Crucial Content Marketing Checklist – 10 questions to ask yourself before you publish new content
With strategic content creation, (the creation of content with a specific business goal in mind), it is critical that you take a systematic approach to ensure the quality and clarity of your content. As a result, I’ve put together this list of 10 questions to help ensure that the quality of all content you produce and publish is consistently high. I’m often guilty myself of only having a cursory read over articles before I hit the ‘publish’ button. The excitement of new content always leaves me eager to get it live and share it with people, but haste is not conducive to great quality content.
Rushing to share new content is tempting, but it won’t do you any favours
Even with good attention to detail, proof reading can be difficult, especially when you are the author and as such are highly familiar with the content. When reading the brain makes a number of inferences and educated guesses; instead of reading entire words the brain often picks up a few letter cues and based on those cues will fill in the blanks. This means that when we read, without realising it, we often skip individual letters which makes it difficult to spot the odd typo.
Once you start writing about a subject it’s easy to veer off topic or end up with content that is unbalanced or even a bit waffly. To make sure that your content is as good as it can be, considering the following questions will help. This list serves me well and I now have a quick run through it before I post any new content; I hope you will find it useful too.
10 questions to ask yourself before you publish new content
1. How clear is your messaging?
What is the point of your article? Do you say everything you need to say in a clear and easy to follow way? Do you waffle on and become irrelevant anywhere down the line? Content can often be edited down to improve the focus and clarity of the piece, but don’t strip it down ruthlessly. Bare can be just as unappealing as long waffly content is.
2. Are you using relevant keywords?
Does your content contain useful keywords that reinforce the subject matter of your article? For SEO purposes, ensuring that the keywords people will use to search for your content, are included in the headline and body is important in determining how well your content will rank.
Don’t forget that many commercial blogging platforms also allow you to choose keyword tags and categories for your content to be published under; making effective use of keyword tagging can be an effective way to reach new readers.
3. Have you looked at your content with fresh eyes?
Get a colleague, friend our family member to proof read your content before you post, just to be absolutely certain. Failing that, leave your content for 24 hours before goming back to it gor a final read through. You are much more likely to spot any errors you might have missed whilst writing and during your first few read-throughs.
4. Have you included calls to action?
Do you provide clear, useful calls to action in your content? Actions range from asking people to register for a seminar, picking up the phone and calling your company to find out more or leaving their own comments on the article.
5. Is your headline winning?
A good headline can make or break your content and will seriously determine the levels of engagement you are able to achieve. A good headline needs to be attention grabbing and should clearly summarise the nature of the content.
6. Does your content pop?
It’s a fact that people respond better to posts that are visual. Have you broken up your text by using sub headings, lists, quotes and images? This will ensure you achieve maximum engagement levels.
7. Have you included an Author link?
Link all of your content to you by using the Google+ rel=”author” link. This will ensure that your content stands out in search results and helps increase your credibility and exposure. It’s super easy to implement too so is definitely worth doing.
8. Do your links work?
Have you included useful links in your content? If so, make sure they all work and pay attention to how they open. Taking a reader away from your page might not be a great idea, in which case you might want to open a new window with your link.
Likewise, deep linking through to relevant content on your website, news or blog page plays an important role in SEO. Finally, make sure all pictures included in your post are showing correctly and don’t have broken paths or links.
9. When are you going to publish?
The time of day and actual day of the week that you choose to post content on will help to determine how well it is received.
There are universally accepted best times and days to post content. For example, currently, content posted on a Monday morning is reported to achieve the highest levels of engagement but find what works for your audience.
Try posting on various different days at different times and track what happens to find out which day and time work best for you.
Remember though, you can publish your content at pretty much any time you want and simply hold off promoting until an optimal time/day.
10. How are you going to promote your content?
Once you’ve published your new content you need to tell people about it. It can take Google anything from a few hours to many days before it will pick up and list your new content, so search engines alone should not be relied upon for sending you traffic.
Use all the channels available to you from your clients or companies news page through to social media. Social is the ideal way to promote your article so make sure you use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc to publicise your new content. Digg, Reddit and Stumble Upon can also generate traffic to your blog but in my experience traffic from these sources is prone to suffer from high bounce rates.
