Posts

How to Make a Content Calendar You’ll Actually Use [Templates Included]

content calendar

We’ve been there: the next social media post or blog article is due, and you’ve been so busy that you’re just now looking for a great topic to cover. You feel the pressure as you work to get it done quickly, and once it’s published you can barely enjoy the sense of accomplishment before your next deadline arrives.

When you understand what content marketing really is, you know that means sticking to a publishing schedule. Just one small delay can throw the whole thing off.

That’s why an actionable content calendar can transform the way you’re able to develop, find, and publish content consistently. Great content calendars can be simple — as easy as working with an Excel spreadsheet. Even better? There are tons of ready-to-use templates available to help you get started.

Ready to change your entire content marketing experience? Let’s dive into why content calendars are a valuable tool and look at some awesome content marketing templates you can start using right away.

Quick Takeaways:

  • Content calendars are critical tools that keep content teams on track.
  • Using a content calendar template is a good way to start the process.
  • For a content calendar to be effective, it also needs to be actionable.
  • Dynamic content calendars allow you to be agile, and it updates in real time.

What Is a Content Calendar?

A content calendar a documented schedule of all your content projects with due dates. It encompasses planning, scheduling, and organizing content.

The best content calendars are the secret to consistently publishing relevant content? Using content calendar templates can transform the operational side of your content marketing.

Do You Really Need a Content Calendar?

Simple answer: YES!

Content Calendars are the “forcing function” of any effective content marketing strategy.

Annual content planning needs to be strategic, effective, and useful. You need to make sure you are hitting your goals, meeting the needs of internal and external stakeholders, and making the most of your resources. The bottom line is that bad a$$ content marketers run really good content calendars

And content marketing teams rely on these to plan campaigns out across different channels and tactics.

A content calendar is your content strategy in action. Of course, that may be why you’re not using one – you don’t have a content strategy. The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) reports that the majority of companies have one, but there are still some that are lagging.

Image: CMI

That’s the starting point to drive content marketing ROI. And your strategy should define what your content calendar will include and the parameters around the workflows that support it.

It’s easy to dismiss content calendars as another ball to juggle rather than a valuable tool to help you manage your content. But guess what? Content managers who find content calendars tedious rather than useful are likely using a bad template or not setting aside the time to make it work effectively.

Like any project management tool, content calendars take commitment, especially in the beginning when you’re building one from scratch and adjusting to the routine of updating it every week or month.

But resist the urge to throw that calendar to the wayside! Content calendars not only make the process of managing content more enjoyable and less stressful, they lead to better-performing content that’s more likely to resonate with audiences and help your brand accomplish its goals.

Here are some of the most important benefits of a good content calendar:

  • Keeps You Organized and Accountable – When you plan ahead with a content calendar, you won’t be scrambling to publish and you’ll be more accountable to the content plan because you’ve outlined it ahead of time.
  • Gives You a Better Grasp on Your Content – Your content calendar gives you a bird’s eye view of your content. Rather than always focusing on the next post, you’ll gain a more holistic understanding of your content themes and trends over time.
  • Helps You Identify Opportunities – Did you know that 90% of companies feel that their content would benefit from having more contributors? Keeping a content calendar can help you identify opportunities to collaborate and source content ideas from other team members and happenings at your company.
  • Leads to Better Content (and Better Results) – Over time, your content is going to get better as you plan it more intentionally. Better content means better engagement, and more engagement means higher marketing ROI.

What Are the Benefits of Content Calendars?

Using a calendar delivers a bounty of benefits, including:

  • It keeps you honest with your production goals: If you say you’re producing six pieces of content a month but aren’t tracking deadlines and tasks, you won’t meet your goals.
  • It provides transparency for all: Anyone should be able to look at your content calendar and know what’s in the queue. In addition, it enables a 360-degree view of content projects.
  • You’ll find where your bottlenecks are: When due dates slip by, and things fall off the rails, you can see why. Is it the approval process? Lack of design resources? Or something else? You can identify it and work to address it.
  • Planning out in advance takes the pressure off: Nobody likes to work in a reactive culture. A calendar enables you to be proactive and look forward for 30, 60, or 90 days, so there’s no constant feeling of being behind.
  • It keeps things organized in a central spot: The calendar uses content workflows to streamline processes, and it’s all in one place, improving productivity.
  • Collaboration is easier: Is it a struggle for some groups to work together on a project? A content calendar that includes notes, comments, files, and other information in one spot makes collaboration simple and not a heavy lift.
  • It helps with accountability: Each team member has a role. If they aren’t fulfilling it, it’s easy to see in a calendar. You can then handle it head-on.

While you can gain these advantages, not all content calendars are the same. They don’t all have the same functionality or configuration. And one of the biggest differences is static versus dynamic.

What Is a Dynamic Content Calendar, and Why Should You Use One?

We use a dynamic content calendar that is part of one of the highest-rated content marketing platforms. Dynamic means that it lives online, identifies the various steps of content production, the owners of each step and notifies users of changes to status.

Users can interact with it at the same time. It updates in real time and provides notifications based on user actions. For example, when a new project goes in with task assignments, the assignee receives an alert.

You can see how a dynamic calendar works in the video below.

If you’re using a static calendar, meaning an Excel sheet, that’s not going to be the case, even if it’s in a shared drive. It’s still just a spreadsheet. Nor can you attach documents or use tags.

A dynamic calendar is living and breathing. It’s a tool that keeps projects moving, tracking every step and offering functionality that supports productivity.

You’ll end up doing too much manual work and possibly have multiple versions of the same calendar if you just use a spreadsheet. It’s not sustainable long-term for a growing enterprise.

Before creating your dynamic content calendar, you’ll need to start with a content calendar template. There are many options and lots of different things you can include.

How Do You Build a Content Calendar, and What Should a Content Calendar Template Include?

In building a content calendar template, you may pick and choose pieces from multiple templates, which we’ll share soon. The goal is to customize it to fit your company’s specific needs.

In deciding what to put in your template, you should conduct an exercise with your team. These steps will help you do that in a logical way.

Define Your Goals

Clearly identify what your brand is trying to accomplish with its content before you start building out your calendar. List out all of your goals and then prioritize them, too. This will look different for every company.

For example, Brand A’s top priority might be building out their blog content library, while Brand B might be focused on building a larger social media following.

Your goals can evolve over time, so it’s a good idea to identify both short- and long-term goals, and reevaluate periodically to be sure your content plan still aligns.

Choose Your Tools

What tools will you use for your content calendar? We mentioned earlier the importance of a dynamic one, which you can execute in a software platform. There are lots of products on the market.

In finding one that’s the best fit for you, consider these points:

  • Does it have a repository for ideas? This keeps topics in one spot and allows you to flesh them out.
  • Can you create a request form? Multiple stakeholders, from sales to product managers, may have content needs. Make it easy for them to submit them.
  • What kind of planning features does it have? Things like drag-and-drop scheduling, filtering, task prioritization, and multiple views will all help you plan better and smarter.
  • How does the calendar architecture work? You may want to have different calendar views (by project, group, date, etc.) and share those with non-users.
  • Does it have task management functionality? Tasks are critical to building content.
  • Can you create custom workflows? Different tasks will require different workflows, so you want to have flexibility here.
  • Does it allow for automated notifications? You don’t want to have to send emails out every time something changes.
  • Can you comment and tag users? Being able to do this simplifies collaboration.
  • Does it track changes? You don’t want to have versioning issues.
  • Does it include an asset library? This makes it easy to find what you need.
  • Can the system integrate with other platforms? Again, this can be very helpful for automation and productivity.
  • How easy is it to use? You want something you can deploy and have users engage with immediately. If the learning curve is too big, your team may not adopt it.
  • What’s the fee schedule? By user? Or are there enterprise plans? Depending on your size and budget, cost structure will matter.
  • Does it track analytics? It can become a hub for you to review content performance and data.

Asking these questions and demoing multiple solutions is the best way to find what will fit your team’s requirements.

Determine What Fields Your Content Calendar Template Should Have

Before you can start using a template, you’ll need to decide what you want to include. Here are some options:

  • Content title
  • Content pillar
  • Focus keyword
  • Expected length of content
  • Type of content
  • Buyer persona
  • Funnel stage (top, middle, or bottom)
  • Dates for each task completion
  • Objective (lead generation, thought leadership, or any other goal in your content strategy)
  • Offer or CTA (call to action)
  • Suggested internal links
  • Research links
  • Miscellaneous notes
  • How you’ll distribute it (social media, email newsletter, paid channels, etc.)

List Your Channels

List every channel you use to publish content and keep this list visible so you can refer to it when you work on your content calendar. Listing your channels helps in two main ways: first, it ensures you don’t disclude any in your content plan. Second, it helps you better prioritize your content and recognize when you’re over- or under-utilizing a particular channel.

Develop Your Workflows

Calendars will make the most significant impact on production when you define your content workflows.

