Category Archives: Content Marketing

Dos and don’ts of content marketing from The Guardian

Content marketing works for some and doesn’t work for some. The reason lies in particular dos and don’ts that some companies follow and some companies don’t. On the surface level, in terms of the attitude of most of the businesses desiring to use content marketing to promote themselves, there is not much difference between content marketing and email marketing. Spam has been the undoing of email marketing. Lack of analysis and strategy is often the undoing of content marketing. According to a live Q&A conducted by The Guardian here are a few things you should take care of while working on your content marketing strategy. You can use these suggestions as a template or a framework and just like you do with a template or a framework, you need to create something unique that specifically works for your business and your audience.

Define your target audience/market
Create content that helps you stand out from the crowd
Create content that establishes trust
Create content around topics that are highly relevant, targeted and useful
Create a content marketing strategy that helps you compete with big businesses

Let us quickly go through these individual points.

Define your target audience/market

When you are creating and disseminating content, for whom are you doing it? Who are the people who should react to your content publishing and content marketing? Who is your target audience? This is very important to know. If you seriously want to pursue content marketing then it is going to cost you lots of money and you’re going to have to put lots of effort. It’s a full-fledged activity. The result-oriented content marketing isn’t something that you do in your free time. If you apply this logic, your content marketing is never going to work. So take it seriously and when you take it seriously, you need to know who you’re talking to – the sole purpose of publishing content is to strike a dialogue with the people who will someday become your paying customers and clients (or your followers, or your readers, or your listeners). So it is very important to know who those people are.

Create content that helps you stand out from the crowd

The entire Internet is made up of content. Everything you see on your screen is basically content. You are viewing images, you are reading text, you are watching videos, you are browsing Facebook or Twitter timelines, you are going through your WhatsApp messages – whatever you are doing, you are consuming content. With so much content how do people differentiate you? How do they recognise you? This is why you need to stand out. You need to publish content that sets you apart. It is not as difficult as it may seem initially. You just need to develop your voice, your true style, and then stick to it. Think why people would pay attention to your content. What would make your content irresistible? How does it solve people’s problems? How does it deliver what people really want? In order to understand this, understand your target audience (the 1st point) and understand your own business (seriously, there are many entrepreneurs who don’t understand their own business).

Create content that establishes trust

After all it is trust that prompts people to do business with you. If people don’t trust you, how are they going to give you their money or their support? How are they going to support and promote your brand if they don’t have faith in what you say? Remember that even if they are not your paying customers and clients, people in general are going to play a very crucial role in the promotion of your brand in this socially connected world. So whether you intend to sell to them directly or not, gaining their trust is vital for your business. How do you create content that establishes trust?

Post important news that can help people
Create content that can improve people’s lives
Continuously talk to people through your content
Create content according to the feedback that you get from your target audience
Respond to people’s queries
Curate content that people can use to solve their day-to-day problems
Be there when people need to hear from you
Become a part of their daily routine (they look forward to hearing from you)
Publish content in a friendly language

Create content around topics that are highly relevant, targeted and useful

Sometimes, in order to cover practically every keyword that caters to their niche, content marketers publish content relentlessly. They don’t mind if the content is utterly useless. As long as it is getting good search engine rankings and it is getting attention on social media, they’re fine with the content. Such content may get you lots of traffic and even attention from people, it won’t help you improve your ROI. It won’t get you new leads and it won’t get you new sales. In order to have a truly effective content marketing strategy in place, you have to pay attention to relevance, targeting and usefulness. As mentioned above, is your content actually solving a purpose? Now there is a reason I’m using the word “purpose” and not “problem” because not every piece of content needs to solve a problem. It needs to solve a purpose. The purpose can be making people laugh, making people sad (yes, sometimes that’s needed too), jolt them out of their inertia (environmental activism, for example) and yes, solve their problems. In some way, big or small, they should be a “before content” and “after content” manifestation. If your content doesn’t make a difference, it has no reason to exist.

Create a content marketing strategy that helps you compete with big businesses

That is, if you want. Not every small and mid-sized business wants to compete with big businesses – they are quite satisfied with their current disposition. But here what a mean to say is, with content marketing you can easily compete with big businesses even if you are a small business. This is because content marketing democratises the space; how much attention you get on the Internet doesn’t depend on how much content you can publish and distribute, but how much relevant content that actually touches people’s lives you can publish and distribute. The problem with big businesses is that they cannot be flexible quickly due to their bureaucratic structure. For example, if a blog post suddenly needs to be changed, it can be changed for a small business within a few minutes but for a big business, it may take hours if not days. Similarly, it will be easier for a small business owner to directly talk to his or her customers and clients (and audience) compared to a large business.