I hope these 10 questions prove useful to you and as always, i’d love to hear your thoughts on this post!
Shell Robshaw-Bryan is a marketing consultant at Surefire Media, the Cheshire based web design, eCommerce and marketing company. Shell specialises in organic search, content strategy and social media engagement for both B2C and B2B companies.
If you’d like to find out how Surefire Media can help your business, get in touch!
Design & layout principles behind the perfect landing page
This guide to producing strong landing pages from Formstack.com is great and many of the suggestions on here are also highly suitable for email design too. It might be old, a couple of years old in fact, which is positively ancient by web standards, but all of the points made are still highly relevant today. Given my recent article on email marketing that you can view here, I wanted to share this with you. Follow these design rules and you won’t fail!
Thanks again to Formstack.com for this great article.
What do you think makes a great landing page? Do you disagree with anything? Let us know what you think.
7 email marketing ideas you can use right now!
Email marketing is routinely overlooked by clients, a common reason being that businesses simply don’t know what to do with the customer data they have collected and are short on ideas.
I’m going to cut to the chase in this article and as such am making the assumption that you already have a customer email database, privacy policy in place and email marketing service set up. If this isn’t the case, don’t worry, i’ll be covering the basics of getting started with email marketing very soon, and i’ve also included some links further on in this article to a handful of the best email marketing service providers i’ve used. In another forthcoming article I will also be covering the things you need to take into account when planning and designing an email marketing campaign.
Email marketing can be highly effective no matter what sector you are in, and can work just as well for B2B companies as it does for B2C companies. For consumer focused eCommerce websites, there are few more effective marketing activities and regular email marketing sales promotions and campaigns can help you to increase sales revenue. In my experience, regular weekly email campaigns have the potential to generate many thousands of pounds in sales revenue and what company doesn’t want to achieve that?
“Every eCommerce business should be regularly using email marketing!”
So let’s look at some of the benefits to be had from email marketing, followed by 7 practical ‘do-right-now’ ideas that you can use.
Some of the benefits of email marketing
- Connect directly with your customers allowing you to Inform them about new products, services or news
- It can bring froward a planned purchase
- Email marketing can help to positively influence a buying decision
- It can help to reinforce positive brand perception
- Puts you at the forefront of the customers mind
- By segmenting your email data you can closely target customers with highly relevant content
- Using sales and voucher promotion you can drive sales
As a word of caution, I would say beware of buying in data; I always urge clients to grow their mailing list organically whenever possible. Doing it this way will provide you with a higher success rate; you’ll get fewer unsubscribes and higher open and click through rates. Also, please make sure you are using a reputable service. Don’t whatever you do, attempt to bulk email all of your clients using your regular email account. Not only does a massive CC list look highly unprofessional, but your email service provider will take a very dim view of this, leading to penalties like a total ban.
A few email providers I can recommend are: www.sureshotemail.co.uk, www.constantcontact.com, www.mailchimp.com and www.icontact.com. Whilst there are countless other providers, these 4 are services i’ve used in the past and have been happy with. Ok, on with the good stuff, here are 7 things that you can do right now!
7 email marketing ideas
- Tell your customers about your blog, highlight a recent article and encourage them to follow you on social media
- Send an automatically scheduled courtesy email. Schedule delivery to a customer a few days after they order or make an enquiry, and give them your customer service details and ask if they need any further assistance
- Round up of all of your latest or hottest products and present them in an email. For service companies, tell them about new services you offer
- Send an email to your customers to tell them about your latest reviews or customer testimonials and encourage them to leave a review
- Send out a ‘great reasons to shop with/use us’ email, highlighting your USPs and outlining your excellent customer service
- Send out a voucher that gives free P&P for a limited period, gives a % discount off an order of a certain value or a limited time discount on one of your services
- Weekly or monthly special offers – a selected group of products all reduced in price for a short period of time (eg. a week, or a flash sale for 48 hours)
Remember, whatever you do, make sure you act strategically and understand what it is you want to achieve first before you do anything. Keep your email focused (don’t bombard with too many messages) and ensure you have clear calls to action. Now, go forth and be epic!
