Content marketing is a necessary component of every marketing strategy, no matter your business’ size, industry, or budget.
Any type of content, from your landing page to a whitepaper designed to attract email signups (and those emails, too, while we’re at it) are part of your content marketing strategy, so it’s important that you know your audience and create what they care about.
The good news is: you don’t have to write the content yourself if you don’t have time or skill. Hiring a content marketing agency can be a great investment in the future of your brand. Not only can a professional writer help create a steady flow of content for your blog and other assets, but you will see an increase in traffic to your site as well as conversions to sales.
If you do want to create your own content, these posts will give you valuable tips on writing for your audience as well as stylistic guides for specific types of content marketing.
For me, creating thought leadership content comes naturally. It is, after all, what I do for a living. And it’s my best marketing tool, so I write for sites like AllBusiness and Forbes to make sure my name is out there, showing what I know about content marketing, as well as what I can do with it.
But if you’re like a lot of business owners or marketing execs, creating your own thought leadership content might be at the very bottom of a very long list of priorities…if it’s there at all. That, my friend, is a mistake.
Originally published on AllBusiness.
I hate how grown-up we’ve all gotten in the world of business. We put on these professional personas and end up taking the human factor out of doing business. And yet, we understand we have to make human connections to sell.
It’s a conundrum.
Recently, I was visiting the Team page of a company called Nav. Rather than having the typical stiff suit-and-tie employee headshots, each staffer is superimposed into a funny photo, often as a character from a popular movie. So it appears like Inigo Montoya, Speed Racer, Frodo, and even Buffy the Vampire Slayer work at the company. Fun!
I love this example of how brands are humanizing themselves rather than hiding behind a wall of corporate stuffiness.
Let’s get back to being humans who work for companies, shall we?
The middle of the funnel (MoFu), or Evaluation Stage of the B2B content marketing funnel is rather like the “getting to know you” part of a relationship.
Your potential client has become aware you have something to offer in the first stage and wants to know more. These are your qualified leads.
Your prospect is interested but inclined to be skeptical. He will do some investigation into your company to find out if you are who/what you say you are.
As with a relationship, you want to put your best foot forward during the MoFu. You want to show your prospect all of your positive attributes such as trustworthiness and credibility.
You also want to entice them with the benefits they can get by purchasing your product or engaging your services.
Scraping, reproduction, or plagiarism; no matter what fancy name you use, the essence remains the same, which is the copying of someone else’s content. With the development of various tools and software programs, it is getting extremely convenient for people to copy content and pass it as their own while at the same time deceiving search engines.
One such unfortunate practice is content scraping, where the scraper steals your website traffic and puts you in a risky position with the search engines. Considering the fact that thousands of content creators are troubled by content scrapers, you need to take proactive steps to prevent your content from being scraped. But first…
Content scraping takes place when people create websites in a similar niche as yours, and from there, they just blatantly copy your content. Sometimes, scraped content is limited to only excerpts with links to the original site, while other times, the entire blog post is copied word for word.
Additionally, content scrapers do not manually copy the content. They rely on various plugins and coding scripts that instantly copy your blog’s RSS feeds and produce similar content within a matter of minutes.
One of the top questions I get asked by prospective clients is: how long should a blog post be?
It’s a fair question and one that will never have a concrete answer, simply because content marketing experts keep changing their mind as marketing trends change.
Neil Patel, who tends to set the bar for the content marketing industry, currently says content between 1,500 and over 2,000 words (depending on the industry) hits the mark.
Yoast, makers of my favorite WordPress plugin Yoast SEO, say it’s got to be over 1,000 to rank in search results.
The Write Practices says if you want more social media shares, make the post 600-1,500 words.
You can spend an hour going down the rabbit hole to see what others think about how long a blog post should be.
But you’re here because you want to know what I think, right?
Today, at least 2 million blog posts are published every day. Given the intensity of competition, you need to have something that makes your content truly stand out. In this context, infographics are effective marketing tools. In fact, people share infographics 3x more than any other type of content.
In this article, you’ll find out:
Many people work hard on their marketing strategies. They try out every trick and advice they can find — have a blog, optimize for SEO, produce good content, produce videos, engage on social media, analyze, track, optimize for mobile and so on. And yet, the results are just not that favorable. The effort is there, all of the components are there and there is no increase in conversions or anything, really.
So, most people become frustrated — what are they doing wrong? Everything seems to be working fine for other people, other companies. Just not them. Why?
Well, the trick is not in what they are doing but rather in why they are doing it.
They set up extensive plans about content, videos, social media and all of the other components as well as schedules on when that is going to be released. However, those plans are often not informed and supported by a general strategy.
Do you remember the last blog post you’ve read? What was the content there like? Was it informative or dull, compelling or boring, clearly structured or chaotically arranged?
If it was engaging or jaw-dropping, that’s the right content. You probably followed it smoothly, naturally, without any effort. But if it was just a cluttered mix of words that didn’t make any sense and left you thinking “What have I just read?” — that’s content pollution, which is bad.
The matter is that blogging is so much more than writing posts in social media. It’s that creative medium that provides readers with both the information and a pinch of entertainment they want to digest. And generating effective blog content means nourishing the audience with compelling and original texts they find truly engaging to follow.
If you are wondering how to write a blog post that hooks and is devoid of content pollution, keep reading this article and learn five tips to make the most of your text entries.
I was talking to a potential new client the other day, and he told me they had tons of writers. So why was he looking to hire Egg?
“We don’t have anyone who really gets our client. That’s what we need you for.”
His writers, it seemed, did their jobs. They wrote what they were assigned. But what the company needed was to hire a content strategist. You see, writers are a dime a dozen (and I truly hate to be able to say that), but professionals who can go one step further are rare. I agree: hiring a content strategist is the way to go.