longer airtime, up to a minute, but what Reddit did in 2021 was unprecedented.

Reddit had a much lower marketing budget, which led to a short, five-second ad airing during the Super Bowl.

Reddit

(Source)

Reddit spent its entire marketing budget on this single, short clip.

It was a strange video, starting off as a car promo, then cutting to some text, and then horses galloping through a field.

Sound confusing? It’s supposed to.

Very quickly, viewers went to social media to see what it was all about and stumbled upon this tweet.

The tweet racked up over 465,000 views and quickly became the center of attention on social media.

  1. Amazon’s Garage Delivery Service (video marketing)

Amazon’s In-Garage delivery might seem like a strange and even uncomfortable idea for some, but Amazon has done plenty of research.

In-Garage delivery is a simple concept on paper. You provide your local Amazon delivery man a digital key to your garage so that packages can be delivered and put inside your garage for safety.

According to The New York Post, 210 million packages were stolen in the United States alone in 2021.

Amazon’s advertisement aired on TV, but can also be found on their YouTube channel.

amazon

In-Garage service might be better for customers who felt that Amazon’s In-Home delivery is a little too risky. 

The advertisement itself is quite simple, and wouldn’t have been too expensive to make.

It shows how simple its new service is and exactly how it works.

  1. Slack (video marketing)

Slack is an excellent digital HQ, that is used to create tasks among your team, as well as assign tasks, due dates, and check the progress of tasks.

Slack also has a YouTube channel. 

Slack 1

Every year Slack hosts a conference to meet new customers, as well as educate them.

These conferences aim to educate its users on different business topics, like marketing, productivity hacks, customer care, insider insights and general tips and tricks for using Slack. 

slack 2

During the pandemic, Slack saw significant growth, since so many companies opted to work from home. Slack then started creating even more content for their YouTube channel, which has almost 50,000 subscribers.

Their content is aimed at their current users, offering guides and tips to effectively use Slack.

There are also videos from clients that currently use their software, offering excellent reviews about Slack. 

As a business looking to leverage video marketing, easy-to-use video editing tools like Canva, Visme, or Clideo will help you come up with quick and appealing video content for your audience. 

  1. Apple’s Shot on an iPhone (social media marketing)

What’s better than a user-driven campaign? It’s cost-effective, and much of the footwork is done by brand loyalists. Apple is a brand that has a long history of capitalizing on user-generated content marketing. In 2015, they launched a campaign called “Shot on an iPhone” that featured photos users shot on their iPhones.

In 2022 the trend continues. In January they hosted a new #ShotoniPhone campaign with their #iPhonemacrochallenge.

iPhone users that own an iPhone 13 Pro or Pro Max were asked to take the best macro photo and post it with the hashtags #ShotoniPhone and #iPhonemacrochallenge.

The best photos were posted in a gallery on Apple’s Newsroom in April 2022.

Apple

  1. GE (social media marketing)

General Electric is an excellent example of a B2B focused business that creates inspiring content marketing examples.

Their Instagram has plenty of inspirational content.

General electric 2

GE’s business might sound boring, or even difficult to really market, but taking a glance at their Instagram shuts those ideas down.

An excellent example is their #GEInstaWalk campaign.

GEinstawalk

(Image source)

Using micro and macro influencers like nk7, who specializes in photography, they created these excellent videos.

This video shows drone footage of a person in between massive wind turbine propellerspropellors.

They also allowed these influencers to tour their manufacturing facilities. Altogether this campaign resulted in over 8 million views on their Instagram accounts, and over 3,000 new followers.

  1. Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke (social media marketing)

How to get everyone talking about your brand.

Put their name on your product.

That’s exactly what coke did in 2011. The campaign started in Australia when Coca-Cola added the 150 most common names in Australia on their Coke cans and bottles.

They then encouraged people to share photos on social media using the hashtag #shareacoke with a picture of their name on the Coke can or bottle.

It’s no surprise that this campaign was extremely successful. A study showed that 80% of customers were more likely to buy a product if it was a personally customized product.

During the first summer of the campaign run in Australia, 250 million bottles and cans were sold.