Are they insane?! Companies step away from providing customer service via social
I’ve just read an article from marketingpilgrim.com that you can see in full here, The article discusses the fact that some US companies are moving away from providing customer service via social media. An excerpt from the article is reads:
The biggest problem with social media for customer service is that there’s really only one response to a problem – “we’ll look into it.”
Companies can’t do much more than that in public. They can’t solve your outage, refund your money or track a missing package unless the consumer forwards more information through a private channel.
Isn’t a direct response from a company saying “we’ll look into it” better than no response at all? Why do companies have to limit themselves to such a bland platitude? Even if you have very clearly defined customer service channels, customers will still contact you via social media! That’s the beauty of social, you can hold real-time conversations with your customers, obtaining real-time insights into what is working and what isn’t working. Ignoring a customer who Tweets about a missed delivery, service outage or order discrepancy, or a post on Facebook asking for pre-sales advice, just doesn’t make sense.
Always respond to customers no matter what, even if it’s just to apologise and explain you can’t deal with the issue and give them further advice on what to do or how to get the information they need to resolve whatever issue they might have – being helpful, understanding and courteous really isn’t difficult to do.
Simply responding positively to a customer and pointing them in the direction of your official support forum or whatever you might have, is often all it takes to nurture a good customer experience.
It’s true, it may not be possible to resolve Issues there and then, but the difference between good customer service and bad, is that you allow your customers to contact you in a way that suits them. If you aren’t equipped to deal directly with customer service issues via social, it doesn’t matter! Simply responding positively to a customer and pointing them in the direction of your official support forum or whatever you might have, is often all it takes to nurture a good customer experience.
As i’ve previously stated in the article Keep track to avoid social media fail, the key lies in monitoring your social media channels. Get into the habit of checking once in the morning, at lunch time, in the afternoon and in the evening. It takes just a few seconds to check your Facebook wall or you Twitter feed and can mean the difference between a happy customer and an unhappy customer.
Many businesses are scared that customers contacting them to resolve issues via social is a bad reflection of their brand – rubbish! Resolving customer service problems publicly is a very smart move indeed and something I explore in detail in my article Real-time responses via social media are worth the investment!.
Not only do you have the chance to turn a negative experience around for the individual concerned, but you are actively demonstrating to all of your followers/fans that you provide high levels of customer service, which will amplify and drive trust in a way that far exceeds the narrow reach of your usual customer service channels.
Don’t make the mistake of turning your back on providing customer service via social, if anything it’s an area you should be investing in and when putting your social team together, don’t just have someone from marketing do it all, you need someone trained in customer service as part of the team too.
6 Great infographics looking at email and content marketing
I’ve stated before that I love inforgraphics, but that doesn’t mean I think all infographics are great! The key to producing something great is hard facts and data, presented in an attractive and interesting way. Great infographics provide at-a-glance insight and I keep track of all of the best ones I come across over on Pinterest here, but I wanted to put a post together to highlight a few of the best examples that i’ve found useful, I hope you do too!
All infographics link through to their original source.
What is the best time of day to send out email campaigns?
Why content for seo?
How important is email marketing over the Christmas period?
What types of content marketing are you using?
12 Things to do after you’ve written a new blog post
The Anatomy of Content Marketing
Do you have a great marketing or social infographic you’d like to share? Feel free to post your link in the comments section!
In 2013 content is king, but just how good is your content?
In case you hadn’t already noticed, 2013 is all about content. Google’s ever evolving ranking algorithm has finally come of age and is sophisticated enough to be able to rank sites based on the quality and relevance of their content like never before. No longer is content generation a matter of writing for SEO purposes OR for human visitors (or finding a balance of the 2 which was the case for many years). Finally, we have reached a point where the content that search engines like is largely the same as content that your human visitors will like.
The lines between writing good SEO copy for search engines and engaging copy for humans have all but disappeared
The days of keyword stuffing, or writing meaningless content that would only impress search engines are thankfully, a distant memory. Producing great content that engages your visitors is well and truly in. Yup, content is king!
If SEO is at the top of your list of priorities (and lets face it for any business, SEO has got to be up there) then focusing on improving your content should be right at the top of your to-do list, because good content is more important than ever in determining how a website is ranked by Google.
