Category: Marketing

When it comes to engaging with consumers, an effective content strategy is essential.

Producing educational content targeted for specific keywords can help attract more traffic and raise awareness of your brand.

Content about your industry and how your product or services stack up can help persuade your audience to enter your marketing or sales funnels.

Even when dealing with pure conversions, content has a power that can produce leads, improve the customer lifetime value, and increase loyalty.

All of these are possible outcomes of a successful marketing strategy, important data points to measure and benchmark for content marketers in any industry, but one metric stands apart.

The only content marketing metric that matters is the one you’re trying to measure.

The Target Metric

Content marketing is a numbers game. Every piece of content you produce should be tracked and measured according to the metric you’re aiming to benchmark. It takes time to establish this benchmark and understand what works with your content marketing and what doesn’t.

What is the only content marketing metric that matters?

Conversions, obviously.

But what about awareness-content; content for targeting the top of the funnel?

Measuring conversions for that content would be a waste of time. If you’re measuring the success of your content marketing based on conversions, and only conversions, you’re setting yourself up for failure. The conversion metric isn’t the most important.

If you’re measuring the success of your content marketing based on awareness, and only awareness, you’re again doomed to fail.

Awareness fills up the funnel, but you’ll start to watch your bounce rate soar.

The target metric is the most important benchmark for the asset in question. You need to establish a goal for every piece of content you create, and each piece of content you create should have just one goal.

This is your target.

Determining The Target Metric

Set up your metrics carefully, or you could end up damaging your relationship with your audience. You shouldn’t be providing a solution to your audience’s problem through media while backhandedly selling them your solution at the same time. You must be willing to give something away and trust in your consideration content to lead the audience down the funnel.

Above all else, be authentic with your audience. They can sense it.

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Marketing automation has become an important part of marketing strategies in today’s world.

It saves time and can dramatically increase the number of people who end up viewing the marketing materials a business sends out.

Of course, the use of automation is something content marketers must adjust to. The ease and usefulness of automation can easily be negated if marketers don’t utilize it properly.

Here are a few tips to help content marketers utilize automation the right way and get the most out of it:

Add A Personal Touch

Automation is going to be inherently impersonal, and so content marketers have to go out of their way to make sure that’s not the case. The key is in creating content that will benefit the customer. Find a way to speak to them personally instead of it being obvious that the message is automated and going out to a countless number of others. By no means will this be easy, but you have to find a way to relate to the customer and let them know that you are trying to help them and not just waste their time with an automated message.

Start Broad

Early in the automated campaign, don’t get too specific about what your company can do or what it’s trying to accomplish with this marketing campaign. Instead, go broad and create content that mentions challenges that will be faced by a variety of businesses and individuals. This will help you relate to as many people as possible without making it obvious that you’re after their business.

Once you start to get people’s attention by providing content that is appealing and relatable for the masses, then you can start to mention what you bring to the table and what you can offer them. But you should always be concerned about not promoting yourself too soon.

Set Goals

Never set off on a marketing campaign without specific and concrete goals in mind. The last thing you want to do is embark on an automated marketing campaign blind without any sense of why you’re doing it or what you hope to get out of it.

From the beginning, you should have goals in mind, and your content and distribution should reflect those goals, as should any call to action you include in your campaign. You do not want to waste time, content, and money running an automated campaign if it’s not going to help the firm’s long-term and big-picture goals. Make sure you set goals and have a clear idea on how an automated marketing campaign can help you accomplish those goals.

Schedule Things with Precision

Stop if you’ve heard this before, but timing is everything. Whether you’re using email, social media, or any other resource, always schedule things in a way that will make your audience receptive to the material. There are plenty of tools that will allow you to schedule material to go out at any time you choose, so make sure you utilize those tools. It’ll enhance your chances of sending out the right content at the right time, which is one of the main advantages of automated marketing.

Respond to Feedback

You may not want to respond to feedback directly, but always look for feedback and take it into account when making adjustments to your marketing campaign. By looking at third party sites, you can usually gain some insight into how customers are responding to your automated marketing campaign. This information, while it should be taken with a grain of salt, can be invaluable. With it, you can make proper alterations to your content and your marketing strategy to fit your audience.

Don’t Rush Things

Taking your time may be the best advice you can heed during an automated marketing campaign. For starters, there are so many variables with such a large-scale campaign that you can’t find the perfect fit or solution for all of them at one time. You have to think about any automated campaign as a long-term project. Take your time in learning about individuals so that you may have a better understanding with regards to what tactics will be most effective. You may not experience instant success with this strategy, but if you put in the time and effort, it will pay off over the long haul.

Focus on Content not Offers

Don’t let the automation aspect of the campaign distract you from the most important thing of all, which is content. The one thing you need to do in a marketing campaign before you can do anything else is win people over with quality content, and that needs to remain the focus. Don’t just whip up something in a hurry thinking it won’t matter and don’t become too consumed too quickly with making offers and trying to make sales.

Creating useful content is the best way to get people’s attention and get people on board with what you’re selling. No matter what other marketing methods you use, your top focus should always be producing quality content.

 

Shared experiences can produce powerful conversations that have a lasting impression on an audience; a sense of comradery with a group of strangers. They can transform the way people think, influence their buying decisions and change the sentiment of a brand. For marketers, experiential marketing is wonderful. It can feel like capturing lightning in a bottle. You are able to see, up close, the connection your message is creating. But despite all the fuzzy feelings, there is something important missing: the ROI.

TL;DR – Measuring the effectiveness of live event marketing is hard. Use Snapchat.

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Using IFTTT is a great way to automate simple tasks in your digital life. Below, I’ll list the best IFTTT Recipes for Marketers that I’ve found very useful. They are helpful in a variety of ways to expedite marketing tasks, gather information, and take your campaign to the next level.

TL;DR – Its an app that connects your apps.

The “recipes” are the order of operations, telling your apps what do next, and to whom. The best IFTTT recipes for marketers connect apps like Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox and Google Calendar to automate marketing tasks such as posting and data-mining while also improving productivity. Recently, IFTTT introduced three individual apps that make up the core function of its web app.

• Do Button – launch a recipe, activate something
• Do Camera – open camera, take picture, do something with the picture
• Do Note– write a note, upload copy

Now, IFTTT has become a very valuable tool for all do-ers. These recipes help anyone upload a photo or video immediately after taking one, or organize all the tasks piling up on your to-do list. (more…)