These will look different depending on the type of content, but most will be repeatable. They’ll each have an assignee as well. Examples include:

  • Keyword research: The SEO specialist or content marketer establishes what keywords to use.
  • Research: Content writers or researchers pull data and statistics.
  • Writing: This is the first draft.
  • Review: Multiple people may need to review the content, including managers, legal, compliance, product managers, or other SMEs (subject matter experts).
  • Edits: The writer takes the feedback from the reviewers and makes updates.
  • Copy editing: The copy editor checks for grammar, syntax, style, and more.
  • SEO optimization: An SEO specialist may review the content again to make any additional tweaks for optimization.
  • Design: Every content piece will need some design, from blog images to social media posts to larger projects like e-books. There may also be a subset review for the creative as well.
  • Publication: The content goes live!
  • Distribution: Posting the content on social or any other channel.
  • Measurement and review: Track the performance of the content around SEO rankings, social media engagement, pageviews, and conversions.

Establish Timelines

After you confirm your workflows, you need to put a timetable on them. How long do you think it will take to do each step? Do you have past data to look at that can help?

If not, you’ll make a guestimate and evaluate it as you go. For example, you may give reviewers three business days. After a few months, you may find they need longer.

It’s something you’ll have to monitor from an operational perspective to ensure that your deadlines don’t fall off.

The deadlines should be clear. You need to communicate with your team that these are hard, not just for show. It will likely be bumpy at first, but you want to keep people accountable.

Here’s what to look for in establishing your content calendar timelines:

Internal – things happening at your company

    • Product launches
    • Seasonal campaigns
    • Events
    • Special content series or pieces

External – things happening outside your company

    • Industry news and events
    • Local/national/world news and events
    • Holidays and observances
    • Social media trends and challenges

Document Everything

All the steps discussed should be documented in your content strategy. That way, when you onboard new employees, they have a source of truth about the logistics of making content.

It’s not set in stone. It’s flexible and will change as your business does. The point is to have a process and stick to it. You’ll avoid confusion and frustration.

When you do make changes, get buy-in from stakeholders. They should be part of the decision-making process.

An effective content calendar also includes all the subtasks necessary in producing a piece of content. It holds tags that ensure you’re hitting your content pillars and meeting all stakeholder needs.

Tags could include:

  • Content type (blog, infographic, e-book, whitepaper, video, emails, social media posts, etc.)
  • Buyer persona (most organizations create content for at least 3 audience segments)
  • Focus keyword
  • Funnel stage (top, middle, or bottom)

Using tags also allows you to audit so that you’re staying on course with your content strategy.

It’s also about assigning roles. It maps out each task and the resource required (writer, designer, SEO specialist, etc.).

Consider it to be the blueprint of your content operations.

Fill in the Blanks with Evergreen Content

After you add your time-bound content, you can build in your evergreen content (or content that is not time-sensitive). Identify evergreen topics you can cover that will interest your audience. Keep this list wherever you keep your content ideas and brainstorms. Then, pull from it to include evergreen topics frequently in your content calendar.

You can also identify prior content you’ve already published that falls into this category and reuse it by sharing it on other channels. You can also repurpose it in another form (like turning a blog post into an infographic) or give it new updates to make it fresh.

Make a Publishing Plan

Knowing who is responsible for creating and publishing your content is key. If you’re working with a multi-person content team, it’s not a bad idea to incorporate it into your content calendar in a way that shows who is responsible for which type of content.

You can also utilize publishing tools like Hootsuite and SproutSocial to help automate your social media publishing, and use the “schedule post” feature in WordPress or whichever web content management system you use to schedule your blog posts ahead of time.

What Makes a Content Calendar Actionable?

So, what’s an actionable content calendar? Simply put, it’s building one with the steps above that you adhere to on a regular basis.

The calendar isn’t just static; it’s dynamic, and the workflows are in place to go from task to task. An actionable content calendar is one that gets used, and that is visible to all parties.

Content Calendar Templates

You can start from scratch, but we found these content calendar templates worth checking out.

First, we created this template for use in content marketing workshops. It’s simple, and you use it for all your content marketing efforts.

I’m currently drafting an article to cover all the content marketing strategy templates I’ve created. But for now, you can download the one above including all the others in the previous link. Check back in about 2 weeks for the follow-up article…

DivvyHQ

DivvyHQ is a content marketing platform that allows you to customize your content calendar. You can download their content calendar planning template and use it to construct yours inside their platform. They’ve also created this amazing comparison of all the content marketing platforms.

Keep in mind that your content calendar doesn’t have to replicate any of these. You can make it as simple or granular as you need.

You may find that you want to remove some fields if they aren’t useful. Adding other ones may become appropriate, too. You have the freedom to tweak it as needed. You want to remain agile because you never know what might change.

Hootsuite Social Media Calendar

Hootsuite offers a free template for social media posts. You may have more than one content calendar, with one focusing purely on social posting.

Image: Hootsuite

HubSpot Content Calendar

HubSpot has several templates you can download and then customize. For example, you could use this one as the printed version of your calendar. It does color-coding well.

Image: HubSpot

Trello Board

Trello is a task management and collaboration tool that’s also great for creating content calendars. We like the flexibility of creating lists and converting them over to calendars, and it’s flexible editing options. Here’s a tutorial that walks you through the steps of creating a Trello content calendar:

Smartsheet Blog Editorial Calendar

Image Source

We like the simplicity of this blog editorial calendar template from Smartsheet, which focuses on creating monthly schedules and also includes tabs for brainstorming and keeping an archive of published content.

CoSchedule Annual Content Calendar Template

Image Source

CoSchedule’s content calendar template is really useful because it provides templates for general content, social media, and email marketing. It also includes a centralized calendar template for putting it all together and color coding to stay organized. If you’re working with a team, this is a great template to help manage all of the moving parts.

Backlinko

Backlinko offers a version for Excel or a Google Sheet. It has a lot of detail in it, specifically around SEO techniques. It also has a built-in workflow. It includes an actual calendar view for your content as well.

Taking Your Content Calendar Template to the Next Level

Content marketing is a long game. It requires a commitment to producing great content. A content calendar can certainly help, but sometimes that’s not enough.

In cases where you simply can’t do it all, you need to find a partner that can keep your content flowing. We’re here to offer that help.

If you are ready to get more traffic to your site with quality content published consistently, check out our Content Builder Service.

Set up a quick consultation, and I’ll send you a free PDF version of my books. Get started today and generate more traffic and leads for your business.

The post How to Make a Content Calendar You’ll Actually Use [Templates Included] appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

/by

How You Can Save Your Support Budget With a Chatbot

Modern-day customers are picky and demanding when it comes to choosing where to make a purchase. And they have every right to do so! Of course, they expect stellar customer service and support at all stages of their customer journey.

However –

How can a company ensure exceptional customer service if it’s growing fast? What are the ways to maintain the speed and quality of support without non-stop hiring and training new employees?

The answer is automating your support as much as possible, for example with a chatbot. 

But, first things first —

When do you need support automation? 

It’s highly rewarding when the company is growing because the product is scaling. The more people convert and stay with the service as active users, the more challenges the support team is presented with. Essentially, it’s a never-ending cycle of trying to keep up with the growth without sacrificing the quality and speed of the support you offer. 

Obviously, the support team has to inevitably grow, too. However, this raises new potential challenges – more people means more knowledge to transfer in onboarding and training, more people to manage, more careers to grow, more 1-1s to lead for managers, and more communication channels. More hiring leads to even more hiring. Peter Drucker compared such bloated organizations to full-scale monster organisms, which require big brains to coordinate all the organs, and heaps of energy to even stay alive. 

In order to not create such a monster and not to turn a fast-growing tech company into a soulless call center with thousands of unhappy employees, it’s a great idea to aim at automating your customer support as much as possible. 

Customer support automation: everything you need to know

Essentially, automating your customer support means reducing human involvement when it comes to solving any kind of customer issue. Examples of automated support include automated workflows, chatbots, conversational AI, self-service helpdesks, and FAQs. Automation comes with a great reduction in costs and allows teams and companies to scale sustainably and without sacrificing quality. 

Still –

What are the main advantages of automated customer support?

Here is the list:

It reduces customer support costs. 

This one is a no-brainer – a chatbot costs a fraction of the price the company would pay for hiring and training one human support agent. According to the statistics, the average ROI for chatbots would be 1,275% (and that’s just support cost savings). Quite impressive, isn’t it?

It allows human support agents to focus on important tasks. 

When all the basics like FAQs, welcome messages, and collecting feedback are covered by automation solutions, your support team can focus on what truly matters and provide better quality assistance when it comes to complex challenges and tasks. This way, they will be able to anticipate customer needs before they even arise and, as a result, provide exceptional support assisted by chatbots. 

It improves speed and efficiency. 

Customers will love the shorter response time you offer. At the same time, the team will also appreciate it – instead of going out of their way to achieve the shortest response time possible, they can focus on the quality and the result of their interactions. 

It allows 24/7 customer support, everywhere. 

It’s hard to argue with this point – chatbots have no shifts, they are available everywhere and at all times. If there is an issue requiring a human agent, chatbots can notify them and assure the customer that they will get the reply as soon as possible. This allows for a smooth communication flow and support with no interruptions. 

Main advantages of customer support

What metrics do you need to look at? 

