Category Archives: Content Marketing

10 facts about content marketing people are constantly getting wrong

The good thing is that more and more businesses are understanding and recognising the power of content marketing. The bad news is, most of them don’t really understand what content marketing is and they are constantly running behind quick fixes. The presumed facts about content marketing, if not totally wrong, are not what they should be, and consequently, when business owners and entrepreneurs don’t see any positive results, they get disenchanted and worse, also start discouraging others from pursuing content marketing.

The thing is, if you are barking up the wrong tree is it the fault of the tree or your judgement? Obviously your judgement.

Listed below are 10 facts about content marketing people are constantly getting wrong.

1. Content marketing means improving your SEO

Most of the businesses want to publish lots of content because they want to improve their SEO. Trying to improve your SEO is not a bad thing but if you are using content marketing for this purpose, it’s an overkill. Content marketing is a complete mechanism, a complete process, of getting people to your website and then turning them into your customers and clients. By simply focusing on your SEO you may improve your search engine rankings and hence also increase organic traffic, but if you don’t focus on your branding, if you don’t get recognised for your quality of content and if you don’t target your audience, all your traffic will go waste.

2. Content marketing shouldn’t cost much

By this I don’t mean it should cost more but many business owners presume that since it is just writing, it shouldn’t cost the way other services (web designing, accounting, programming, etc.) cost. Like any other service, writing, producing, publishing and disseminating content is a real activity and people require expertise to carry it out. It takes years of training to consistently create quality content that remains true to your brand identity. Besides, content marketing isn’t always about writing and publishing content, a major part involves promoting your content and responding to user behaviour.

Just in the morning I come across a website selling “well-written” articles for $ 1.25 per article. At the surface it might seem quite enticing. Just imagine the amount of content you can get for $ 1.25 per article. But have you ever considered why such writers are never hired by businesses that actually make money? Even eHow, a company known to have made millions of dollars through AdSense-supported content, was paying or is paying $ 15 per article. And that’s not even “well-written” content as you may come across on many professional websites.

The point is, when you are looking for a serious, committed and professional content marketing service, extremely low cost (for example, $ 1.25 per article) shouldn’t be the only criteria. Dependability, expertise, writing quality and marketing experience should come as a complete package.

3. Content marketing is for big businesses

People are more comfortable with conventional advertising and they are also familiar with the way it works. You advertise and people respond to your advertisements. When it comes to content marketing many small businesses think it’s a fuzzy concept that requires lots of money and involvement. You daily come across questions like “what exactly is content marketing?” But how often do you come across something like “what exactly is advertising?”

Due to lack of awareness many people think that content marketing is for big businesses that can invest lots of money and hire multiple employees to create high-quality content around their brands, publish that content, broadcast it and then generates lots of buzz as well as inbound traffic.

I’m going to contradict myself yes, $ 1.25 per article can work for many businesses looking for lots of product and service descriptions and if these product and service descriptions are well-written and if you can post these product and service descriptions on your social networking websites or even broadcast them to your newsletter subscribers, this is an example of good content marketing.

Just as you can have an ad during the Super Bowl, you can publish pamphlets on your printer and distribute them in your locality; these are both examples of advertising.

Similarly, whether you storm the Internet with a celebrity endorsement or 5 hundred articles and press releases in a week or you consistently publish a single blog post every day and then promote it on Facebook and Twitter these are all different levels and forms of content marketing and hence, whether you want to pursue content marketing or not doesn’t depend on your business size, but on your strategy and your understanding of content marketing.

4. Provided your content is well-written, there is no need to target search engines

Although your rankings primarily depend on the level of competition you face, the quality of your content, the way you have used the language and the phrases, directly impact your SEO. Google’s SEO guidelines clearly state that write content in such a manner that it is good to read, easy to access and stick to the point and if you stick to these guidelines, you automatically improve your search engine rankings. But many content marketers believe that you should totally disregard search engines.

Whether you want to target search engines or not is your own prerogative, but you can get lots of targeted traffic from search engines because millions of people use them to find relevant information. But creating high-quality content for your target audience doesn’t mean you should ignore SEO. You can follow SEO practices while creating high-quality content. I do that on my website and blog and I also do that for my clients I can maintain the balance even while creating keyword-century content.