ShareaCoke

The campaign quickly spread across the world, with Coke even adding an option to order a can or bottle of Coke with your own name on it.

  1. The Furrow (tried and true marketing)

The Furrow is one of the earliest examples of content marketing.

It all started when John Deere published their first Journal back in 1895 as a way to help and guide farmers to use their products correctly and effectively. It also addresses any issues users are dealing with. 

It’s an old content marketing strategy that is still used over a century later. Offer insightful information about your products, as well as show expertise in your field and watch customers roll in.

The furrow

(Image source)

The furrow is now available online as well, with plenty of insightful information and tasteful photography.

If you’re looking to write informative, high-quality content, there are plenty of AI writing assistants online that can help you write quality content like that found on The Furrow.

  1. LinkedIn (tried and true marketing)

LinkedIn uses the same content marketing strategy that John Deere started over a century ago, but takes things even further.

Sure, you can post weekly informational articles, but LinkedIn went above and beyond and published its very own eBooks.

LinkedIn

These eBooks all focus on marketing.

LinkedIn used its reputation, expertise, and wealth of data to produce these excellent and informative eBooks. These eBooks show how well LinkedIn knows marketing and the online marketing space, which sets them above the rest of its competition.

  1. Simply Business (tried and true marketing)

Simply Business is an insurance firm based in the UK. They offer insurance mainly to B2B businesses.

They have followed a similar content marketing strategy, offering up tips and guides through their “Knowledge center.” 

Simply Business

These helpful tips and guides, along with the beautiful design and photography show that old and boring sectors can create content that engages with a younger generation but still stay true to who they are.

What's you favorite content marketing inspiration?
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Start creating your content strategy today

It’s no surprise that a considerable amount of time and money is spent on content marketing.

If you take note of these 9 content marketing ideas from brands, you can easily create a successful content marketing strategy that yields excellent results.

About Shane

Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant who specializes in influencer marketing, content marketing, and SEO. He is also the Founder and CEO of Content Solutions, a digital marketing agency. He has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities.

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How To Effectively Segment Your Email List

Email marketing almost feels like a retro form of digital marketing nowadays. With the development of social media and general content marketing, sometimes your email efforts might hit the backburner. Resist this urge! Email marketing is important to your efforts, and needs time and attention to maximize its output.

We all know that email marketing isn’t dead – but before sending a single email, businesses need to understand the importance of segmenting email contact lists. Yes, segmentation can be tedious but consider this,  77% of email marketing ROI came from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns. Not to mention with sites like Constant Contact it’s never been easier to read your metrics.

Furthermore, MailChimp reports that email opens and unique opens of segmented campaigns were 14.31% higher than non-segmented campaigns. Clicks from segmented campaigns were also more than 100% higher compared to non-segmented campaigns. Finally, when emails are segmented, there are 9.37% fewer un-subscribers.

Most businesses are already implementing some form of segmentation when it comes to marketing communication, but it’s usually only based on demographic information. The truth is, the more you’re able to personalize messages, the higher your chances of engagement and conversion.

Here’s a quick brush up on email segmentation from Max von Collenburg:

Quick Takeaways:

  • Email marketing is still alive and well in today’s digital marketing space
  • Segmenting your email list can lead to better leads and conversions
  • By utilizing effective segmentation you can maximize your overall content marketing strategy

Here are a few ways to effectively segment your contact list and make the most out of your email marketing campaigns:

Segmentation by Demographics

Source: Marketing Charts

The most basic way to start segmenting your contacts is to use demographic data such as location, age, industry, and job level. Demographics can tell a lot about what a prospect might want or need, so the more info you can get during a prospect’s signup, the more options you’ll have for segmentation. That being said, you should only be asking for as much detail as your sales team needs to qualify the lead. Anything more will overburden your audience and potentially send them packing.