More than 140 characters on Twitter; how is it going to impact content marketing?

Leave a reply

Content marketing on Twitter with more than 140 characters

Most people I have come across (especially on Twitter) flinch at the thought of people being able to write more than 140 characters on Twitter. In fact, many believe that a big reason why Twitter succeeds is because of its 140-character-limit. If people are allowed to type more than 140 characters, they declare, Twitter will become just another spam-filled platform where long streams of text will clog the timelines and most of this text will make no sense.

The inherent strength of Twitter is of course it’s short messages. The entire format has evolved around this state of brevity. Even in terms of usability, it is easier to quickly scroll through shorter spurts of text rather than long paragraphs. Yes, images and videos are there that often occupy lots of space, but you can disable them in almost every Twitter app that you use on your mobile phone or tablet.

Twitter would like more long form content published on its website just like Facebook and LinkedIn, according to this Re/Code update. The company is working on building a “product” that will allow people to use the social networking website to post more than 140 characters or long form text. It isn’t very clear whether it will be the users of the “product” who will be able to post long form content while the remaining Twitter users go on using 140 characters, or the facility will be available to everybody.

Longer content means people spending more time on the website and more time on the website means greater ad revenue, or at least this is how the conventional logic goes. Up till now, as you know, long form content is published elsewhere – your own website or your own blog, Medium, WordPress.com, Tumblr and even Facebook these days – and the URL with a small textual description is published on Twitter. So basically Twitter is constantly sending traffic away because the whole purpose of publishing your URL on Twitter is to send people to that URL and consequently, leave Twitter. People are not staying on Twitter longer unless they are engaging in some ongoing conversation. If they come across blog posts and articles on Twitter itself, they won’t have to leave the website.

What does an ability to post more than 140 characters on Twitter mean to content marketing?

In simple terms, there will be another platform at your disposal where you can publish content to promote your business. The true purpose of content marketing is to help people while letting people know from where the help is coming. Marketing messages don’t sell. Relevant, useful content does. So the same philosophy will apply on Twitter when you decide to use its ability to publish long form content for content marketing.

But isn’t it a big hassle to post content on different networks? You might already be publishing long form content on LinkedIn, Facebook and Medium? Of course, then there is also your own blog. After all how much content can you publish?

Personally, I wouldn’t suggest my clients to go for all platforms. For B2B marketing, yes, LinkedIn is important and it is worthwhile to invest in content marketing over there and publishing long form articles and blog posts specifically written for LinkedIn. But for Twitter? I’m not very sure. You may call me a power Twitter user but I mostly use it for political, social and cultural interactions, not for business purpose. For business purpose I use my own blog as well as LinkedIn and I believe the same applies to most of my clients.

Not much data is available regarding how much business Twitter exclusively generates for advertisers and marketers.

Also, I’m not saying that for content marketing you can totally disregard Twitter’s ability to publish long form content. It is hard to predict how everything will evolve. But as of now, even if you decide to post longer blog posts and articles exclusively on Twitter, keep in mind that the audience is used to quickly browsing through shorter updates. The sort of attention people pay to tweets might be totally different from the sort of attention they pay to posts on LinkedIn or even Facebook. So start experimenting with first, one paragraph, then a couple of paragraphs and then maybe a few more paragraphs.

I often suggest my clients to publish long form content on their own website and on LinkedIn and then use their other social media profiles to promote that content. You may do the same with Twitter.

It also depends on your audience. For example if you are an author promoting your books then Facebook would be a better platform and you can start building content over there along with on your own website. If you write business-related books then LinkedIn would be a better platform for you and you should focus on creating long form content on LinkedIn. If your experience of having interactions on Twitter tells you that you are going to get good response by publishing long form blog posts and articles on Twitter, then sure, go ahead.

Is iOS9 web analytics blocking update going to affect your content marketing?

Leave a reply

The latest iOS9 update comes with apps that can block not just advertisements but also analytics tools from accessing lots of user behavioural data when using the Safari browser. Content marketing these days depends a lot on analytics like the number of page loads or the pixels where most of the activities take place and the number of clicks coming from different users. Content marketers and business owners use these tools to gauge the efficacy of their content and then make changes accordingly. As content marketing evolves, more and more of it depends on analytics data churned out by tools like Google Analytics, Chartbeat, Inbounce, Optimizely and ClickTale.

All these tools can be blocked with the iOS9 ad blocker apps such as Crystal and Purify. How does this matter?