The problem is not with overly focusing on SEO or totally ignoring it, the problem is with getting carried away. The problem is either focusing on your audience completely or focusing on your SEO, completely. Maintain a balance. Write content for humans but use keywords and key phrases that these humans use on search engines in order to find the information you have published.

5. You cannot predict the success of your content marketing campaign or strategy

Well, using the same logic you cannot even predict the success of conventional advertising. Nobody has been able to create the perfect formula for ensuring the success of conventional advertising. Nonetheless, since it’s being done since time immemorial, people are more trusting towards conventional advertising and a bit cynical towards content marketing.

So, can you predict the success of your content marketing campaign or strategy? This Oracle report (it is a PDF) precisely calculates the ROI of content marketing and how you can definitely make out how much improvement you’re going to experience with your content marketing strategy provided you do all the right things. For example, in the very beginning of the report they write that “per dollar, content marketing produces three times more leads”.

Saying that you cannot predict the success of your content marketing campaign or strategy is akin to saying you cannot predict whether you are going to get more business or not by installing a telephone or by opening a new branch in another locality.

Content marketing is a platform. It’s a communication channel. It’s an engagement mechanism. What sort of business you get is a byproduct of the platform, the communication channel and the engagement mechanism you can establish.

6. Content marketing only means creating lots of fun content for the B2C market

When people approach content marketing from this angle they immediately feel discouraged when they realise that they are either serving the B2B market or their product or service is not “interesting” enough to warrant content marketing success.

Yes, fun stuff does well but only in terms of creating buzz and to an extent also brand awareness but even if there is no fun factor (and who says there cannot be fun factor in serious business?) content marketing can be one of the greatest tools to put your point across and make a presence for yourself.

If you think content marketing is only for a B2C audience, you will be surprised to know how Intel is using content marketing to strengthen its presence. You very well know that Intel is as B2B as it gets. It cannot directly sell its microchips and other hardware products to consumers. But it can certainly encourage consumers to purchase electronics and gadgets that use Intel products. Remember “Intel Inside”? It was a very clever marketing tactic. In fact to promote its content Intel is publishing a complete magazine called iQ.

Although as a small business or even as a medium-sized business there is no use trying to emulate Intel, but the point is, content marketing can be used for every business. The problem is not with content marketing, the problem is that sometimes people don’t understand how to use it and turn it into a formidable inbound marketing tool.

7. Content marketing should deliver fast results like conventional advertising

Frankly, it can, and it cannot. It depends on your market, your content marketing approach and the reaction of your audience. Having said that, remember that content marketing is not a machine or a formula. It’s a platform. It’s a channel. Take the example of a television channel. For a few months every channel has to work without getting advertisements. Then, as its audience builds up it begins to get ad revenue. The same happens with your content marketing. First you need to make a presence. People need to relate you to your content quality. This takes time unless you have got lots of money, like Intel. Even creating and writing quality content takes time.

The problem on the Internet is there is lots of noise and “voice” is rarely heard and when it is heard, since there is already so much noise vying for your attention, you either end up ignoring the voice or soon forget about it. In order to remember the voice, you need to be exposed to it repeatedly, on an ongoing basis. This “voice” is quality content. You need to constantly publish and distribute quality content in order to maintain your place in people’s memory. Again, this takes time but once you have embedded your voice inside people’s minds, you have got them as your customers and clients for life.

8. Promoting content is secondary to publishing content

Going back to the Intel example, its Global Paid Media & Content Strategist Luke Kintigh rightly says that

We have the mantra that for every dollar and hour spent on content production, it has to be matched with a subsequent dollar and hour devoted to amplification. Being agile and quickly acting on early distribution insights is also critical to optimizing recently published content as well as iterating and creating more content that will stick with your audience based on what youre seeing resonate.

A big part of content marketing is, what the phrase so eloquently says, “marketing”. You have got content, and you have got to market it. Marketing your content means making sure that your content reaches the right audience. No matter how great your content is, unless people know about it, unless the content is at a place where it can be found without much fuss, unless people can be brought to your content, unless there is a mechanism that attracts your target audience to your content, you aren’t going to achieve much success in content marketing.

