We have all heard the phrase content is king. In the modern world, highly shareable, entertaining and authoritative content is the key to success. Here are some do's and don'ts to help you succeed.
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“Please be patient, we will be with you shortly”. We have all heard these words and we are well aware that “shortly” may end up being quite a while. The days of forcing clients to wait for “the next available operator” are coming to a welcome end
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We all know how crucial digital marketing has become to a business’s success. One aspect of digital marketing that has the ability to carry a dramatic impact is a landing page.
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Part two of our series on Social Media and how to choose the right platform for your business.
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A look at what specific social media platforms offer and how to utilize these features.
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Many marketing or consumer psychologists believe that colour makes all the difference to how your company is perceived. The colour you choose for your website, corporate logo or print advert can have an influence on your consumer’s behaviour or the feelings they experience from your brand.
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According to many Marketing Psychologists, colour has an enormous influence on emotion, consumer behaviour, marketing and your perceived brand personality.There are of course those that view colour psychology with scepticism and think that the effects colour has on emotion is exaggerated.
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It is amazing how little consideration is taken when uploading a new Social Media profile. It is a subconscious action that might cause reputational damage if done incorrectly unbeknown.
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The feast famine cycle means that you either have too much of something (feast) or you have too little (famine). In order to prepare your business for the famine cycle, there is one vital thing you should take from this article…
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Staying on top of social media trends and tricks ensures that your business will show significantly more growth than a company that doesn't optimise their social media presence. Social media is so important for your business because it leads to increased exposure
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At first it was a Twitter exclusive, but now we see the hashtag trend swept up by Facebook, Instagram and Vine, to name but a few. The hashtag is used to link posts, articles, videos; you name it, to any topic.
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The rapid rise of the Internet, social media and content marketing has caused a shift in information power. There is a mammoth amount of content readily available whenever we want it. Anyone, whether with a journalism degree or not, can publish material online.
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Linkbait is a serious problem that needs to be addressed not embraced...Every day hundreds of thousands of innocent internet users are tricked into clicking on soul stealing linkbait. The cruelty lies in the nature of the title, which sneakily pokes at our uncontrollable curiosity.
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Complaints are a given if you run a business, but where most companies are mistaken, is they think that complaints looks bad on your blog or website, but the truth is – your company can gain tremendous credibility if these complaints are handled and responded to with speed, grace and integrity.
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Although the effectiveness of adding social media to your marketing and sales strategy has time and again been proven, companies continue to question its return on investment.
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While striving to rank higher on Google remains one of the core goals of any website, we sometimes forget to ‘stay with the times’.
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Identifying the right keywords for search engine optimization is essential, so picking the most popular ones would be the obvious choice?
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An introductory article on Content Marketing. As a content marketer, you should know exactly what appeals to your target audience, which means you should be presenting them with the most relevant content.
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There seems to be a misunderstanding surrounding when the editorial process must be applied.
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The internet is our marketplace and content our currency. The demand for content has grown at a monstrous pace and will continue to. So we develop strategies, plan content, create it and implement vigorously.
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Instagram is a social networking platform which allows users to post images and videos on whichever subject they choose.
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We have finally reached a time of life in which consumers are officially tired of empty promises. This is the era of authenticity. This era pokes fun at the old TV infomercials, complains about ‘fake’ Photoshoped models in commercials and they disregard your claim to be the best in business.
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Content marketing is a continuous thing. You never truly stop building up content, gathering ideas and communicating with your clients over social networks.
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The marketing industry is ever changing, and its changing faster than university classrooms can keep up. How relevant is your marketing degree? How do you stay on top of trends?
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Being socially awkward no longer applies solely to face-to-face interaction.
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Once we get into the swing of compiling an analytics report, it is easy to forget or misinterpret the various fields you are filling in on said report. These statistics are so vitally important, because they are the truest indicators of your website’s performance.
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With the increase in social media marketing, it is easy to overlook the fact that you may be spamming users.
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There may be many reasons for casting your thoughts back to old blog articles. Perhaps you notice that they are dated, perhaps the topic has become a hot trend once more, perhaps it’s a good article that has been forgotten, or perhaps you need inspiration for a new post.
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2013 is recognised by many people as the year for short-form content. It seems that most users nowadays spend less time reading your content than they have in the past.
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What makes inbound marketing tick is the focus on providing your audience with good quality content and infographics are an excellent way of displaying information in an engaging an creative manner.
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While easily confused as another name for social media marketing, Real-Time Marketing is, in fact, a strategy which adds to a social media marketing plan.
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Your online presence, be it for social or professional purposes, advertises exactly who and what you are.
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You may have encountered it on your Google Analytics page, but most of us pay no heed to the bounce rates tab. A bounce rate of 50% is not necessarily bad – anything much higher than that should attract your attention.
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Back to the days of old when you advertised products and services by posting them on a notice board; except now, it is digital.