What exactly is content marketing?
Put simply, content marketing is the ability of a business to communicate effectively with existing and potential customers in a meaningful way. Content marketing drives trust in a brand and creates a connection. Having trust and feeling connected to a brand makes a customer more receptive to any subsequent marketing messages, making them more likely to react positively.
A traditional customer encounter might go something like this:
We sell boxes > They are brilliant boxes > Come and buy them from us!
An alternative, more content-focused encounter may go more like this:
Here is a lot of helpful information on boxes > We know a lot about boxes > We understand why you want to buy boxes > We sell brilliant boxes that fit your needs > Come and buy from us!
The second content-focused approach will ultimately convert more customers and builds trust more successfully. This content-focus will prove more successful in the long-run, making it an effective strategic approach to use.
“The single most significant trend is the continued emergence of content marketing as a standalone discipline. Content, in all its shapes and forms, is core to everything we do as marketers.” Econsultancy, Digital Trends for 2013.
Many consumer focused businesses, in particular retailers, will find it relatively easy to strengthen existing content, or to create new content. For others, in particular B2B companies who may not have particularly sexy or interesting products or services, this can be more difficult. As in the example above, just how do you make content interesting for a company who makes boxes?
If you are just getting started, my advice is to start by going over what you currently have. There is no point writing brilliant new content if it will join a whole bunch of mediocre or mis-matched content. Look at what you already have and optimise this before you go any further.
Just how good is your content? Ask yourself the following questions.
- How useful is your existing content – are you giving your customers the information they are looking for?
- Does your content tell a potential new customer everything they need to know in order to make an informed decision?
- Is your content all sales focused and full of blatant marketing?
- Are benefits clearly laid out and are they compelling enough?
- Is the content interesting enough to warrant return visits, bookmarking or sharing?
- Is your content sticky enough to capture and hold peoples attention, increasing their dwell time?
- Is all of your content professionally written?
- Is your content on-brand?
The bottom line is, focusing on the quality of your content will help to ensure that you are able to maintain your online visibility throughout 2013 and It will have a big influence on your ability to gain the competitive edge, especially in terms of keeping existing customers engaged and in reaching new ones.
I’d love to hear from others on this subject; do you agree that the focus should be so heavily on content? Perhaps you are a business owner who can’t see the value and would prefer to invest in other areas instead? How do you approach your content strategy?
Shell Robshaw-Bryan on Google+
Keep track to avoid social media fail
When it comes to social, one of the biggest mistakes any business can make is to blithely go about setting up various social media pages and then forget about them. If you don’t have the resources to enable you to keep track on a daily basis, then you might end up doing more harm than good, achieving exactly the opposite of what you’d planned.
Checking your social media pages every now and again just isn’t enough, and for any page with more than a few hundred Likes or followers, it is critical that you are regularly monitoring interactions.
Facebook Fail will inevitably happen if you don’t monitor your wall regularly
smartcompany.com.au reports on the case of Australian business Just Jeans, who suffered from an imposter posing as an employee who caused havoc on their Facebook wall by being obnoxious and rude to their Facebook fans.
The scam was played out over a period of 12 hours, during which time the imposter engaged with a number of people on the official Facebook page which has over 18,000 likes. Now that’s some high visibility hoax; damaging Just Jeans’ reputation and it illustrates the need for businesses to remain vigilant in monitoring their pages.
One way to avoid this of course, would be to simply disable public posts on your wall – this is not advisable; it’s like advertising your businesses phone number but unplugging the phone. Inviting participation and the engagement that can result, is one of the key elements that makes Facebook such a valuable marketing tool, get rid of this ability for people to interact with you, and you may as well not be on Facebook at all.
Another example of the need to keep track emerged when I visited the Twitter page today for a large, well known national builder here in the UK. I was astonished to see well over 400 followers, but a Tweet and follow count of zero.
Think about it; that’s 400+ customers and potential customers who have sought that page out and followed. 400+ followers, receptive and waiting to be engaged with, but the business is doing nothing. The continued lack of attention will mean that gradually these followers will disengage and simply un-follow. What a wasted opportunity!