9. Once you have gotten a certain number of blog posts and webpages, your content marketing is done

Content marketing isn’t publishing twenty blog posts or publishing ten webpages or submitting twenty-five articles to article submission directories. Yes, they help you, but in order to show some tangible results, content marketing needs to be an ongoing process. In fact, let us call it a process rather than a “campaign”. Let us call content marketing a part of the business. For example, you need to make phone calls regularly to your prospects. Do you call this exercise “making calls campaign”? No, you do it every day as a business development exercise. The same is the case with content marketing. Quality content writing, production and distribution is an ongoing process.

You may think, “Heck, does it mean ongoing expense?” but this is not the case. Don’t take it as an extra cost, take it as an operational cost, just as you need to pay the office rent, the electricity bill, the telephone bill, the Internet access, remuneration to your employees, etc.

Content marketing is one of the best things to have happened to small business owners because it empowers you to compete with the big guys by being innovative, persistent and quality conscious. The trick is, yes, being persistent for a long time and publishing and distributing content your target audience is looking for.

10 Quantity try and is over quality

Precisely this is the reason why many entrepreneurs and business owners find the idea of hiding content writers charging $ 1.25 per article enticing. You can get tons of content at an extremely cheap rate. Well, the problem is, you also get cheap content, most of it plagiarised and full of grammar and spelling mistakes. Of course there are exceptions. Exceptions are everywhere. And if you want to base your content marketing on exceptions, well, go ahead.

But if you really take your business seriously, don’t compromise on quality.

Using negative storytelling as an effective content marketing tool

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Photo of the dog named Eddie the Terrible

Here is the story of a dog named “Eddie the Terrible” who isn’t for the fainthearted, and this is a good example of negative storytelling as an effective content marketing tool. Who says stories that need to sell something (in this case, selling the idea of adopting this dog) have to be positive and full of praises for what is being promoted? The cute-looking dog that has been put up for adoption isn’t your typical cuddly and sweet dog you would love to run to and squeeze or cuddle with. The description of Eddie begins with

We know, we know. He is adorable. All small and yellow and fluffy. A little bit tubby which makes him seem more softer somehow, like a dog you can trust with your secrets. Don’t be fooled. Yes, he is a great listener. But inside that innocuous adorable blonde package exists tons – indeed, whole square miles – of naughty.

Then the copy goes on with describing how, although till now he has never attacked other dogs, he isn’t quite friendly. He isn’t even friendly with kids so the copy of the ad says that if you want your kids to grow with their toes and fingers intact, you better not adopt Eddie.

2) Want your kids to grow up with a full complement of fingers and toes? Not the dog for you.

Some dogs love kids. We have a bunch of child-lovin’ dogs. Eddie the Terrible, however, is not one of them. Honestly he’s a little whiffy with some adults, too. Not in an eat-them sort of way but in ‘this makes me very nervous’ sort of way. Eddie’s never actually bitten anyone but we’re not saying it could never happen.

What is the writer of the ad trying to achieve by saying so many negative things about the dog that is being put up for adoption?

First of all, all his naughtiness is being cutified. Then, honesty is the best policy when it comes to creating convincing copy. All the peculiarities the dog has have been put in the copy so there is no scope for confusion, misunderstanding and even a libel suit. Just imagine if the dog actually bites and the family with small kids adopts him and then the dog bites off the finger of a toddler. Not only a kid will be maimed for life, but the dog adoption agency will be shut forever for hiding this crucial information.

Nonetheless, if the agency has been able to keep the dog so can someone who knows about his peculiarities. So there must be some family around who would be fine with his misbehaving nature (misbehaving according to us humans, for dogs it might be just OK to act like Eddie). In case you’re worried, a brave couple has adopted Eddie the Terrible.

Photo of the couple that has adopted Eddie the Terrible

Does negative storytelling work as an effective content marketing tool? I don’t think there is anything negative about the whole story. The writer was just being honest in a funny, adorable way. Especially in this case it was very crucial to be honest because adopting such a dog for a family who might think that dogs are all fluffy and cute might be dangerous. You must’ve seen all those dog videos on YouTube where you see dogs being extremely patient with small kids. Such videos can be misleading. Dogs being animals, their behaviour cannot be predicted. So it would be very dangerous to write a honey-coated copy just so that people adopt such a dog. In fact, it is an effective marketing tool in the sense that people will appreciate the fact that the adoption agency is being honest.

So it is not about negative storytelling, it is about being honest. Can this also work if you’re trying to sell a product or a service instead of encouraging people to adopt an unpredictable dog?