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Some marketing methods are quite dated and drastically less effective nowadays than they were ten years ago.
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Attracting people to your blog requires captivating content that is both interesting and creative in its presentation.
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It is time to revert back to the days of old, where interacting with customers was both a personal experience as well as a stage for building your ‘brand experience’.
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Targeting ‘Demographics’ in your digital marketing strategy still counts – just not the way it used to. Demographics are still on the top of Google’s analytical means of determining what displays on page one of your search results.
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Could LinkedIn’s Showcase pages replace your small website?
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Customers find you through inbound marketing, but in some instances inbound marketing simply doesn't work. This article explains why.
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The Internet has become somewhat of an equaliser in that small companies can be viewed on the same scale as large companies by simply having an impressive website and blog.
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Customer feedback is the one true piece of intimate information that allows you to review the success of a product or service through the eyes of your consumers. It is therefore invaluable.
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This article covers the advantages and risks when allowing others to contribute to your blog.
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Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website.
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The importance of tapping into different communities on Twitter by making use of scheduling apps and hash-tags.
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A question often asked by new bloggers is “how often should I publish?” The answer is – as often as you possibly can.
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Any writer should undeniably also be a researcher. However, it is highly improbable to learn the technical details of specialist fields in a couple of days, before the article is to be published.
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Having covered the principles of website usability and browser behavior in the previous articles it is time to set the guidelines for converting your website into a model for usability design.
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Sales people are gradually using LinkedIn as their main source of new leads.
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Your blog is the centre point of your content marketing campaign so as much care as possible should be taken to ensure that the content is interesting, relevant and shareable.
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Customer Experience, also known as CX, according to Wikipedia is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods and/or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier.
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The Google Hangouts platform is great for social interaction between multiple participants. However, users are utilising this platform for more than merely informal chatting.
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No matter how awesome your content is or how much brand loyalty you may have earned, a badly structured website is only going to increase your bounce rate and drop your repeat visits.
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A competitor analysis will allow you to see why your competitors are doing worse or better than you are and will give you a much needed wake up call.
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Website usability is a measure of the ease of use of a website for its user.
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Before choosing a digital marketing agency to manage your content it is necessary to consider certain points – which can be quite confusing if you’re not sure where to start.
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How exactly do you choose topics that are interesting and, once turned into an article, share-worthy?
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Google Glass wearable technology is yet another building block to add to the complex structure of technological disruption.
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In this article we will be covering the last elements of lead generation, namely lead scoring, lead distribution and lead recycling.
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Content marketing is based around two main elements. The first is of course content, and secondly the promotion thereof.
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If, as a business, you gain most of your success from Google, you should start making drastic changes – and fast.
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This article lists 12 tried and trusted ideas for enhancing the visability of your main online marketing machine, i.e. your blog.
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As a marketer it is essential to understand what makes people tick and the following books will help you to do exactly this.
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It may seem like a daunting task, but with proper planning the entire lead generation process can become incredibly simplified and even automated.
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Google's new Hummingbird algorithm is fast, super accurate and affects 90% of searches.
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A company website used to be the centre point of the online universe. In recent years this changed and social media (of which blogs are the most integral part) took the number one spot.
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Presenting blog articles in the form of lists is a popular blog writing convention.
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Unless your job is digging trenches, most employees have access to the Internet, and with it, access to countless distractions
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Content curation shouldn’t replace content creation; it should be another way of adding value to your already impressive collection of content.
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Content curating is a lengthy process that involves in depth research, a lot of reading and a well-planned argument.
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Using curated content for populating your website or blog for the purpose of digital marketing is a great idea. It is a professional and respected way of providing your browsers with valuable and insightful information.
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Call to actions and landing pages go hand in hand, and when practiced correctly will result in a huge increase in leads.
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Even though we are already knee deep in online articles, content marketing is still evolving and many are still unaware of its exact benefits.
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A good content marketing strategy is complex; it requires a blog, a website, a comprehensive social media plan, landing pages, lead nurturing, a pay-per-click campaign and a report on all of this.
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A company intranet will work only when it works for you, but to achieve a successfully functioning company intranet, you need to put some work into it as well.
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A well-planned Pay-per-click ad campaign will generate your business leads for targeted keyword; keywords that would require considerable resources to gain a first-page organic ranking.
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It’s commonly accepted that people only retweet that which they find to be relevant and of a certain quality. As such Twitter is somewhat of a quality filter.
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As many of our other articles state, a company blog is the centre point of your content marketing campaign. Remarkably, some companies still do not see the worth in having a blog separate from their main website.
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A landing page, also known as a lead capturing page, is a webpage that appears in response to clicking on an advert, a call-to-action button, or a search engine pay-per-click ad.
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How to choose between the large, well-known agency and the smaller (under 15 employees), yet appealing one.
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If your updates are constant, relevant and informative people will want to follow you, and what’s more, they’ll be industry relevant people who you can learn from as well.