In order to optimize the switch from all-human support to partly automation, it’s vital to take a look at several metrics. Those include:

Contact Rate

It’s a very useful indicator to estimate the number of people needed for customer support in a company. Contact rate is the number of daily active users in relation to the number of daily chats with support. It is also a great indicator of the state of automation and self-service for your team.

Average Tickets Per Hour

Measuring the number of tickets per hour during different time frames helps to estimate the effectiveness and performance of the support team over a period of time. It will help to highlight the times when the support team is overloaded with requests. 

Customer Satisfaction Score

Obviously, it’s a crucial one. For many support teams out there, it is the key performance indicator for the quality of customer service. If this metric is dropping, it’s an important sign that changes have to be made. 

Once you bring all the numbers together, you will have a clear recipe for how many people you need on the team and how many projects you can automate.

What metrics do you need to look at?

How can a chatbot help out?

One of the most efficient ways to automate customer support is to install a chatbot. 

Essentially, a chatbot is computer software that simulates human communication via text in order to help businesses answer questions and requests. It’s also a great helper of any support team. Installing a chatbot for customer service always helps to save the budget you would instead spend on employing and training a huge team of human support agents. 

To start with, many chatbot builders and chatbot templates are available free of charge. Very often, no coding skills are required to build an efficient virtual assistant. As a result, you get a self-sufficient bot that comes with multiple integrations, speaks many languages, answers questions 24/7, and gives your brand a unique voice. 

A well-designed chatbot can cover all basic customer support needs. It can greet new visitors with a welcome message, offer discounts and personalized offers, recover abandoned carts, collect feedback, answer FAQs questions, help to track orders and guide the visitors through every step of making a purchase. As a result, your support team can focus on the quality of their work and solve complex problems with speed and efficiency. The company will be able to invest in their training and growth instead of endless hiring.

Sounds tempting, doesn’t it? Read on for more tips!

Tips for sustainable growth

  • The true savings on support come from not hiring more people, but from automating the work of the team as much as possible. Hire only when it’s needed and focus on candidates with more skills and experience. 
  • Stick to the approach: ‘fewer people, more skills’. Focus on helping your support agents grow and learn. Support them by having enough highly qualified managers and team leaders. 
  • When the traffic is moderate, make sure that managers and team leaders focus on helping others grow. At the same time, when the traffic peaks, they can help the team to cover it. 
  • Scale the support team for what you will be doing in 12 months. 
  • Keep your standards by monitoring all necessary metrics and adjust them as you are growing.

Key findings

Support automation is becoming a must these days. If you want to have a highly qualified support team that will be focused on solving complex issues and delivering the highest levels of customer satisfaction, it’s a great idea to consider installing a chatbot to help them cover the basics. 

Let’s review the key findings regarding support automation:

  • To avoid turning a fast-growing tech company into a soulless call center with thousands of unhappy employees, it’s a great idea to aim at automating customer service as much as possible. 
  • The main advantages of automating support include reducing customer support costs, improving the speed and efficiency of support, and allowing your live agents to focus on more important requests. Additionally, it provides high-quality support at all times, everywhere, and in all languages.
  • The key metrics to observe if you want to save on customer support with automation include Contact Rate, Average Tickets Per Hour, and Customer Satisfaction Score. 
  • A great tool to automate support is a chatbot, computer software that operates to simulate human communication through text chats. They are cheap, efficient, and easy to set up.

It seems like support automation with chatbots is here to stay, and it’s becoming more and more widespread. It might be high time to install a bot for your business, too.

The post How You Can Save Your Support Budget With a Chatbot appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

/by

Three Ways (and Tools) to Improve The User Experience of Your Content

Three Ways (and Tools) to Improve The User Experience of Your Content

Content is a key element of just about any page. No wonder it can make or break the user experience your site provides.

Have you ever thought about your content strategy in the context of user experience? Is your content user-friendly and accessible?

Here are three ways (and three tools) to improve the user experience of your content:

1. Align Your Content with User’s Expectations

Poor content that doesn’t prioritize its reader is by default poor user experience. But what exactly does “poor” mean when it comes to a copy?

There are numerous ways to define and evaluate content quality. We can talk about length, depth, readability, clarity, and comprehensiveness of a copy and still fail to explain why we think we are dealing with a poor copy.

The problem is, content quality is subjective. What one thinks is a shallow copy is a perfect article explaining the basics for someone who is less familiar with the topic.

This is why the best way to define a poor copy is from a target reader’s perspective.

In other words, a high-quality page is the one that satisfies a searcher’s intent, or the one that meets searchers’ expectations.

Tools for Fulfilling Your Searcher’s Intent

How do we know if our content fulfills the searcher’s need?

  • Clearly understand who you are writing for: Define your target reader’s profile (or persona) to better relate to their needs. Are they experts or newbies? Travelers? Stay-at-home parents? Which challenges are they facing on a daily basis? Why did they turn to Google to search for this particular query you are targeting? Talk to your customer service team to better understand your target audience. Take this Unified Communications Test to set up an effective knowledge sharing process within your company.
  • Keep an eye on Google clues: What search elements is Google showing for your target search query and what do those tell you about people searching for it. Are there video carousels showing for that search? Do “People Also Ask” boxes include broad or specific questions? Do top-ranking pages provide in-depth or 101-type of answers? Google knows their target searches. They have had years of data to analyze their users’ searching patterns for all kinds of data. All you need is to be able to see Google’s hints.
Using Google For UX Clues

Looks like this search is often performed by beginners!

Narrato WorkSpace is a great platform to put all of these multiple pieces together. Narrato allows you to keep all your content workflow (ideation, research, creation, editing) under one roof empowering your team with research, collaboration and AI writing tools. You can add projects, invite collaborators and let your team create content together:

Narrato WorkSpace

Finally, use Text Optimizer to grade your writer’s intent optimization efforts. The tool uses semantic analysis to help you create a copy that matches your target user’s expectations: the higher your content is graded, the better it satisfies your searcher’s intent!

Text Optimizer tool

2. Build an Effective Content Structure

Organize content into well-defined sections using headings, (ordered and unordered) lists, and visual elements (icons, graphs, etc.)

This helps on many levels and makes your content user-friendlier:

  • Subheadings help readability because people can scan them and quickly decide if that’s something that is going to be helpful for them
  • Clearly visible subheadings that stand out improve engagement as they prompt readers to stop scrolling and read a section that seems to be the most relevant to their particular needs
  • Content that is broken into logical sections is easier to remember and follow
  • Well-written subheadings help accessibility as it helps blind web users to navigate the page using screen readers. Another way to help people with disabilities navigate your content is to create video subtitles.

Break content into shorter sections with appropriate subheadings (use true and visually significant headings rather than simply big bold text) and create a clickable table of contents to help your readers to easily navigate to the most relevant section..

You can review your content structure by using the free tool called Wave by selecting the Outline View. 

Each page should typically have one main <h1> and multiple subheadings that follow the logical hierarchy (they should not be skipped). The tool will alert you of any structural errors like skipped or missing subheadings, too long headings, etc.:

Wave content structure tool

Additionally, the tool will check your lists that also provide semantic meaning: orders, unordered, and definition lists.

Keyword clustering (i.e. breaking keyword lists into groups by meaning) is a great way to create a logical content structure and rank for multiple keywords within a single group.

3. Eliminate Confusing Page Elements and CTAs

Even great content will fail to engage a reader if it is full of confusing and distracting CTAs or other (often redundant) page elements.

One of the best ways to identify those page elements that prevent your page visitors from reading your content in full and/or engaging with it in any way is using a free tool from Bing called Clarity.

Clarity is pretty easy to install: You need to connect it with your Google Analytics account through standard Google’s authentication process and then install Clarity’s tracking code. This way the tool will have two reliable sources of data (GA and its own pixel) for more in-depth insights.

As soon as it is installed, Bing will need at least 24 hours to accumulate and process your data. From then on, keep an eye on “dead clicks” insights that show you page elements that people clicked and tapped with no results (i.e. those page elements are easily confused with clickable links, buttons, etc.). You can view the recordings of people using your site and clicking/tapping:

Microsoft Clarity

Or you can use Clarity’s heatmaps to identify page elements that attract most “dead clicks”:

Clarity dead clicks

Bing promises that the tool will be free forever!

More Tools for Optimizing Pages

There are quite a few on-page engagement solutions for you to experiment with and test with Clarity. If you are using standalone content assets, pick a content management system that already has a smooth conversion funnel already built-in. There are a few great webinar platforms, for example, that have that done very well.

Page speed is another big factor that can make or break on-page user experience. Keep a close eye on that as well. Google’s Search Console will alert you of any issues with your page performance, and if you are using a flexible content management platform, you may even be able to fix it in-house. Both WordPress and Shopify offer built-in solutions and integrations for page speed optimization.

Conclusion

Content user-friendliness is one of the key elements of its success. Your copy can be great and truly useful but it will fail to perform well if it is hard to read or impossible to engage with. 

Optimizing your content strategy to provide a positive user experience is crucial for achieving high rankings (as user experience is a confirmed ranking signal), improving your conversions and building a solid backlink profile.