Although you shouldn’t focus on the negativities of a product or a service while formulating your content marketing strategy all the time (if there are so many negative things about the product or service, better not sell it, no?), you should be honest about what your product or service can do and what it cannot do. People will really appreciate that. Provided the pricing is right and provided your product or service does exactly what it claims to do, even if there are some problems and even if there are some features missing, you are going to find your customers and clients. Negative storytelling or whatever, make your content honest. Provide the right information to your audience. It will always be appreciated.

Combine content marketing, social media and SEO for inbound marketing

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Inbound marketing is a balanced mix of content marketing, social media marketing and SEO. In fact, these are not standalone activities. Every effective content marketing strategy incorporates social media as well as SEO.

When I work on a client project, this is how I prioritise these three aspects of inbound marketing on the Internet:

Content marketing
Social media marketing
SEO

Although most of my clients contact me to improve their SEO on my priority list it is the last aspect of content writing I pay attention to. Does it mean I don’t think it is important? Of course SEO is important and I would never ignore it. It’s just that, I would prefer SEO to happen automatically rather than making an effort for it. I will explain below how. But first…

Content marketing is the most important aspect of inbound marketing

This is because unless you have quality content and unless you know how to market it and then actually market it, nothing much can be achieved. Inbound marketing means people coming to your website or blog on their own after, either having interacted with you on one of the social media or social networking websites, or having come across your content either on your own website or blog, or somewhere else. But whenever they come across you, they come across you via your content.

And it doesn’t just stop at them coming to your website, in fact, the real action starts when people are on your website. It is on your website that you have to convince them into doing business with you. This is where your content plays the most important part. If your content doesn’t convince them, everything goes to waste. If your content is below par, your social media strategy as well as SEO are going to fail. This is why, at the beginning of your inbound marketing campaign, the first thing you need to take care of is content marketing.

Content marketing automatically takes care of social media and SEO

Yes, for the sake of talking to clients one has to talk about content marketing, social media marketing and SEO as separate plans of action whereas they are not. They are all a part of your inbound marketing strategy fuelled by your content marketing strategy. Content marketing means

Writing/producing high-quality content on your website/blog and elsewhere.
Distributing that content using various channels available to you including social media and social networking websites and email marketing.
Search engine optimizations so that people can easily find your content on search engines for the right keywords and search terms.
Constantly analysing the effect of your content using web analytics tools like Google Analytics.
Tweaking your marketing effort according to the results obtained from the web analytics tools

So why do I say that content marketing automatically takes care of social media and SEO?

Assumption.

Assumption that you are going to take all the right steps. What are these right steps?

You use the right language to write your content – the language used by your prospective customers and clients. If you do that, you are automatically search engine optimising your content and hence, in the process, improving your search engine rankings.
Strategically promote your content on social media and social networking websites. You know that in order to promote your content you need a responsive audience. How do you get a responsive audience? By engaging them with not just high-quality content, but also responding to them whenever they reach out to you. If you do this on an ongoing basis, you are handling your social media well.
You are using the right words at the right places while creating content. If you’re going to address the problems and concerns of your prospective customers and clients you are going to use the appropriate expressions while creating titles. You will also use the keywords and search terms people normally use while trying to find your sort of products and services in your headlines and sub-headlines. If possible, you will also use these search terms and keywords in your bulleted points and the hypertext links.

If you properly take care of your content marketing, you are automatically taking care of the other aspects of content marketing like content writing and content production, content distribution, social media marketing and SEO. All these lead to a solid inbound marketing strategy that can totally transform your conversion rate.

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10 ways to improve your website conversion rate with content marketing

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10 ways to improve website conversion rate with content marketing

Although you may have different content marketing KPIs, eventually everything leads to your website conversion rate – how well your visitors convert into paying customers and clients. A big deception orchestrated by content marketing is that sometimes it generates lots of traffic and people are quite pleased with it. Of course every website or blog needs traffic but you are not actually looking for traffic when you’re running a business website or a business blog, you’re looking for customers and clients. The ultimate aim of your content marketing is to improve and maximize your website conversion rate.