Here are some common ways to segment by demographic:

  • Geography: Retail companies and location-based apps that make email offers based on location are particularly effective, but B2B and global organizations can also take advantage of geographical information. For instance, businesses can alter their messaging for US and UK audiences to address how some words are spelled differently in both countries.
  • Age: Are you targeting Millennials or Gen Xers? Segmenting by age will help you send the right message to the right people. Make lifelong customers by considering that their needs today may be different from their needs 10 years from now.
  • Occupation/Industry: If your product appeals to a wide range of audiences, it’s important to remember that they may come from different fields. A marketer and developer may both appreciate your automation tool, but the former will want to know how to use it and the latter how to integrate it into the current system.
  • Job Title: Similar to segmentation by industry, a company CEO will usually have different priorities than someone in a more technical role, even if they’re in the same company. Technical workers might want to know more about the actual usage of a product whereas upper management might only care about the bottom line.

Segmentation by Behavior

Demographics are a solid starting point when it comes to segmentation, as they answer the ‘who’ and ‘what’ to guide your email marketing strategies. Behavioral segmentation, on the other, hand digs deeper, as it answers the ‘why’ and ‘how,’ allowing you to gain insights into buying intent.

Here are a few ways marketers can segment their emails by customer behavior:

  • Last Website Activity: Keep track of your browsing behavior to determine interests. What pages they’ve opened, how long they stayed, what icons they clicked, what videos they watched, etc. and start the conversation based on those metrics.
  • Past Purchase: Using purchase history is an excellent driver for personalized communications. Offer discounts on products that could be complementary to the last item they bought. Recommend upgrades when new product lines are released. The options are endless.
  • Amount Spent: If your products have a wide range of prices, spending can be an effective segmentation strategy. Send out targeted emails featuring products that are priced within the customer’s purchase or product browsing history.
  • Buying Frequency: Does your customer buy weekly, monthly, or annually? Are they purchasing the same products on a regular basis? Segment your list based on customers’ buying frequency and purchase history and send them a message during their time of need.

Segmentation by Customer Lifecycle Stage

Source: Hubspot

Lifecycle stage is about identifying which stage of the sales cycle your contacts are in. Interactions with contacts should vary according to what stage they are in; after all, you won’t want to send emails for a free 7-day trial offer to users who are already paying customers.

Here are the ways you can segment your email contacts list by customer lifecycle stage:

  • Prospect: Prospects are contacts who know about you and have opted in to receive messages from you every now and then. These are the individuals who have signed up for the company newsletter and nothing else, so the goal is to send them communications that pique their interest and inform them about your product or service.
  • Lead: Leads are not mere subscribers, but individuals who have shown interest in your offering. Perhaps they’ve filled out a form to download an eBook or a whitepaper you’ve published. A good way to target leads is to use content that’s similar to what they’ve already consumed. The idea is to encourage brand engagement as much as possible.
  • Marketing Qualified Lead: Abbreviated to MQLs, these are individuals who have shown significant interest and engagement but are yet to become full-fledged sales opportunities. MQLs are indicators that these leads should be pursued by the marketing team with content that encourages sales conversions.
  • Sales Qualified Lead: These leads are those that your sales team may deem worthy of personal or direct sales follow-ups. It’s a good idea to keep an eye on these leads as they’re the ones who are closest to a purchase decision. It’s now on your sales team to close those leads like a boss.
  • Customer: Customers are pretty self-explanatory, but even though they’ve reached the ultimate goal, you should still make the effort to delight them and turn them into brand advocates.
  • Advocate: Advocates are contacts who love your brand and products enough to refer new customers without solicitation. They can bring in new business or help generate leads you could not have gotten yourself. Don’t just take them for granted, reward them for their efforts with discounts, freebies, and other exclusive offers.

Conclusion

These ideas are just a few of the countless ways you can effectively segment your contact list. The key is to remember that this strategy isn’t reserved for businesses with advanced automation software, it’s for anyone who cares about customer relationship management. The most important factor to consider is how to make segmentation work for your unique business and marketing objectives.

Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? Marketing Insider Group has a team of 35+ experienced writers ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weekly blog content service or schedule a free consultation.

The post How To Effectively Segment Your Email List appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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5 Blog Post Templates to Help You Create Remarkable Content

Blog writing is one of the best parts of a solid content marketing strategy. Writing articles to draw people into your website is a creative way to get your product or service out there for the world to see.

Writing quality content for your client base is important in the growth of your business. But let’s face it – sometimes the creative well runs dry.