The post Three Ways (and Tools) to Improve The User Experience of Your Content appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

/by

What 7 Research Studies Tell Us About Content Marketing in 2022

What 7 Research Studies Tell Us About Content Marketing in 2022

Ready for some research gems that you can keep in mind this year as you analyze your content marketing strategy? 

Here at Ascend2, my team and I get to conduct rich research projects that dive into the variety of topics marketers like you want to know most about. For instance, this year alone, we have covered:  personalization in marketing, using data to drive demand, the state of marketing automation, intent data, agile marketing, video marketing, omnichannel marketing, and more. 

Content marketing is a major component that is often present in our studies. So for this article, I’ve compiled our top content marketing findings for you, so you can focus on creating and delivering excellent content.

So, here it goes! Here are my 7 top content marketing insights for 2022 straight from the Ascend2 research library.

Finding #1: Start with the technology marketers can absolutely not live without.

In the Marketing Trends Report 2022 by Ascend2 and Oracle, 32% of marketing professionals said that content management systems (CMS) are essential to modern martech and among the top three most heavily relied on solutions. Also, the top three technologies work together, providing content creation, publishing, data, and distribution. 

Tip: Collecting data is one thing, but harnessing the power of that data to turn insights into action requires a holistic view. Customer data platforms (CDP) allow marketers to deliver content experiences based on real-time data and a single source of truth. Unified data allows marketers to enhance decision-making with data-backed insights about the needs and behaviors of their audiences. 

Finding #2: The power of video content for B2B marketers.

When considering content formats, video is becoming the go-to format for B2B marketers.

The Power of Video in the B2B Buyer’s Journey, by Ascend2 and Brightcove, found that even when stacked up against other content formats, an overwhelming 70% of B2B buyers report that video makes the most impact over other content formats. 

Most Impactful Content Formats

Tip: Start with a “big rock” content piece, like original research, and then slice and dice it into many content formats. For example, a research study can be the foundational content for videos, a webinar, blog posts, infographics, and more. 

70% of B2B buyers report that video makes the most impact over other content formats.
Click To Tweet

Finding #3: Content marketing is a key part of demand generation.

In The State of Demand Generation, by Ascend2 and HipB2B, 38% of B2B marketers are using content marketing syndication to generate and nurture leads. Social media marketing is first on the list (62%) and content marketing is a critical part of your social media strategy. 

Why of the strategic formats are you currently executing

Tip: Use content marketing to reach your prospects where they are. An omnichannel program (email, social media, web, display ads, etc.) allows you to focus on delivering customers a consistent experience and removes data silos so that you have one source of truth on your clients and KPIs to measure performance.

Finding #4: Interactive content will have a major impact on marketing performance.

The study, 2022 Marketing Budget and Planning, by Ascend2 and Wpromote, found that interactive content is a critical tactic that marketing professionals will rely on in 2022. 

Interactive content is content that requires active engagement from its consumers. It empowers the individual to be more than just a passive viewer, but an integral part of a dynamic, two-way experience.

Which strategies or tactics will have the most impact on marketing performance

Ideas: What are common and effective interactive content types that you can use to get more leads? Examples are interactive quizzes, interactive infographics, surveys and polls (popular now on LinkedIn), interactive calculators, assessments, interactive e-books, interactive emails, virtual events, and webinars.

Finding #5: Content is the cornerstone of a personalization strategy.

Asend2’s research study, Personalization in Digital Marketing, reveals that creating and delivering relevant content is the most critical element needed to execute an effective personalization strategy. 

What are the most critical elements to execute a personalization strategy

Tip: To create relevant content you must:

  • Build your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP) to understand who you are targeting.
  • Understand that relevant content is content that helps the reader (make the content valuable to them). 
  • Create your customer journey map and add in the content.
  • Understand what your audience wants from each content piece.

Finding #6: The most important metrics to evaluate content marketing performance. 

Measuring Content Marketing Performance Survey by Ascend2 found that 44% of marketers agree that tracking conversion rate and website traffic metrics are critical to effectively evaluate content marketing performance. For 43% of marketing professionals, social media engagement is also among the most important metrics to consider when gauging the success of a content strategy.

What are the most important metrics to consider when evaluating a content strategy

Tip: Before you set goals and track the right KPIs, you need to understand the objective of every content campaign. Are you trying to generate more leads, attract qualified traffic to your website, improve brand reputation, improve engagement with your content, etc? With clarification on your goals, you will be able to align metrics that will help you evaluate whether or not you are achieving your goals.

43% of marketers will be adding personalized content to their marketing strategy in the year ahead.
Click To Tweet

Finding #7: AI is trusted (and needed) for content marketing.

Marketers across all industries are adopting AI to carry out marketing tasks. Nearly 42% of those surveyed report that they trust AI to personalize content and offers in real-time. AI allows marketers to personalize content without human intervention and provides an added layer of marketing agility to a content marketing program.

Which activity would you trust AI to

Tip: Content and personalization are dynamic duos. 43% of marketers will be adding personalized content to their marketing strategy in the year ahead. 

Conclusion

Use these research pieces to put together your content plan and budget. Go to the Ascend2 Research Library for additional research resources.

The post What 7 Research Studies Tell Us About Content Marketing in 2022 appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

/by

7 Content Marketing Takeaways From 4.6 Million B2B Downloads

7 Content Marketing Takeaways From 4.6 Million B2B Downloads

“A generation which ignores history has no past – and no future.” –  Robert A. Heinlein

Marketers love to talk about data. We love to talk about findings. But what good are such things if we’re not ready and willing to both learn from and act on them?

Each year, my company, NetLine, publishes the most complete study on B2B buyer behaviors through first-party content consumption data. The result is a complete view into the current trends in the market, how needs and appetites are evolving, and what marketers can do to adapt. 

Here are some of the biggest takeaways and most impactful insights from NetLine’s 2022 State of B2B Content Consumption and Demand Report for Marketers.

B2B Content Demand Increased 9% YOY

Anecdotally, we’ve known that content demand and consumption have been rising for years. But how often is that story quantified? 

In each of our six annual reports, we’ve only seen growth YOY and would be stunned if it ever dipped. However, thanks in large part to the pandemic, the previous 24 months saw B2B audiences request a whopping 33% more content combined compared to 2019. 

With this tremendous upswing in registration volume, there can only be one conclusion: We need to produce more content. 

Audiences Require More and More Content 

I can already hear the dismay this conclusion will cause, though I promise it’s not so bad.

“Wait—you want us to produce more content than we’re already creating?”

The short answer is, well…yes. Granted we’re not talking about asking your content team to go overboard on what they’re already working on. In most cases, the content you’re producing or planning to create is going to be plenty for what your audience needs. 

As Jay Baer and many others have discussed for years now, what audiences really need is more options of how to consume your content. That eBook you spent months on? Turn it into a Webinar; highlight different sections in a series of blog posts; ask your design team to transform it into an infographic; chunk it out into a few Twitter threads, etc. However you choose to format your work, our data is proof that atomization is key to satisfying the demands of your audience. 

Speaking of formats, they certainly do matter when it comes to consumption.

Books Accounted for Nearly Half of All Registrations

B2B users love eBooks. They are hands down the most popular format across our platform, representing 43.3% of all registrations. To underscore just how dominant eBooks were, if we combined the registration volume between the next eight most popular content formats, it would still represent a smaller number of registrations than eBooks. Wild.

The larger trend here is that shorter, simpler, and more casual content is the real winner here. Guides were the second most popular content format and consumption of Cheat Sheets increased 56.5% YOY—good enough to place them in the top three. 

White Papers, once the king of the content castle, were the third most requested format in 2020 and even saw a nearly 8% increase in request volume this past year. Despite this uptick in interest, they still dropped to fifth in the Top 10 and were bested by eBooks by 484%—further underscoring the growing interest in more casual content.

But don’t go thinking that White Papers are losing their fastball, dear friend. Oh, no, for that is certainly not the case. In fact, thanks to NetLine’s buyer-level Intent Discovery data, we’ve found that White Papers have a very special place in the buyer’s journey. More on that in a moment.

Content Consumption is Directly Correlated with Investment

As we analyzed all of the data generated on our platform from the previous 12 months, we began to investigate the 72K first-party buyer-level intent insights we captured over the same period. What these insights revealed was quite remarkable and (if we’re being honest) led to the most impactful study NetLine’s ever published.

For starters, we found that content consumption relates directly with investment within the next 12 months. The more your audience consumes, the more likely they are to be closing in on a purchase decision. Again, this is something we’ve long theorized at an aggregate level, but now we have tangible evidence.

We learned that nearly one-third (~31%) of B2B buyers expect to make purchases within the next 12 months, with 15.2% expecting to make additional investments within the next six months. To put this in perspective using an example from our analysis of Artificial Intelligence investment trends, close to 6% of the buyers in this market are preparing to make a move in the next quarter—that means there’s potentially $3.72 billion just waiting to be spent.

This is all well and good but what specific signals can you be on the lookout for with your own content to help you 

Long-form Content Registrations Indicate Greater Purchase Intent

Remember when we said that White Papers have a very special place in the buyer’s journey? This is why.