Although globally, according to this link, the usage of the Safari browser is 12.37%, in the US, it’s share is well over 48.8%. It’s not that everyone who uses Safari is going to block ads and analytics tools, but even if a major chunk does, it can change the way you analyse your content marketing data. This Marketing Land report on the topic explains exactly how it is going to affect the various ad serving and web analytics tools. According to this The Next Web blog post:

These new applications, which are mostly used to block ads, block JavaScript code from loading on websites based on a list that specifies which sources are disallowed.

That means there could be a crisis for marketing tools on the horizon if content blockers gain any sort of traction on iOS. There are hundreds of popular tools that marketing professionals use that could simply cease to be useful if mobile users disappear from their grasp altogether.

Google Analytics is widely used by both large and small companies to measure site traffic and learn more about the type of people visiting — with iOS 9 content blockers, it may become a lot harder to get a real picture of how many visitors are truly browsing a website or learn where they came from.

Optimizely, a tool used by companies to perform so-called ‘A/B testing,’ a method where a percentage of users are selected to see a tweaked version of a site to see if proposed changes perform better, also no longer works when a content blocker is installed.

Without A/B testing tools, companies that leverage such methods to learn about their visitors’ habits will be forced to guess whether a change is working well or not without the hard data that is normally collected before making a tweak.

Publishers like the New York Times, which rely on accurate traffic data to sell advertising may be acutely affected as visitor numbers appear to drop in number, when in reality they’re largely remaining the same.

Is it all doom for content marketing analytics? Not necessarily, according to this Adobe Digital Marketing blog post:

Although this new functionality is making headlines, it is not going to change things overnight. The most important thing to know is that content blockers are off by default. A set of APIs was released with iOS 9 to allow developers to create an ad blocking add-in — there is nothing enabled by default. In this regard, they are actually catching up with other browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer), so the effect should be nominal.

Customers must enable content blocking within Safari’s Settings and then download and use a third-party app that will perform the content blocking for them. As noted in Apple’s pre-release notes, “not all iOS devices are supported that can run iOS 9: only those with 64-bit processors. This excludes the iPhone 4s, 5, and 5c; the iPad 2, 3rd-generation iPad, and 4th-generation iPad; 1st-generation iPad mini; and the 5th-generation iPod touch. All later devices work.”

Data crunching can help you only up till a particular level and after that you have to use your own logic and this is where, it might be actually a good news for experienced content marketing experts who use their own intelligence rather than depending on data analytics tools.

Difference between static, dynamic and interactive content

Leave a reply

Your content marketing strategy often needs to be a steady mix of static, dynamic and interactive content. Yes, content is of different types and every type of content has its own characteristics, and pros and cons. Let’s see how these individual types of content can help you take your content marketing forward.

Static content

Static content never or rarely changes. It remains there on your website for weeks, months and sometimes, even years. It may include your homepage, website pages, eBooks, case studies and white papers, landing pages, videos, PPC campaigns and social media profiles.

Wondering how come videos and social media profiles become static? By static content we don’t mean content that doesn’t move. Although in video things move, but once a video is published, it rarely goes through changes. It is the same story, the same visuals, the same sounds. No matter how many times a person watches your video, it is going to remain the same and eventually, people are going to stop watching it.

Social media/networking profile means the profile, the main page, not the feeds.

Advantages of static content

Easier to create.
Easier to distribute.
Low-cost.
Lets you focus on highly targeted groups for better conversion.

Disadvantages of static content

Has no repeat value, people soon get bored of it and stop consuming it.
Doesn’t get indexed by search engine crawlers repeatedly.
There is one-way communication with no intent to engage the audience.

Dynamic content

Dynamic content is constantly updated according to the latest trends, available information and user input. Some examples of dynamic content are your business blog, the RSS feeds, your social media feeds, email newsletters, personalised website content (the content changes if a person is logged in or if he or she has become your customer), A/B test landing pages and syndicated content.

Advantages of dynamic content

It keeps your visitors interested in what you have to say by continuously serving them latest and updated content.
It gives you higher conversion rate because dynamic content keeps people interested in your website and blog and keeps them coming back to your website repeatedly.
Interesting, relevant and evolving content increases audience loyalty.
Dynamic content is shared often on social media and social networking websites.
It improves your search engine rankings as search engines like Google prefer to visit freshly updated and dynamic content rather than static content that never changes.

Disadvantages of dynamic content

Dynamic content is costly compared to static content.
Requires complete change in marketing outlook as all your content becomes customer-centric from product-centric.
Requires constant analysis because it needs to change and adapt according to its metrics.

Interactive content

As the name suggests, it evolves according to user input. Interactive content is usually not prepared or created by a single person or a single agency and often you have little control over it. Examples of interactive content include your blog comments, people’s comments under your social networking and social media profiles, Facebook updates and tweets, online service, online games and mobile apps, multi-participant webinars, customer reviews and social sharing buttons. Some content marketers also prefer to call it “crowd sourced content”.