Drawing on tried and true methods from the major players in the industry can help guide your business’ blog writing strategy.

Here’s a quick video about blog writing from Neil Patel for a quick background for the concepts ahead:

Quick Takeaways:

  • Companies spend A LOT (even too much) on advertising
  • Blog writing is a sustainable way to create new traffic to your website
  • Starting off strong can build your organic audience over time can be more efficient and better for your bottom dollar than exclusively using paid advertising

Blogging Basics

While paid advertising is great for a short term boost, article publishing and blog creation helps boost long-term organic engagements from prospects and your current customers.

On average, it takes about 3-4 months of consistent, quality content to see larger yield. One article per week is a solid start, but getting into a daily rhythm of publishing will give you the quickest result over a shorter period of time.

Source: Marketing Insider Group

This process is especially beneficial for businesses that expect their prospects to seek education and information before they purchase. Creating context about why they need your item and leading them to the conclusion is why you write a blog in the first place.

So, what does quality content look like? Well if you’re looking for blogging advice, we’ve got you covered with our guide to the perfect blog post. But for good measure, here’s the essentials for publishing content on your website.

1. Keep your word count between 1000 – 1800 words

Google likes articles within this range. Too little or too many might keep your hard work from ranking where it should!

2. Know your keywords

SEO/SEM is most successful when you know what words are the most important to what you talk about. Back to our party favor example, words like party, favor, event, would likely contribute best to a higher ranking among similar articles.

3. Have a compelling meta description

Source: Kinsta.com

The hook is everything, right? Having a good description under your article title will be the blurb prospects read. If it’s boring or irrelevant to them, why would they click on your article?

Keeping these rules in mind for every blog post you write, we’ve assembled our favorite blog post templates to keep you on the right path for your content marketing strategy:

Lists

Like this one! Articles that give the reader a variety of examples and options grant a better shot at giving them the most optimal solution to a problem or task.

SEMrush.com says:

The perfect listicle title is attention-grabbing but NOT clickbait. A title is clickbait if it is overly emotional or shocking in a way that doesn’t reflect the content. To avoid this, make sure you only use titles that accurately reflect your article as a whole.

You can get pretty creative with your lists. Remember, the object is to get a prospect to your site to become aware of your product – leading them down the marketing funnel.

For example, let’s say your startup sells grilling aprons. Creating content focused around keywords like recipes or grills will bring your target prospects (grillers) to your site. As they read your blog, they’ll realize “wow, I DO need a grilling apron for all this brisket I’m cooking!”

Some articles you’d write using this template would be:

The 15 Best Tools for your Grill

Top 10 BBQ Recipes for the Summer

RANKED: What Sauces are best for Grilling?

This isn’t just for selling products – the same idea applies to selling services too! If you’re trying to gain clients for say, your real estate business, some article ideas include:

What to Look For When Buying a House

10 Things First-Time Homeowners Get Wrong

Top 5 Places to Live In (Your Area Here)

How Tos

What’s one of the reasons you use the internet the most often? For me personally, I look up DIY projects and how-tos. As marketing professionals, we have to capitalize on potential customers doing the same!

How-to articles describe a step by step process (or solution) to a problem or task. Often the titles start with How To ___ and are followed by a separate clause that builds trust like, and how to stick with it or and why you should.

Let’s stick with the grilling example. Here are a few ways we could apply this blog template to the world of BBQ:

How to Get Your Grill Ready for the Summer

How to Find The Best Grill Tools: and Why You Should Look Now

This content is literally designed to propose a solution to a problem the reader may not have even known they had when they opened the article. Creating a sense of need through your blog posting is crucial to its overall success. 

Comparisons

Comparison articles should seek to differentiate between two similar concepts or the pros and cons of extremely different ideas. This formula is commonly referred to as X vs Y. This type of article is particularly helpful if you expect your clients to be doing research on your product or industry.

Some examples of this format from us at Marketing Insider Group include:

Virtual Events & Webinars: What Are The Key Differences?

Organic Search vs. Paid Search: Which is Better?

Retargeting vs. Remarketing: What’s The Difference?