Content Forms Associated with Buying Decisions

According to our buyer-level intent data, long-form content formats like White Papers, Research Reports, and On-Demand Webinars are more closely associated with immediate buying decisions. Despite the fact that eBooks dominate overall registration volume, they are clearly a top-of-funnel format and are therefore less likely to be associated with an immediate buying decision.

The content that’s been assigned to the More Likely column, however, is much weightier and dense. White Papers are, by definition, technical documents that discuss subjects in great detail. While eBooks, Cheat Sheets, and Tips and Tricks Guides all had record years on the NetLine platform, their quick-hitting, “in-and-out” natures are perfect for buyers just getting introduced to a given subject matter or market. 

Perhaps the most longform content of all is the Webinar. Webinars are geared for those looking to answer questions like how and why—which are typically asked toward the end of a buying cycle. Considering that professionals registering for webinars are 29% more likely to make a purchase decision within 6 months, it’s clear that those who register for (and then attend) these sessions should be hot on your Sales team’s radar.

Professionals registering for webinars are 29% more likely to make a purchase decision within 6 months.
Click To Tweet

Hybrid Events Are Here to Stay

Speaking of the value of Webinars, this medium and its kin continue to show their worth. In 2020, Webinars were thrust into the spotlight across every industry, resulting in a 103% increase in uploads to our platform. While content marketers clearly had a need for this medium during the crux of the pandemic, users continue to find them worthwhile today.2021 saw a 63% increase in total Webinar registrations. 

On-Demand Webinars increased by 45%, generating 41% more registrations than Live Webinars. Virtual Events were the big winner of the group, as the format saw registrations increase 139% YOY—an indication that both virtual and hybrid events have a booming market. Yes, pandemic paranoia plays a part in this market growth, but the real reason hybrid is here to stay? Return on investment. 

Events will forever remain a significant place in the Marketing landscape. But when we’re looking at the return on time, quality of data and pipeline generation, Webinars and other virtual sessions hold the upper hand.

Content Consumption is Up…and So is the Time to Consume It

While we shared that content consumption has increased 33% over the past 24 months, we’ve yet to mention that secondary content demand (aka any content requests that occur beyond the first request) accelerated by 19% YOY. Said a different way, users are not only consuming more content, but the same users are also coming back for more. This is a great thing! But here’s the other side of that coin: It’s taking them longer to consume this content.

This time from registration to consumption is something that NetLine calls the Consumption Gap. For the third year in a row, the Consumption Gap widened; 2019 and 2020 saw increases of just over an hour, growing from 2018’s low of 27.1 hours. However, 2021 saw a 12% increase, as the Consumption Gap grew from 29.7 hours to 33.3 hours — a 3.6-hour increase.

How often is the Consumption Gap taken into account by marketers and sales professionals? You can probably answer this question for yourself. I’m sure you’ve gotten a call from a representative after just registering for an eBook. No, thanks, pal.

Hypothetically, consumption can increase infinitely. B2B professionals, on the other hand, have a finite amount of time to dedicate to consumption. Therefore, as registration volume grows, the more likely it is that the consumption gap will widen. To combat this, marketers need to be on top of their nurture programs and be sure to give users enough breathing room to actually consume the content they’ve asked for.

Learn More About 2022 B2B Content Marketing Trends

There are still dozens of insights left to be discovered within NetLine’s 2022 Content Consumption Report. Ultimately, the report aims to aid your content marketing efforts and highlights the true behaviors of B2B users. Our hope is that by knowing these details, you’ll be able to better position your content in every facet and deliver more impactful results for you and your audience.

NetLine’s 2022 Content Consumption Report is now available for download. Best of luck in your content creation and strategy.

 

 

The post 7 Content Marketing Takeaways From 4.6 Million B2B Downloads appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

/by

The Higher Education Content Marketer’s Summertime Bucket List

The Higher Education Content Marketer’s Summertime Bucket List (1)

During my years as a higher education marketer, summer always felt like a small reprieve. Campus was quieter, parking was more plentiful and coffee shop lines were shorter. It was also that magical time of year that I had just a little more time to plan content for the academic year starting in August. Or so I thought. In actuality, summer always went by faster than I anticipated. 

While I can’t slow down time for you, I have put together the following short list of things you can do right now to reflect on your higher education content marketing efforts more strategically, and capture specific, effective ideas for the semesters ahead.

#1. Meet your audiences where they’re at. Literally.

Do you know your target audiences? Like, really know them? According to Content Marketing Institute’s 2021 B2C trend report, only 26% of B2C marketers increased time spent talking with their customers last year, and only 18% revisited their customer personas. 

Higher education is unique in that marketing teams are usually surrounded by the people for whom they are developing content – students and alumni for starters. You can gain a distinct competitive advantage by dedicating more time to directly interacting with your audiences and those who are closest to them, in order to discover what they truly value.

Talk with the people who get direct feedback every day.

While the majority of students take a summer break, staff work year-round. Summer is a good time to invite other departments to participate in your content planning and creation process. One of the most insightful practices you can do is to host discovery sessions between members of your marketing team and others who provide services to your audiences. This could include colleagues from recruitment, student services, academic program directors, career services, or alumni relations.

Prepare a list of questions about your target audience that would allow you to gain additional insights about them. Try to understand them from the point of view of another team. Ask questions like “What are the most frequent questions that you get asked?”, “What do students/alumni express to you as their biggest frustrations?”, “What information seems to be the most helpful to them?”. 

With each conversation, you will gain a better understanding of how your marketing content can support your audiences throughout their journey at your college or university. 

Attend events

In addition to collecting organizational insights, it is also helpful to get firsthand knowledge of audience interactions. While summer is not quite as busy, it is likely there will be institutional events that you can attend such as:

  • Career events
  • Commencement
  • Recruitment and alumni events 
  • New student orientations 

Events like these provide a great opportunity for you to directly observe attitudes, motivations and pain points. Are they hesitant about anything? What do they seem most excited about? 

Taking the time to understand your audience’s experiences first hand will allow you to create engaging content for them in a more meaningful and personalized way.

Audit a summer class

This is a great option to consider if you are seeking a deeper understanding about an audience for a specific program offering. Immersing yourself in their same learning experience will allow you to more authentically communicate that to future students.

Compare notes and document what you’ve learned

Invite multiple members of your content team to take part in these sessions and events as well. For instance, consider writers, designers, social media managers, media specialists, etc. After you’ve all had a chance to attend a few gatherings, regroup to reflect on what everyone learned. You can then utilize the insights gained through this process to build out customer journey maps for each of your target audiences. 

#2. Give existing content a new spin

Before you start brainstorming 100 new ideas to add to your content plan, take time to consider how to repurpose and atomize  work you’ve previously published.

Start by reviewing your digital analytics. What content has the most engagement from each of your channels (website, blog, social media, etc.)? Are there ways you can repackage this top-performing content to utilize it in a new way?

Then look through your content library. Do you have existing “large content” pieces that address your audience’s needs? Can it be broken down into bite-size nuggets? Look back on things like event recordings, research reports or long-form blog posts to name a few. 

At Convince & Convert, we recommend that for every large piece of content you have, you should try to create eight smaller pieces as well. This is not a hard and fast rule – you can adapt as it makes sense for your needs. Even if you only get three additional pieces of content from the original, you’ve still tripled the outcome.

Atomization Example for Higher Ed Content Marketing

Large Content Atomization

Convince & Convert recommends atomizing your large content into eight smaller assets.

For example, let’s say your institution hosted a webinar for prospective students to communicate important information about how to enroll. If you have a recording and the slides from that event, you could use those assets to create several mini items. These can be used for future lead generation and lead nurturing campaigns. This could include:

  1. A new web page showcasing the event recording for on-demand viewing
  2. Social media graphics featuring pull-quotes from the event
  3. Short video clips featuring event speakers
  4. Infographics on key concepts covered in the event (how to apply is a great one for complicated admissions processes)
  5. Animated videos that answer questions asked at the event
  6. Interactive quizzes featuring enrollment questions for web or social 
  7. Digital guides that provide more detailed information on topics from the event
  8. Downloadable checklists for new students to reference

Breaking down long-form content into multiple pieces will allow you to have a variety of materials to engage your audience throughout their journey, in whatever format they prefer. This will keep key messages consistent. 

#3. Take your vacation time…and admit when you need help early on. 

Recent research by Salesforce.org found that a staggering 73% of higher education staff find it challenging to maintain their wellbeing. Also, 76% find it challenging to maintain work/life balance. If you want to have fresh content, you need to find the time to refresh yourself first. Use vacation time this summer and step away from the computer. Taking time to recharge yourself physically, mentally and emotionally will do wonders for finding inspiration for that next big creative idea. 

Once you’ve taken time for yourself right now…then you can start planning how to help your future self, too. 

As you start to plan out your content for the months ahead, purposefully try to spot areas where you may need extra support. Think honestly about your team’s priorities and capabilities. Plan to address any pinch points from the beginning. This will allow you to make a business case for the budget or personnel you need to ensure success early on. It’s best to identify before resources are already allocated or your time is maxed out in the busy fall semester. 