Advantages of interactive content

Low-cost and easy to set up, for example the commenting section on your blog. Similarly, once you create your social networking profiles and start interacting with people and increase the engagement level, people begin to participate in various conversations, generating interactive content in the process. After a certain threshold level, it is practically set on autopilot.
Gives you more social credibility. If more people are encouraged (feel encouraged) to spend time generating content for you it means they are serious about your brand or at least have some serious views (whether negative or positive). It is a social proof of your online reputation.
Increases brand loyalty. When people repeatedly interact with you in lieu of generating content for you their sense of loyalty towards your brand increases.

Disadvantages of interactive content

You have little control over the quality of the content.
Trolls can easily take over especially on social media and social networking websites.
Lots of spam can be generated making your entire content marketing counter-productive.
It can become resource-consuming in the long run because you need to closely monitor the quality of interactions.

What should you focus on? Static, dynamic interactive content?

It depends on your target audience. As mentioned above, it should be a heady mix of static, dynamic and interactive content and all types of content should follow a clearly-defined path of evolution. For example, you can begin your online presence with dynamic content which is needed to create your presence and improve your search engine rankings. Once you have generated decent amount of dynamic content, you should focus on increasing the number of pages containing static content for consistent information. Eventually, as you become more famous on the Internet, interactive content begins to manifest. When this happens, you not only have to keep up with the momentum, you also need to monitor the quality of your interactive content.

What do you choose? Digital advertising or content marketing?

Leave a reply

There was a time when digital marketing was avant-garde. People swore by PPC and retargeting. These advertising campaigns use software algorithms to decide, according to your net browsing habits, what sort of advertising you should be exposed to when you visit various websites, even social networking websites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Small bits of information like some ad that you recently clicked or some article that you recently read, or something that you purchased on an e-commerce website, are used to calculate and predict you’re buying pattern.

According to this Bloomberg Business article, such PPC and retargeting campaigns are nothing but click frauds. Below I’m publishing a small portion of the article, you can read the entire article in the original link above.

Increasingly, digital ad viewers aren’t human. A study done last year in conjunction with the Association of National Advertisers embedded billions of digital ads with code designed to determine who or what was seeing them. Eleven percent of display ads and almost a quarter of video ads were “viewed” by software, not people. According to the ANA study, which was conducted by the security firm White Ops and is titled The Bot Baseline: Fraud In Digital Advertising, fake traffic will cost advertisers $6.3 billion this year.

One ad tracked in the study was a video spot for Chrysler that ran last year on Saveur.tv, a site based on the food and travel lifestyle magazine. Only 2 percent of the ad views registered as human, according to a person who was briefed on data provided to the study’s participants. Chrysler, which doesn’t dispute the data, ceased buying ads on the site once it became aware of the “fraudulent activity,” says Eileen Wunderlich, the automaker’s spokeswoman. White Ops, which left out the names of the advertiser and website in its published study, declined to comment. Executives at Bonnier, the publishing company behind Saveur.tv, say they screen every impression and that the White Ops study looked at 5,700 ads, a very small number. They also say there are multiple methods for detecting nonhuman traffic, and that there’s no single standard used by the industry. “We weren’t aware of any problem or complaint. If it had been brought to our attention we would have fixed it,” says Perri Dorset, a Bonnier spokeswoman.

Fake traffic has become a commodity. There’s malware for generating it and brokers who sell it. Some companies pay for it intentionally, some accidentally, and some prefer not to ask where their traffic comes from. It’s given rise to an industry of countermeasures, which inspire counter-countermeasures. “It’s like a game of whack-a-mole,” says Fernando Arriola, vice president for media and integration at ConAgra Foods. Consumers, meanwhile, to the extent they pay attention to targeted ads at all, hate them: The top paid iPhone app on Apple’s App Store is an ad blocker.

The revelations are quite startling considering the fact that even big companies like Google depend on pay per click traffic.

The so-called revolutionary technology that drives digital advertising is turning out to be as ineffective as native advertising like TV and print. At least when it comes to advertising on TV and print it’s not the boards that are watching your ads – people are either watching them or not watching them. On the Internet, the views and clicks can be easily faked. If you are advertising on the Internet, you might be paying for bots clicking your ads. This is sad, but this is also a reality.

So what do you do if you want to promote your business online? It may seem like blowing my own horn, but when it comes to promoting your business online, nothing can beat, at least for the time being, content marketing. You cannot fake high quality content and the response it generates. Of course there is spamming and there are automatic content aggregators but such spurious content generation tactics never work or rarely work. It’s the original, relevant and valuable content that always does the trick.