How can you achieve a higher conversion rate? By first getting the right people to your website and then delivering them the right message. There are two sides to your content marketing:

Bringing people to your website
Convincing them into doing business with you

If you can achieve parity in both these sides of your content marketing, you can maximise your conversion rate. Here is what you need to do:

10 ways to use content marketing to improve your website conversion rate

Totally understand your product or service: What are you trying to promote? A lifestyle? A way of doing business? A service that enables people to manage their business accounting from any device that can be connected to the Internet? Unless you totally understand why people would use your product or service, you cannot create and market content to have a big impact on your conversion rate.
Totally understand your target audience: What moves your target audience? What are your prospective customers and clients looking for? What are the problems and what sort of solutions they want and exactly why they want those solutions rather than some other solutions? What sort of platforms they prefer while interacting with each other and while interacting with the brands that provide products and services they use or plan to use? For consuming content what format do they prefer? What sort of language do they use? What sort of thing puts them off and what sort of thing excites them?
Answer as many questions as possible on your website: When it comes to improving your conversion rate there is no scope for confusion. As soon as people come to your website they should immediately know what problem you’re going to solve for them. Even if it is not a particular problem you’re trying to solve, they should be able to know exactly what you are trying to achieve. Are you trying to shock them? Are you trying to make them laugh? Are you trying to educate them? Do you want them to become politically aware? Carefully go through every page you have on your website and make sure that it communicates the central message of your website because you never know through which page people are going to enter your website.
Sound professional through your content: Convey to your visitors that you mean business. Being professional doesn’t mean using a particular language or sounding like a snob. It means that you are trustworthy, that they are not going to regret after giving you their hard earned money and you are going to be around when they face some problem regarding your product or service.
Create your content from the prospective of your customers and clients: Whom are you creating your content for? You are constantly creating content for your prospective customers and clients. If you want to create content for yourself then you can have a personal blog or a website but if you are creating content for your business, you are always creating content your prospective customers and clients can relate to. Your first priority is solving their problems and addressing their concerns. Your content should be their advocate, not yours. Instead of trying to convince them, inform them as much as possible and then let them decide. This is the best way of increasing your website conversion rate with content marketing.
Use web analytics tools to streamline your content: Always creating and marketing content in isolation doesn’t help you much. You need to know what sort of audience your content is attracting and the best way to achieve this is by using some sort of web analytics tools like Google Analytics. A careful observation of Google Analytics will tell you what sort of keywords people are using when they come to your website or blog. If they are using certain keywords this means your content is ranking well for those keywords. How is the impact on your conversion rate? If the traffic is increasing for those particular keywords but your sales are not increasing, there is some disparity going on somewhere and you need to take care of it. Similarly, a social networking tool like Hootsuite can tell you which of your updates get maximum reactions from your friends and followers. Keeping track of your audience behaviour is very important for the success of your content marketing effort.
Build your mailing list: 1000 subscribers of your newsletter can often outperform your 20,000 Twitter followers. No matter how mainstream social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook become and no matter how many million views your YouTube video generates, nothing can compete with a well-managed email marketing campaign. The content that you broadcast through email fares far better than the content that you broadcast through Twitter and Facebook. I’m not talking about retweets and likes, I’m talking about the actual conversion – people buying from you.
Be persistent with content marketing: Your conversion rate won’t experience much improvement if you are not regular with your content marketing efforts. This means you need to generate high-quality content on an ongoing basis without getting impatient. You may have to continuously publish and broadcast content for four-five months before you experience any improvement in your conversion rate.
Don’t spread out your effort unnecessarily: More isn’t always better. Better conversion rate manifests when your approach is focused. Whether you are producing content or distributing it, focus on a particular audience and use particular channels. For example, if you are targeting B2B businesses then it is better to put your energies into creating lots of informative and educational content and then creating a strong, vibrant presence on LinkedIn where most of the professionals look for business opportunities and business partners. It doesn’t make sense to target every social media and social networking channel.
Quality should always triumph over quantity: Having lots of content is always advantageous but it can affect your conversion rate adversely if you just focus on quantity while paying scant regard to quality. People don’t do business with you because there is lots of content on your website and because they were easily able to find you on Google, on LinkedIn or on Twitter, they do business with you when the quality of your content is able to convince them.

Many content writers and content marketers get too bogged down by the production and marketing part, totally bypassing the need of the business to convert well. This is why when I’m offering my content writing and content marketing services I’m not offering them as standalone services, I’m offering better conversion rate, better engagement and possibly, improved search engine rankings.