73% of higher education staff find it challenging to maintain their wellbeing. Also, 76% find it challenging to maintain work/life balance.
Click To Tweet

Higher Education Content Marketing Considerations:

  • Interdepartmental teams. Depending on the size of your college or university, sometimes there are multiple content teams, or colleagues with similar skill sets, who can offer support when you need it. If budget is a concern, try forming a collaborative team of colleagues from different departments who are interested in planning and creating content. I have had a great experience doing this with members from recruitment, IT and instructional design, for example.
  • Interns and student workers. While more affordable than hiring a full-time employee, this route can also take quite a bit of time depending on your institution’s hiring policies. However, giving enthusiastic and talented students an opportunity to gain experience is always worth consideration and is something that can also be built-in to your long-term processes.
  • Pre-approved contracts. If you want to outsource work to a third party, start by reviewing your institution’s policy for hiring on a contract. They most likely have a list of pre-approved vendors on file, which could be your quickest route for urgent needs.
  • Agencies. If you’re looking to outsource entire projects from A-Z, a marketing agency may be what you need. Typically an agency will be at a higher price point. However, in return you will get more service in multiple areas, including project management, writing and design.
  • Recruitment firms. If you need to find a freelancer with a unique talent or for a short-term project, recruitment firms can utilize their deep networks to quickly find high-quality candidates without the need for you to sort through countless resumes for a perfect match.
  • Self-service platforms. Sometimes that extra talent you need can be found at the click of a button. Sites like Upwork and Fivrr allow you to easily match your needs to independent contractors. 

If at any time along the way you find that you need some expert support for your higher education content marketing needs, reach out to us for direct assistance or a custom recommendation.

The post The Higher Education Content Marketer’s Summertime Bucket List appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

/by

6 Types of Social Media Ads That Drive Solid Results

6 Types of <a href=Social Media Ads That Drive Solid Results" width="1024" height="512" srcset="https://www.convinceandconvert.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/6-Types-of-Social-Media-Ads-That-Drive-Solid-Results-1024x512.png 1024w, https://www.convinceandconvert.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/6-Types-of-Social-Media-Ads-That-Drive-Solid-Results-300x150.png 300w, https://www.convinceandconvert.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/6-Types-of-Social-Media-Ads-That-Drive-Solid-Results-768x384.png 768w, https://www.convinceandconvert.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/6-Types-of-Social-Media-Ads-That-Drive-Solid-Results-1536x768.png 1536w, https://www.convinceandconvert.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/6-Types-of-Social-Media-Ads-That-Drive-Solid-Results-1000x500.png 1000w, https://www.convinceandconvert.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/6-Types-of-Social-Media-Ads-That-Drive-Solid-Results-100x50.png 100w, https://www.convinceandconvert.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/6-Types-of-Social-Media-Ads-That-Drive-Solid-Results-150x75.png 150w, https://www.convinceandconvert.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/6-Types-of-Social-Media-Ads-That-Drive-Solid-Results.png 1600w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />

We can all agree that an organic social media strategy is great, mainly for its cost advantage. But it also takes a lot of manpower and time to get your content in front of the right eyes.

Investing in different types of social media ads guarantees faster results. 

However, as the field of digital marketing grows, choosing the best paid social media ad for your business can get confusing.

In this post, you’ll find 6 different types of social media ads you should consider investing in to build brand awareness and increase conversions.

6 Types of Social Media Ads for Your Business

Here are 6 types of social media ads that you can choose from, for your next advertising campaign.

1. Image Ads

These are perhaps the most common types of social media ads.

Almost every social media platform supports image ads. You’ll find them on news feeds, sidebars, and banners.

They’re most powerful on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest, where images are the prevalent form of content.

Image ads immediately grab the audience’s attention, which makes them great for creating awareness about your brand or a product. You can include a link to a specific page on your website on the ad or a call-to-action like “Shop Now”.

To get the most out of these types of social media ads:

  • Use high-quality images
  • Keep text on the image to a minimum
  • Try to match the style of content found in your posts, as it helps the audience associate the ad with your business faster

Here is an example of an image ad by Bluehost on Facebook.

Blue Host Image Ad Example

Image via Facebook

 

2. Video Ads

Video is a powerful marketing tool. A study by Wyzowl shows it’s used by 86% of businesses.

86% of businesses use video content

Image via Wyzowl

The same study shows that people watch an average of 19 hours of video content every week.

This makes video ads one of the most effective types of social media ads.

Every major social media platform supports video ads. They are visually captivating, which makes them particularly effective in gaining the attention of your target audience. Apart from this, with the right SEO tactics, your video ads can also rank in the search engine results, leading to greater engagement and views.

Here is an example of an in-feed video ad on Facebook.

Wise in-feed video ad example

Image via Facebook

Social Media Video Specs Guide

For Image ads, it’s important to get the dimensions of the videos you publish right. It’ll provide a more pleasant viewing experience for your audience, which maximizes the total views, reach, and engagement.

An in-feed Facebook video ad, for instance, should have a resolution of 1080×1080 and an aspect ratio that’s between 9:16 to 16:9.

For Instagram, you can use:

  • 16:9 with your landscape video ads
  • 1:1 with square video ads
  • 4:5 with vertical videos

For TikTok in-feed ads, a resolution of 540×960, 640×64, or 960×540 is best. The aspect ratio can be 9:16, 1:1, or 16:9.

Twitter video ad resolution can be 1280×720 for landscape video ads, 720×1280 for portrait ads, and 720×720 for square ads. The recommended aspect ratio is 16:9 for landscape or portrait video ads and 1:1 for square video ads.

For LinkedIn video ads:

  • A landscape video should have minimum dimensions of 640 x 360 and a maximum of 1920 x 1080. The aspect ratio should be 16:9.
  • Square videos should be a minimum of 360 x 360 and a maximum of 1920 x 1920 with an aspect ratio of 1:1.
  • Vertical video ads should be a minimum of 360 x 640, a maximum of 1080 x 1920, and an aspect ratio of 9:16.

Snapchat video ads should be 1080 x 1920 with an aspect ratio of 9:16.

YouTube video ads can have a minimum dimension of 426 x 240 and a maximum of 3840 x 2160. The recommended aspect ratio is 16:9.

Ensure that your video ads can be understood without the sound on for two reasons:

  1. Most mobile users watch videos on social media with sound off.
  2. When a user has enabled auto-play, most videos will autoplay with the sound off.

Make sure that your video has a single powerful message. Short videos, preferably under one minute, tend to perform better. However, don’t be afraid to make it a little longer to convey a compelling message. 

It’s best to leave this to a social media manager who’s a strategic communications expert as they’d know exactly how long a particular video should be to become compelling enough.

3. Carousel Ads

Carouselsocial media ads let you show multiple marketing videos and/or images in one ad. Each video or image can have a headline, description, link, and CTA.

These types of social media ads are most popular on Facebook and Instagram.

You can use carousel ads to advertise real estate, show different features of a product, tell a brand story, show behind-the-scenes shots, or any other product or promotion that fits.

Here is an example of a carousel ad showcasing the different services a school provides.

Moringa School carousel ad example

Image via Facebook

Facebook even supports an optimization feature where your best-performing carousels are displayed first. But if the cards have to follow a sequence to tell a story, opt out of this feature.

To use these types of social media ads effectively, ensure the images or ads you use in your carousel are visually similar to maintain consistency. Tie your images or videos to a landing page to generate leads.

4. Stories Ads

Story ads are  supported on Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook. These allow you to advertise your products or services in between users’ Stories.

Here’s an example.

Stories ad example

Image via Facebook

The short duration of Stories makes these types of social media ads ideal for time-sensitive promotions. Stories have higher visibility as they are at the top of users’ feeds, which makes them great for building awareness.

An Instagram and Facebook Stories ad can be:

  • A video that plays for 15 seconds
  • A photo that plays for 5 seconds
  • A carousel that plays separate content, such as an image and video, within one ad

With Snapchat’s Story ads, you can reach your target audience in between content or on Snapchat’s Discover section using a branded tile. For the Discover section, you can have a collection of up to 20 images or videos.

To get the most out of these types of social media ads, make your Stories ads as interactive as possible.

Get a creator account. It’ll give you growth insights into your profile and help you learn  the most effective advertising message for your Stories ads.

5. Message Ads

While most types of social media ads appear in a user’s news feed or Stories, Facebook Messenger ads and LinkedIn Sponsored InMail appear as a message.

Facebook Messenger ads appear in a user’s Chats tab in between their conversations. Here’s how that looks.

Facebook Messenger ad chat example

Image via Facebook

 

Interested users can tap on the ad and carry out an automated conversation with your brand. Or the message can redirect them to your product or service pages.

How Facebook Messenger Ad can redirect to Page

Image via Facebook

 

The best part about using the Messenger app is that you can restart conversations with warm leads that have turned cold or customers who’ve messaged your business in the past.

LinkedIn Sponsored InMail also lets you advertise through messages. But in this case, it goes to the users’ LinkedIn inboxes.

Here is an example.

LinkedIn Sponsored InMail example

Image via LinkedIn

Keep your messages simple and direct to get the most out of these types of social media ads.

But how do you find the leads who need to be messaged?

You can leverage a CRM to track your leads to determine which ones need to be targeted through these ads. Typically, they’re ones who haven’t been engaging much recently.