It doesn’t always have to be vs. It can just be a comparison of two relevant topics to inform your reader of nuance and detail.

Definitions (What Is?)

A common thread in every business (B2C or B2B) is the definitions category of blog posts. Think about it, how many times have you searched up something on the internet you wanted to know more about?

For a B2B, this category is a treasure trove. For example if you run an SEO consultancy, you would target keywords like SEO, search results, and Google trends.

Definition articles should be a general overview of whatever topic you think your target audience would be researching (or would grab their attention!). Using an SEO consultancy as an example, some definition / general overview articles could be:

What is Search Engine Optimization: And Why Should You Care?

What is the Point of Digital Marketing?

The Ins and Outs of Google Trends: Building Your Brand Online

Get creative with your titles! You should have some diversity in your articles to draw in different people looking for different things. It’s important to experiment with these templates to find the content that works best for your website.

Expert Guest Posts

If you’re struggling to find inspiration or just don’t have the time, consider hiring a guest writer! Guest writers can provide legitimacy to your brain with their expertise and even bring over their audiences to your site. Not to mention, they probably already know how to write the perfect blog post.

Hiring professionals in your industry can bring another layer of legitimacy to your blog. Not to mention, many experts bring readers with them wherever they go, providing an immediate boost to your viewership and clickthrough rates.

This one is pretty open for the format, but creating a strong introduction for the writer and leading them in can help inform your normal audience why they should care about the wisdom offered. Sometimes you have to discuss experience and credentials to get your audience to pay attention.

This looks a bit like:

Intro from you or your writer about the expert

-> Intro from the expert 

→ Actual content produced from the expert

Wrap Up

No matter which template you use, what’s important is that your blog is reiterating the need for your product or service. That doesn’t necessarily mean you should have a big BUY NOW button at the end, but writing about unrelated topics is a disservice to you AND your prospect or client.

By keeping the basic rules of writing a perfect post at the forefront of your blog writing efforts, you can continue furthering your overall content marketing lead conversion rates and keep your ad spending down. Now that you have some fresh ideas, get to writing!

Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? What luck! Marketing Insider Group has a team of 35+ experienced writers ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weekly blog content service or schedule a free consultation. 

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Guerrilla Content: 30 Growth Hacks To Content Marketing Success On A Limited Budget

marketing success on a budget

My journey into content marketing actually started in 2004 when I went to work for a well-known market research firm that very few people had actually ever heard of.

They hired me as their first VP of Marketing. My team of 1 (me) had absolutely zero budget to start. But as a research company, we did lots of surveys for clients who wanted to use the survey data to build reports and get good PR.

My first taste of success in what we now call content marketing came when our website crashed from all the traffic we received for an article I wrote based on survey data from the American Cleaning Institute. Yes they are a thing!

The article was titled “Survey Reveals How Many Of Us Pee In The Shower.” (77% is the answer if you’re wondering. Gross, right?)

But the main thing I learned was that 1 fun, helpful, or entertaining piece of content can outperform all the copywriting for product web pages on why we were the best company to conduct surveys. But in order to win this game, you gotta go guerrilla baby!

Quick Takeaways:

  • Guerrilla Marketing is art of using free or already available resources to attract your audience to your website.
  • Growth Hacking is the science of testing creative ideas, using analytics and demand metrics to sell products and gain exposure.
  • Applying both guerrilla tactics and growth hacking to content marketing can bring you huge ROI on a limited budget.

Here’s an example to get your creative juices flowing:

96.3 Rock radio’s free air guitars:

How to do content marketing with (almost) no budget?

At the research firm, I took our greatest asset: survey research. And used it to continuously update our newly revamped website to drive inbound leads for our sales team. I taught myself SEO basics and used a list of target keywords to create and distribute stories on our latest research.

Traffic on our website grew exponentially. Inbound leads started coming in to the company on a consistent basis for the first time. I even spent some time teaching the CEO about digital marketing and how to do paid search.

He ended up saving my job, my house and maybe even my marriage. But for that story you have to go read Mean People Suck.

Growth Hacker Content Marketing

When I initially proposed content marketing at SAP, many people asked, “How much software you gonna sell with blog posts?”