Before you get started with social media, have a serious think about how you will manage and maintain your presence on each platform, and make sure you build time in every day, to monitor these channels and join in the conversations that are evolving.
Lack of In-house expertise is one of the most commonly cited reasons among SMEs for either not getting started, or not making the most out of social media, as a result 38% of respondents to a recent Econsultancy.com survey stated they were expecting to out-source their social media activities in 2013.
See the related post Real-time responses via social media are worth the investment!
For more ideas on how to make the most of social media see the post 10 tips to get the most out of social media.
Shell Robshaw-Bryan is a marketing consultant at Surefire Media, the Cheshire based web design, eCommerce and marketing company. Shell specialises in organic search, content strategy and social media engagement for both B2C and B2B companies.
If you’d like to find out how Surefire Media can help your business, get in touch!
What’s so great about infographics?
Infographics are awesome, there, i’ve said it. As a visual person with a background in graphic design I love content that is presented this way. As an absolute geek, I love stats and figures, so it’s natural that inforgraphics should appeal to me as much as they do, but the recent explosion in popularity of Tumblr and Pinterest suggests i’m certainly not alone.
40% of people respond better to visual information than plain text
Our brains are evolving as a direct result of the digital age (for more on this read the fantastic The Shallows by Nicholas Carr) and we now consume Information differently. Our brains are adapting so that we can process vast amounts of data, skimming and picking up on interesting, relevant tidbits. We are getting used to content that is categorised and indexed so we need only concern ourselves with the most useful bits.
With their ability to highlight useful information in bite-size chunks, inforgraphics do exactly this. Often concerned only with a very narrow subject area, answering highly specific questions or displaying key statistics, they are the ideal way in which to both publish and consume data.
For a collection of some great infographics, take a look at my board on Pinterest.com
Sadly, this does not mean that creating infographics is easy nor that they should be your goal whenever blogging or presenting data. However, an attractive and well designed infographic full of relevant and interesting information, can be of benefit for a number of reasons.
Some of the great things about infographics…
- They are the ideal way to publish statistics which might otherwise prove dull or unappealing
- Strong viral potential as they are easily saved and shared
- Ideal for demonstrating in-depth expertise
- They can drive brand awareness
To write and publish a blog article, all you really need to do is to write it. If you want to add some interest you can include images perhaps taken from your existing website or purchased with ease from an image library or if you really want to impress, you can include video content and polls.
Producing an infographic not only takes far longer than writing a simple blog article, but it also takes graphical expertise, requiring much more than a passing familiarity with Photoshop or illustrator. So, whilst infographics have many associated benefits, there are also some down sides.
…and some of the not so great things about infographics
- Graphic design expertise is needed
- They are time-consuming to produce
- Strong content is necessary to warrant the additional investment
- Badly designed or ill thought-out infographics are pointless and look naff
If you could easily illustrate what you want to say in a regular post, then do it that way. Only invest in creating an infographic if your content will benefit from being visually arranged and illustrated, and if so, then make sure you do it beautifully.
I’d love to hear your thoughts and feelings about infographics. Do you like them? How often do you use them yourself? Perhaps you hate them and just think they are a current fad you’re hoping will soon go away?
Stop your social media activity now!
Ok, stopping all of your activity right away may not be entirely necessary, but my point is that you shouldn’t be actively involved in any social media activities for your business, unless you know why you are investing in it, or before you fully understand what you want to achieve from it.
Start by looking at a social network you use and consider the question “What am I doing here?”, if you aren’t quite sure or only have vague notions, take a look at the checklist below. Considering these 6 questions will help you lay the foundations of using social media effectively.
1) Have you defined your objectives?
As previously mentioned, ask yourself what you are doing on Facebook/Twitter/G+ etc. Why are you investing time on any particular network? Understanding the benefits of social media is a good starting point to get you thinking more strategically about what you are doing, so what do you want to achieve?
2) Do you know your target audience and where to find them?
Demographics differ depending on the social network. Just because you have heard lots about Tumbr or Pinterest, it doesn’t mean they are the best place for you to invest your time into. Look at demographics, think about your product, services and customer base and choose the most relevant social networks to invest in. A little bit of initial research will pay dividends and ensure you aren’t focusing your efforts in the wrong direction.