6. Collection Ads

Collection ads are among the best types of social media ads.

These ads include a cover photo or video, followed by smaller product images that show the details of your products’ or services’ pricing and features.

It’s a form of a storefront that allows your target audience to buy your products without leaving the social media platform. These ads nurture the users’ interest in your brand.

These types of social media ads are highly effective on Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat.

You can link each image to a separate URL.

Here is an illustration of how a collection ad appears on Instagram.

Instagram Collection ad example

Image via Facebook

Ensure your collection ad provides an immersive and rich visual experience.

To know which types of ads are most suitable for your business, you need to generate social media reporting and hone in for better results.

Ready to Try Different Types of Social Media Ads?

Of course, not all 6 types of social media ads will be suitable for your business. Research your audience and choose the ones that you think will resonate with them. 

Measure the performance of the ads to figure out the type that helps you meet your campaign objective and don’t be afraid to experiment.

The post 6 Types of Social Media Ads That Drive Solid Results appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

Did you miss our previous article...
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/?p=618

/by

How to Conduct a Social Media Audit in Just Three Steps

How to Conduct a Social Media Audit in Just Three Steps

A quick Google search returns 2 billion results for “social media audit.” 

Social Media Audit Google keyword searchBut no matter how many headlines promise to help you do it effectively, there’s really no such thing as an effective social media strategy if you don’t tie it to your audience. 

In this article, we’ll show you three steps you can take to audit your social media strategy and create one that better reflects your customers’ needs.

Define the status quo. 

This first step is to go back to the early days of your business and revisit your core objectives. The point of this is to see how your current social media strategy stacks up to your original goals. Basically, it’ll show you if you’re in the status quo or in a gradual dynamic.

Here is how to do it:

  • Write down your primary goals and ask yourself how your current strategy is helping you achieve those goals. By dint of following trends and benchmarks, companies often forget to align their social media efforts with their core objectives. 

For example, a company’s goal may be to engage with its audience on Twitter. But because the latest studies credit Pinterest and the importance of being present there, that company might decide to start being active on that platform. Without even wondering, “Does my audience use Pinterest?” “Do I have the resources to do both Pinterest and Twitter?”

  • Make a list of your competitors and ask yourself if your current social media strategy is similar to theirs. Every industry has it’s quirks, and every audience has its standards. Chances are, your competitors have a strategy that aligns with these standards, and this is your chance to see how your strategy measures up. 

The idea is not to copy your competitors but to have a strategy that aligns with theirs. For example, if you are in the fast-food industry, you should have a social media strategy similar to that of Burger King or McDonalds, not Boeing.

  • Compare your strategy from 3 years ago to your current one. Have you noticed any progress? What worked and what didn’t? What can you improve and what part of the strategy should you abandon?
  • Ask yourself “where does my brand fit in the market/industry?” If you’re a startup or have a new product, your strategy should be focused on how to generate awareness. On the other hand, if your brand/product is older, the ideal strategy might be a brand activation campaign. 

For example, when Starbucks’ reputation was suffering, Howard Schultz returned to restore consumer trust in the brand by launching “My Starbucks Idea” to gather feedback and re-engage customers.

At the end of this first step, you may have enough information to:

  1. Understand what is wrong with your positioning.
  2. Locate the misalignment between your strategy and overall brand objectives
  3. Have a clear understanding of the part of your strategy you need to get rid of.

The next step is to talk to your customers and prospects to see how you can best serve them.

Listen to your target audience.

According to an IBM study, 4 out of 5 consumers say that brands do not know them as individuals. That means most brands fail to give their audience what they want because they’re not listening to them.

Here’s how listening to your customers can help you build a solid social media strategy.

  • It tells you who your customers really are.
  • It gives you an overview of what your audience thinks of your brand.
  • It gives you insights into what your audience’s pain points are. 
  • It tells you where your audience hangs out online

The first step in your social listening is to determine what your audience thinks about your brand. Go to the social media platform of your choice and use the search bar to identify where your brand has been mentioned and what has been said about it. Here’s an example from Twitter.

Twitter brand mentions

You can repeat this for all other existing social media platforms. It allows you to know what your audience thinks of your brands, and based on this information, you can develop a more tailored strategy for your customers.

For example, Starbucks may decide to launch a campaign in which it rewards customers who share their positive feelings about the brand on social media. Starbucks can then comment on each of these posts and congratulate users for earning [insert rewards]. 

Campaigns like this can change people’s perception of a brand and attract new customers. The next step is to talk to existing customers and ask them questions about their pain points in using your service or product. This provides insight into how to be most helpful to your audience on social media. 

For example, Adobe realized that most of their users have trouble using their products. So they created a Twitter account to help users solve their problems.

Adobe Care

Another way to listen to your audience is to conduct a survey to find out their age. You can do this in a creative way. 

Instead of asking them “how old are you?”, run a survey on Twitter and ask them:  

“Who are you?

a: Murphy McFly (Back to the Future)

b: Neo (Matrix)”

By looking at the survey results, you can determine which generation most of your audience members are from. Based on that, you could tailor your social media strategy to reflect their generation. 

This insight can also help you determine which social media platforms you need to double down on, so you can tailor your social media strategy to reflect the generation of your audience. 

For example, Millennials seem to use Facebook a lot while Generation Z is on TikTok and Snapchat. 

Revise your social media KPIs.

This is the last part of your social media audit. It is where you use the insights gathered above to set goals and key performance indicators to measure your progress. 

Remember, social media is not just about marketing. Social media can also have an impact on broader business objectives. 

Identify social integration opportunities beyond marketing such as social media interactions that impact the sales force, customer service functions, R&D and HR department recruitment, and employee policies and engagement. Social media strategy may be led by the marketing team, but the company’s social media efforts are too important to be left to marketing alone.

— Keith A. Quesenberry, author of the book “Social Media Strategy: Marketing and Advertising in the Consumer Revolution.”

So, depending on the department affected by your social media strategy, you may need to define the KPIs accordingly. For example, if it’s the marketing department, the ideal KPIs might be to increase brand mentions by 7% or increase audience engagement by 17%. 

It’s time to audit your social media strategy!

There you have it, the essentials to conduct your social media audit. Here are some steps to follow.

  • Talk to your customers and figure out what their pain points are.
  • Find out what people are saying about you on social media.
  • Don’t use a platform just because the trends say you should use it. Instead, find out where your target customers are and double down on that platform.
  • Watch your competitors and emulate the things they do well. 

 

The post How to Conduct a Social Media Audit in Just Three Steps appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

/by

Take A Social Media Review from Audit to Action

The social media landscape has changed dramatically since 2020 began. If you aren’t working from a current strategy, you have no strategy at all. That’s why we recommend auditing your social media programs annually. 

If you’re just getting started with a social media review, here’s my (free) course on completing competitive audit and a C&C primer on the best tools to use to conduct an audit. 

A key part of rethinking a social media strategy is to evaluate which social media channels are the best fit for your business with their different strengths and weaknesses. It is important that you understand how each channel can be used as an effective tool for marketing, customer service, and communication. There are many factors that need to be taken into consideration before you can decide which channel will work best for your company.

There are three things that you should know before you create a channel-driven social playbook: your audience, the best way to engage them, and the purpose of each social channel. Articulating these will help to work out how to support a social strategy by detailing what type of posts to publish, how often you need to post, and what metrics will show your progress. 

Is Your Audience Also Your Followers?

The first step in this process is being clear on the audiences targeted by using social media. 

Creating a relationship between brand and follower requires significant effort from both sides. A follower must opt-in to “Follow” and then seek out or actively engage on a brand’s content in their feed. The brand must ensure content is relevant to the follower and provides enough value to help them move forward in a relationship. 

When we conduct social media audits for clients, there is always an “a-ha” or discrepancy between who the brand thinks is following them on social media, and what the audience demographics and psychographics tell us about who is truly among the followers. If you haven’t looked closely at follower insights by channel, be sure that is part of your next review. 

Think you know your followers? Then you should be able to answer these five questions about the key target audiences you are trying to reach on social media. 

  • WHAT kind of content do they expect? 
  • WHERE are they participating most often?
  • WHEN are they most active? 
  • WHY are they motivated to follow and engage with your business? 

After considering these questions, you’ll be better equipped to build out the tactical steps to reach these audiences and see positive results on each channel. 

Action step: Create a matrix that lists your priority audiences down the side and the social channels in your mix along the top. For each audience, identify which channels they’re most likely to be active and engaged with brands on. Review the matrix to determine what the correlation is between where your audience is online and the channels that are most important to you. 

Consider Your Social Channel Selection

Social media channels are as diverse as global cities and cultures – none are exactly alike. Spend time in each channel and take in the culture of the channels before (re)creating your strategy. This includes understanding the audience’s intent and expectations. What type of content will resonate with what they are looking for – and drive engagement that matches your business goals? 

It’s fine to be on every social media channel. It’s also fine to be more selective, and only activate where you and your audience are consistently present. 