Luckily I had a direct manager who saw the declining effectiveness of traditional advertising. She knew that the digital age demanded more engaging and consistent content marketing.

At the time, we were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising landing pages. These destinations had 99% bounce rates, no organic search traffic and zero social engagement. I asked for a fraction of that cost to build our thought leadership content hub.

So for a third of the cost of a throwaway landing page, I built a content marketing program to serve as the landing destination for advertising, and to reach new people with great content marketing.

Once we started publishing, we saw a 20% lower bounce rate, almost immediate organic search traffic and a growing level of social engagement.

That is growth hacker content marketing. The site basically funded itself – it had a return on investment from day one! And we were continuously testing, iterating and improving our results.

Guerrilla Content: How To Growth Hack Your Way To Content Marketing Success On A Limited Budget

OK, so now you have a site built. But how do you produce enough and a consistent volume of content, at an acceptable level of quality, to stay relevant to your audience?

This is where you can turn to what I call Guerrilla Content:

Guerilla Content: content created with almost no budget, simply by re-purposing things your organization already has.

For example, people ask me all the time how do you find to time to create and share content? The answer: I re-purpose stuff I already create. I look at my email outbox. Each one is an answer to a question!

In many cases, it is a few paragraphs and detailed enough to turn into a blog post. I turn my powerpoints into slideshares. I turn my keynote speaker notes into articles and my speaker videos into lead generation assets. This example from during the pandemic brought me about 5 new clients:

Why keep content created for a few dozen people from reaching hundreds or thousands?

The first 24 blog posts I wrote on SAP’s Business Innovation were all white paper summaries I wrote from content that was sitting in a campaign library.

So if you are looking for your own Guerrilla Content, here are some ideas I’ve used along with some examples:

30 Guerrilla Growth Hacks To Content Marketing Success

  1. Identify the top issues and trends on the minds of your executives or customers
  2. Survey your prospects / ideal audience profiles for their top challenges (this should define your editorial strategy)
  3. Answer the biggest mistakes people make in your industry
  4. Profile your executives and customers by asking Who are you? Greatest challenge? How you solved? + Profile photo and turn it into a blog post.
  5. Ask multiple experts “what is the future of” your industry
  6. Ask people to share their worst mistakes
  7. Share the best examples of . . . content marketing in our case.
  8. Answer the simplest questions about your solution category like what, why and how.
  9. Use Klout, Buzzsumo, Topsy, YouTube, Slideshare to identify “best of” lists like this.
  10. Highlight content you love from others (OPC = other people’s content): Infographics,
  11. People to follow,
  12. Blogs to read,
  13. Slideshares,
  14. Linkedin Pulse articles,
  15. Videos,
  16. Conferences,
  17. Books,
  18. Quotes,
  19. Facts, etc.
  20. Define the terms You Need To Know on [your topic]
  21. 8 Steps To Success In [your topic]
  22. Best Practices For [Topic]
  23. What [Hot Topic] Means for [Your Issue]. My Example: What Google’s New Algorithm Means For You
  24. Re-purpose content from your own campaign material, or
  25. Cover research reports, or
  26. Highlight analyst reports
  27. Turn marketing keynotes + Speaker notes into articles
  28. Customer service people are a great resource. Ask them to identify your customers’ biggest questions or FAQs
  29. Turn customer testimonials (talking head videos) into “customer profile videos” by just taking out the promotional parts.
  30. Ask your employees who attend events to provide you with their notes.

I also suggest teams sit in a room once a quarter and bang out lists of content ideas. Here are a few resources to help you with brainstorming your own list of Guerrilla content marketing ideas:

  • Top Resources and Tips to Develop Blog Topics Your Audience Will Love
  • The Ultimate List of Blog Post Ideas
  • 8 Ways to Brainstorm and Manage a Year’s Worth of Content Ideas

Feeling overwhelmed? Let Marketing Insider Group be your guide to creating ROI-producing content without breaking your budget. We’re not free but for less than the cost of sponsoring 1 webinar, we can bring you a years’ worth of content ideas, full-length articles, and reports that prove our value.

Check our our annual blogging service today or reach out for a free content marketing assessment.

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