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Five Signs Your Content Marketing Strategy Needs a Make over

Content is king. But that doesn’t mean that every piece of content is worth its weight in gold.

While you should never publish a piece of content you are not satisfied is well written and connects, educates and inspires your target audience-that doesn’t mean you aren’t going to miss the mark once in a while. However, if your content strategy seems to be consistently falling flat, you need to take a hard look at what is going wrong and find ways to fix it.

Here are some telltale signs you need to overhaul your content marketing strategy:

Lack of traction. Relationship building is an essential part of content marketing and that takes time. However, if your website never gets views and no one is sharing your content, it’s time to make some changes.
Hidden website. While being at the top of search engine result pages is the ultimate goal of every business, slowly climbing up those pages is what tells you that you are moving in the right direction. If you continue to always languish in the same (low) spot, you need to figure out why.
Stagnant social. Are people liking you on Facebook? Retweeting your Tweets? If there isn’t a lot of activity on your social media sites then your posts clearly aren’t doing their job.
Failure to engage. Valuable content means that visitors will stay on your site for longer periods of time. You also will see a lower bounce rate.
Nothing stands out. Again, not every piece of content is going to be a homerun (although it shouldn’t strike out, either) but periodically you should have a piece of content that hits it out of the park. When a piece of content really creates a buzz around your website you are on the right track. If there is never any buzz, it is time to mix things up so that you can create some.

In some cases, a lackluster content marketing strategy will require a major overhaul. In other cases there are simple fixes that will drastically improve things. These include figuring out how to differentiate yourself from the competition or merely doing a better job of promoting your content.

July 28, 2017

Five Ways to Provide a Personalized Customer Experience

Content Marketing

More and more consumers are asking for personalized experiences. After all, in today’s online marketplace, people are asked to give up more personal information. Therefore, it only seems fair that they should expect this information to be used for their benefit.

Unfortunately, many businesses – especially small businesses – are at a loss when it comes to knowing how to provide these types of experiences. Further, the time, money and resources that are required to develop these types of experiences also can seem overwhelming.

The truth is, however, that creating these types of experiences don’t have to be as complicated as you might think. In fact, you may already be doing many of the things that allow you to customize the overall customer experience.

Below are some the easiest and most practical ways to offer your customers and prospects the personalized experiences they are looking for – without expending a great deal of extra time, money and manpower.

Targeted searches. When your customer is searching for something, quality always trumps quantity when it comes to search results. Focus less on volume and more on targeted offers.
Specific content. Again, more doesn’t mean better. Nothing is more impersonal than content that is merely sales copy or copy solely designed to drive a reader to a particular website. Instead, make sure your content connects, educates and inspires. Solving a problem for a customer or prospect is the ultimate personalized experience.
Do your research. If you aren’t conducting market research it is impossible to know what your market wants. And if you don’t know what your target audience wants you can’t give them a personalized experience. Try to hone in on specific segments of your target audience and market to these particular segments separately instead of using one broad marketing message.
Get interactive. Calculators, quizzes and other tools that help you engage with your target audience are more popular than ever. Further, when these tools help an individual determine a product they could use, for example, the personalization factor increases dramatically.
Don’t forget to be human. In many cases, the most effective personalized experiences are just that: person – to – person. Don’t get so caught up in trying to give your target audience the latest in digital technology that you fail to really get to know them on a personal level. After all, the most personalized experiences occur when your customers and prospects feel that you really want to get to know them.

June 27, 2017

Three Ways to Break Through the Cluttered Content Marketplace

Content Marketing

Three Ways to Break Through the Cluttered Content Marketplace. Many businesses are using content marketing to promote their business online. This is no surprise given the many ways these businesses can use content marketing to leverage their brand. From allowing a business to be seen as thought leader in their industry to capturing leads to building brand loyalty, content marketing is the name of the game.

Unfortunately, your business is not the only one that knows this. As a result, your target audience is relentlessly being bombarded with online messages. So how is a business to stand out? What follows are three strategies to help you get noticed and stand out from the crowd.

1. Know your audience. You must do more than just create content. Make no mistake, posting content that doesn’t connect with your target audience is as pointless as not posting any content at all. Think of it this way: Is your content entertaining? Great. But is it entertaining to your specific target audience? It better be or it won’t do a thing for your business. Does your content tell stories that your target audience wants to hear? Does it solve the problems your target audience is experiencing? If the answer to these questions is no, then your content is nothing but clutter your target audience will tune out. What’s worse, your target audience will come to see your business as a nuisance they want to avoid.