If you aren’t sure, the general rule is to go where the masses are, with over 1 billion people now using Facebook and 500 million Twitter users, these make the safest bets and If you are a B2B company, then you should invest first and foremost in Linkedin.
3) Have you set key performance indicators and can you track them?
Blindly carrying out activities with no understanding of what you want to achieve or the effect they are having is not recommended, but knowing what it is you want to achieve isn’t enough. How will you know you have achieved those things? How do you know you are moving in a positive direction towards your goals?
Likes and followers are obvious choices but don’t reveal the full picture; engagement is important so count comments and shares too so you can look at the reach of your communications. Also make sure you are tracking click throughs to your website, which is after all, a key reason for engaging in social media activity in the first place!
With a little bit of thought you can put metrics in place that can be easily monitored using a combination of freely available tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights. By doing this you will be able to see which activities are working successfully and those activities which are not, allowing you to modify things accordingly.
4) Is your page/profile fully branded?
This may sound really obvious, but it is often overlooked by businesses who are too hasty to get their social activities started. A Twitter account with a stock background image and no profile picture or logo is highly unappealing and you’ll instantly lose your chance to attract a follower if they arrive at your page and find it bereft of all personality.
Make your space on a social network yours – if any of your social media profiles or pages don’t contain an informative introduction to your business and a link through to your website, do it now!
5) Are you promoting social media on your website?
This might sound even more obvious, but it’s been missed by clients i’ve worked with in the past! Ensure you are promoting your social media accounts in your email signatures, on your website, blog and in direct email too. Pretty much wherever you are promoting your website address and contact details, you should be providing links through to your various social networks.
6) Do you have a content plan?
Posting updates for your business is entirely different to posting in your personal accounts. Remember the majority of the content that you post or share needs to be relevant and have a goal; this usually involves spreading brand awareness or providing a specific call to action.
Whatever you do, don’t make all of your posts pushy marketing messages; these are fine, but in moderation. Make sure you are posting engaging, informative and relevant content and you won’t go far wrong.
To read more about balancing your posts and planning your social media content, see the article 10 tips to get the most out of social media.
Shell Robshaw-Bryan is a marketing consultant at Surefire Media, the Cheshire based web design, eCommerce and marketing company. Shell specialises in organic search, content strategy and social media engagement for both B2C and B2B companies.
If you’d like to find out how Surefire Media can help your business, get in touch!
Is Linkedin the only viable social media platform for B2B marketing?
With a visitor-to-lead conversion rate of 2.74% – that’s nearly 3 times higher than Facebook and Twitter (socialmediatoday.com) – it is beyond doubt; Linkedin is absolutely the best social media tool for B2B purposes.
I come from a mainly B2C social marketing background, however, I have done and do use social media for B2B purposes too, just not nearly as much. So the thing i’m currently considering is the fact that B2B marketing efforts are largely confined to Linkedin and if there are viable opportunities that exist on more B2C focused platforms?
When I am on Facebook and I come across a post that is B2B focused, it gets my attention. B2B messages I see on Facebook, don’t have any less of an impact on me because of the platform. To be honest, I tend to purposely filter out and ignore B2C marketing messages (unless they are particularly creative and appeal to me from a professional, non-consumer point of view) as I have no interest in the latest age defying face cream or any of the usual advertising spin; however, I do have an interest in anything relating to my area of professional interest, in finding leads and in the business sector that I work in. So, for me, regardless of what social media i’m using, if messaging has relevancy to me then that is all that counts and i’ll sit up and pay attention.
Sure the conversion rates for Facebook & Twitter are significantly lower, but does that mean they should be ignored by B2B marketers all together? Key decision makers in business are also individuals who will be using other forms of social media and not just Linkedin. For brand awareness purposes at the very least, that’s got to be worth something?
What are your thoughts?
Are B2B marketers missing out on opportunities by limiting themselves to Linkedin? What are the barriers faced when attempting to carry out B2B marketing activities via platforms with a stronger B2C focus?
To find out more about how to get the most out of Linkedin from a B2B perspective, take a look at the socialmediatoday.com article, Be a LinkedIn Rock Star
ubershell