Ask these questions of each social media channel during your social media review to determine if it belongs in your strategy going forward:  

  • Is your target audience here?
  • Does the content you are creating match with the channel’s preferred format(s)? 
  • How much time per day can your team participate beyond posting to engage with audience replies and the accounts you follow? 
  • Is there a budget and resources for paid amplification to support this channel?
  • What results are most valuable to achieve from this audience? 

Action Step: Prioritize social media channels for your brand in a HIGH, MEDIUM and LOW effort. Then, identify any emerging channels to begin experimenting with, and those that can be decommissioned to free up resources.  

Writing Your Social Media Playbook

The social media playbook is the guide on how to use social media channels to reach business goals and engagement targets. The playbook should be rewritten periodically in order to align with changes to marketing campaigns, target audiences, internal resources, and outcomes.

What goes into the Playbook? A good playbook is derived from, but doesn’t replace, your strategic approach to using social media in support of marketing and communications activities. A playbook explains the tactical support for your social media strategy. It should have specific direction on the channel mix and how each channel individually supports business goals with a specific KPI. The playbook should be concise, easy to understand, and flexible enough to be updated throughout the year. 

  1. Write (or rewrite) your playbook to align with the audience targeting and channel considerations done in the aforementioned steps. When making a big departure from what historically has been done on social, by potentially deprioritizing a channel or focusing efforts on an emerging channel, it’s important to “show the work” for how this reprioritization will look going forward.  
  2. Detail a game plan for each channel starting with the core content that anchors the brand’s presence. Core content aligns with the editorial or content marketing plan, and should address multiple personas or journey stages. It is important to define specifically what content supports each channel. Identify what content pillars are prioritized, what content types will be used, and how to support the ideal frequency by curating and sharing user-generated content.  
  3. Give direction on the amount of time spent for engagement by the brand on each channel, and best times of day to be active (based on the time zone of your audience). It’s important to remember that social media isn’t just another online platform for publishing content. It’s more of a conversation between you and your followers. This means that you should be actively engaging in conversations on social media as much as possible, even if there isn’t new content to publish every day. 
  4. Select specific KPIs that will identify the health of each social channel and how it contributes to overall business goals. If experimenting with TikTok is done to build awareness with a different audience, the KPIs must reflect that it’s a top-of-the-funnel activity. Compare that to Pinterest, which has a more direct aim to bring users back to a website–so measuring referral traffic is a better KPI than pin impressions. Include data from your social media audit to benchmark current results and set goals for increases in your KPIs.  

Action Step: Write a channel game plan in the Playbook for each social channel prioritized in your mix. Be sure to include the target audience(s), content frequency and types, hashtags and emoji to use in posts, and how to measure outcomes. 

Convince & Convert Social Channel Game Plan

Download our free social channel game plan template here.

Final Thoughts For Your Social Media Review

Conducting a social media audit is a smart initial step to understanding the strengths, weaknesses and overall health of a social media program. Use your social media review to identify what is working, what needs to change and where fine tuning must occur. How the data and insights are used to rewrite a strategy and playbook is what sets apart the best social media teams. 

The post Take A Social Media Review from Audit to Action appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

/by

7 Things Must Be Included in Your Next Social Media Audit for YouTube

7 Things Must Be Included in Your Next Social Media Audit for YouTube

How do you know that your YouTube channel is performing at its best? Through a YouTube Audit.

But most of the YouTubers and brands on YouTube don’t know how to conduct a YouTube audit. 

Many of them rely on YouTube Analytics, which no doubt is a great source of insights. But it isn’t enough when it comes to evaluating the overall performance of the channel.

And why should you audit your YouTube account? A study says that YouTube is the 5th most used platform by marketers. 

As the viewership has drastically increased in the past couple of years, so has the interest of marketers who want to invest in this platform.

YouTube Audience Gain

Image via Audience Gain

In this article, we will discuss what a YouTube audit is and the top 7 things you should include in your social media audit for YouTube. 

So without further ado – as most YouTubers say in their videos – let’s get started.

What Is a YouTube Audit?

In Layman’s terms, a YouTube audit is a measure of the performance of a YouTube channel. 

Although audits are not the most exciting thing for a YouTube marketer, they are as necessary as optimizing your YouTube videos for more views.

YouTube audits can reveal quick wins that you can utilize for growing your channel. 

Audits also allow you to take a step back from the process of creating the content and have an objective look at what’s working.

Want to know how to conduct a YouTube audit? Keep reading.

Things You Should Include in a YouTube Audit

Now that you know what a YouTube audit is, it’s time to learn the top things you should include while conducting one.

1. Subscribers-to-Views Ratio

Irrespective of the subscriber count you have on your YouTube channel, you need to find out what percentage of your subscribers watch your content. 

Many YouTubers concentrate their focus on increasing their subscriber count, whereas they should be focusing on creating content that connects with their audience and provides value.

The subscribers-to-views ratio can help you understand how well you are performing in terms of catering valuable content to your subscribers.

But, what is a good subscribers-to-views ratio for YouTube?

There is no clear answer to a good subscriber-to-views ratio. A general conception is to aim for a ratio between 0.12 to 0.20.

Here is how you can calculate the subscribers-to-views ratio:

Average views per video ÷ Total number of subscribers

2. Views-to-Engagement Ratio

Another crucial factor of a YouTube audit is finding out which content generates more engagement.

The engagement metrics include likes, dislikes, comments, and shares. 

Engagement is a huge factor for the YouTube algorithm because the platform is all about delivering content that people desire. 

If a video generates likes and comments in a large quantity, it is more likely to be suitable for the intended audience.

Even the dislikes indicate engagement, despite being a negative one. This is because if the audience doesn’t care, they are unlikely to click on any of the engagement options. 

To calculate the view-to-engagement ratio, you need to gather engagement data accumulated in your CRM for sales. 

Go to your YouTube analytics and sum up the counts for Likes, Dislikes, Comments, and Shares to calculate total engagement.

Note that the statistics for engagement parameters can overlap each other. 

Suppose that the user who liked, let’s say, your email hosting tips video might also have commented and shared your video. For this one user, the engagement count will be three.

However, on a broader scale, this does not matter. Here is how you can calculate the views-to-engagement ratio:

Total number of Engagements for a period ÷ Total number of views for the same period

You should calculate the views-to-engagement ratio for every video.

3. Audience Retention

Audience retention is the key success indicator of every YouTube video.

One mistake YouTube marketers make is considering audience retention and watch time as the same. But, they are different metrics. 

Watch time for a particular video is the total duration your viewers watched your video before clicking away. 

In contrast, audience retention indicates how many viewers watched your video till the end. The retention metrics on YouTube also show the average percentage of views by the total audience.

You can put a column for audience retention in your YouTube audit spreadsheet.

4. Traffic Sources

The traffic sources for a YouTube channel can be YouTube search, direct or unknown, suggested videos, external, YouTube advertising, and others.

During your YouTube audit, you need to make sure that you include the parameters that matter to your YouTube marketing strategy.

Suppose you are focusing on improving SEO for several keywords that you’ve researched through Semrush. 

In such a case, considering that you are not advertising on YouTube, you should include YouTube search as the prime traffic source metric in your YouTube audit.

5. Check How Often Your Content Is Suggested

Although Suggested Videos is a part of traffic sources, you should include it in a separate column in your YouTube audit spreadsheet.

Improving traffic via suggested sources is an excellent way of accelerating the growth of your YouTube channel. 

Suppose you have created a couple of videos on online form builders, and these videos are getting more traffic from suggested sources compared to other videos on your channel. If you can replicate their success in other videos, you will get a lot of organic traffic without putting too much effort into promotion.

6. Channel Setup

YouTube marketers often underestimate the importance of auditing the channel setup. 

Once you have a huge YouTube channel with tons of content, you need to start organizing them into categories, playlists, and sections.

Also, check your About section and see what message it has. 

We often forget to update this content, and it remains the same for years, while our brand strategy changes multiple times. 

If the content in your About section doesn’t make sense to your brand, change it right away as per your brand guidelines.

One more aspect of channel setup is the profile picture and the banner image.

During your YouTube audit, have a look at them and see if you need to make a change. 

7. Broken Links

Some of your videos may have been banned by YouTube, or you could have deleted them purposefully. This can result in broken links.

Therefore, while auditing your YouTube channel, check if the links in your video descriptions are valid and live.

You have to do it manually. If you find broken links, replace them with the latest and most relevant videos.

Pro Tip: Remove or Replace Content That Doesn’t Align With Your Branding

Once you have all the above-mentioned information in your YouTube audit, you need to start making amendments to your YouTube channel.

Start by finding out which content is not relevant to your YouTube channel branding.

Our recommendation here is to be careful and think twice before making the judgment to remove any content from your channel.

If you find content that does not suit your brand image, you can remove it. Don’t forget to remove or replace their link from other videos.

Conclusion

YouTube audits can prove to be a cornerstone for your YouTube marketing strategy.

When done right, a YouTube audit can unveil several improvements which lead to greater video engagement and organic traffic.

If you are not a marketer and find it difficult or don’t have experience auditing social media channels, outsource the work to experts who can help you grow your YouTube channel.

Otherwise, long-live DIY.

The post 7 Things Must Be Included in Your Next Social Media Audit for YouTube appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

/by