2. Think in terms of maximum engagement. Is your content merely consumed by your target audience? If so, it’s not doing its job. Your content must be easily shared but it needs to go a step further. It must be likely to be shared. You can include a million share buttons but if your content is not viewed as something that inspires readers to bring to the attention of others, that content has a very limited shelf-life (never a good thing in the world of content marketing ). You also must make sure your content does not exist in a silo. Repurpose your content so it fits different platforms. This includes everything from blogs to social media to email marketing. Your content’s reach should be far and wide.

3. Beware of content overload. It goes without saying that quality trumps quantity. However, your content needs to be more than just high quality. It must be something your target audience not just wants to read but feels that they have to read. This type of remarkable content not only breaks through the clutter, it is something your readers anxiously wait for because it is that significant and helpful.

Content marketing has proven itself invaluable to businesses competing for attention online. As a result, the stakes are higher than ever to break through the noise that surrounds it.

May 11, 2017

Seven Ways to Come Up with Blog Topics

Content Marketing

Seven Ways to Come Up with Blog Topics. Blogging can do wonders for a business. Driving traffic to its website and converting that traffic into leads are just two important benefits of blogging. Blogging also helps a business become seen as a thought leader in its industry which helps establish trust with current and prospective customers.

While it is easy to see why blogging is so important to a business, blogging itself can be much more difficult. Many times it isn’t the blogging itself that causes issues, rather the ability to come up with blog topics over and over. In order for blogging to successfully promote your business, it must be done on a consistent basis. Unfortunately, coming up with new and fresh ideas can be extremely challenging.

If you feel as if you have hit a wall in terms of blog post topics, rest easy. What follows is a list of ways to spark your creative juices and have you back at the keyboard in no time.

1. Ask questions. These questions don’t have to be profound. Next time you are talking with a client just ask that client what his or her biggest challenge is right now. And customers aren’t the only ones you can get ideas from, either.

2. Interview experts. People love to read interviews with leaders in their industry who have been successful. Interviews are great blogs because you don’t have to come up with the content, the interviewee does that for you.

3. Brainstorm. It seems simple but how many times have you asked your co-workers and sales team to sit with you for a few minutes and just throw out ideas. You might be surprised at how many topics you gain from such meetings. Bring donuts and the room will be packed!

4. Use personal experience. Think of a time when you learned an important lesson from a failure. Or when you stuck with an idea no one else believed in and it paid off. These types of blog posts make for great reading because they personalize the author.

5. Spy on your competitors. What are your biggest competitors writing about? If they are getting a lot of likes on their blog posts see if there is anything you could learn from their methods or topics.

6. Keep up on current events. This is a great way to write timely and creative blog posts. Sporting events are a good example. How about a post on how hiring employees is like preparing for the NBA draft.

7. Take a look back. What were your most popular blog posts? Consider updating those posts or expanding on them. Chances are they will be popular once again.

Blogging can be difficult but is essential to the success of your business. Hopefully the ideas listed above will make the task of blogging a little easier.

April 24, 2017

Seven Simple Ways to Drive Backlinks

Content Marketing

Seven Simple Ways to Drive Backlinks. If you are a small business owner looking to improve your content marketing efforts, driving more backlinks to your website is essential to your success. This can be a difficult task, however, if you aren’t sure how to generate backlinks.

While everyone talks about content marketing and all that it can do for a business, it can be difficult to gain traction-especially in the beginning. What follows are some ways to generate the all-important backlinks necessary to get your content noticed.

1. Guest Post. Writing an article for someone else’s website or blog is one of the simplest ways to drive traffic back to your site. Not only will it drive more traffic to your website, it gets your name out as a thought leader in your industry. Be prepared to return the favor when people ask to publish on your website, however. You also can find guest posting opportunities on Twitter by using Twitter Advanced Search for quality sites that need niche writers.

1. Practice Link Reclamation. Seek out sites that mention you or your brand and make sure that there is a link back to your site.

1. Get Listed. Directories are a great way to build backlinks. Write a unique description of your brand and get it listed in one (or more) of the many free web directories out there.

1. Help a Reporter Out (HARO). When you sign up for HARO, journalists are able to find you if they need a quote for a story.

1. Publish Infographics. Everyone loves visual content. Find out what is trending in your industry and create an infographic and promote it. The more it’s used, the more backlinks you will enjoy.

1. Give Testimonials. We all want customers to give us testimonials but your testimonials are valuable as well when it comes to gaining backlinks. Gather a list of products or services you have used recently and visit their websites to see if they have a testimonials page. If they do, write one to be published.

Entice Bloggers. Exchange goods for reviews. Do a search for bloggers in your industry and reach out to them by asking them to review a product or service you will provide at no charge. This is a win-win fo you and the blogger.

Building backlinks is easier than you might think. The key is to always be reaching out to others to gain important backlinks.

March 29, 2017

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