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As any form of fashion does, web design elements gets outdated as rapidly as they are born.
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Email marketing may have lost some credibility in the age of spam that we live in; however, when practiced correctly it can enhance relationships with existing and potential clients, promote your content and encourage loyalty.
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Digital marketing agencies should practice what they preach. Here are some tell-tale signs to take notice of.
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The main difference between traditional advertising and content marketing is that the budget spent on traditional advertising is lost fairly soon after the campaign ends.
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When the project at hand is content marketing, the client supplier relationship should be a partnership.
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Mobile marketing is rapidly becoming a necessity as it is growing at an immense speed. A consumer can do almost anything from the palm of his hand.
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The digital and online marketing fields are emerging at a very fast pace and there are many agencies out there who claim to provide comprehensive digital marketing services.
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However amazing inbound marketing is, there are times when it’s simply not enough.
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When put to proper use a Twitter account can be one of your most powerful forms of content communication.
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Timing is everything when it comes to marketing, so when is the best time to pull out all the stops?
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It is common for sales people to be expected to do their own prospecting, but maybe the expectation is placed on the wrong department.
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Facebook has grown in leaps and bounds since its launch in 2004. Currently standing on approximately 1.15 billion users it is the single largest social networking site on the planet. Facebook provides access to millions of potential customers and clients, such brand exposure cannot be ignored.
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A sales person needs to climb a series of consecutive steps in closing a corporate sale. Sufficient resources at his or her disposal are crucial to the sale.
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Youtube has become the single biggest source of video content in the world. The opportunities with video content are endless, provided you use the correct strategy.
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SharePoint as a platform offers many great building blocks for making collaboration and management more regulated across all departments of a business. In this article I focus specifically on the benefits of SharePoint when used internally, as an Intranet.
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Many of the articles we read online are unoriginal, rehashed and dull because we see them all the time. When generating content it is important to remember to research and compare first. Online users are loyal to sites that produce consistent quality. Over time, your readers, and search engines, will distinguish your site for what it’s worth.
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“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” – Mark Twain. The information that we believe, which isn’t true, is the information that causes us the most harm.
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Twitter users spend a lot of time making sure that they construct the correct tweets, but how much time is spent constructing bios? Take a look at some of the bios out there, so many of them are awfully written and to top it all off, they don’t tell you anything about the person who wrote it. A badly written bio is even worse than no bio at all.
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Once you gain a potential client’s contact details that person becomes a cold lead and this is where lead nurturing comes into play. If you don’t nurture your leads, the probability of you making a sale is slim to none.
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Content is the name of the online game. Strong content draws potential clients to your website, and converts them into strong leads. The purpose of content is to create value for users and in the process boost your credibility as expert in the industry. In order to do so you need to feed users with your quality content updates.
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While playing on the net, you StumbleUpon something wildly interesting, relevant, informative and well written. Immediately you tweet it to all your followers, many of whom retweet it to theirs. You have landed on, and passed on, the perfect content to share. Posting the article has lent you some ever-evasive Twitter credibility. You are impressive. You gain several new followers.
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We all know that we are living in an ‘instant gratification, no-time-to-waste’ age. This impacts most aspects of our daily lives – including how we read. We spend ages scanning the web to find articles and information relevant to us, but do we actually read these articles once we find them? As content marketing is growing rapidly and online content is increasing, someone has to be reading, right?
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Implementing an effective linking strategy begins with your website structure. In this article we discuss the most effective website structuring methods and the effects thereof on linking strategy.
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Marketing, just like mathematics, is something that must be practiced and mastered. You have to push yourself relentlessly and make every second count.
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Search engine optimisation helps Google find and index your website’s content and is the process of improving a websites search engine ranking through relevant keywords/key phrases and fresh topic-specific content. On-page SEO refers to the optimisation of page specific content in order to better the search engine ranking of that page.
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Twitter lists have been around since 2009 so I might be a bit late to join the party, but I’ve only recently started using them as part of my social media strategy. I’ve come to realise that lists are as important as any other element within the social media spectrum and by not using it you’re basically shooting yourself in the foot. A Twitter list is a way on curating Twitter users and to organise what they have in common. Followers are organised into groups which means that you can easily read tweets from a specific group without skimming through your entire feed.
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Creating an interesting eBook or handy White Paper, means going that step further in providing quality content to your users. So how do you go about writing your first eBook or White Paper?
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So you’ve set up your blog and set in motion your publishing schedule. The next step is to promote that content you worked so hard at creating. So where do we start?
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Local results appear for people who search for businesses and places near their location,
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“Facebook is for connecting with the people you went to school with and Twitter is for people you wish you had gone to school with”. When it comes to social media all platforms are equally important but the two biggest are Facebook and Twitter.
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Gone are the days of dismissing the blog as merely some informal journal. If done right the business blog is the single greatest source of content for your business. In a world where content is king, your company blog is the single greatest throne.
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There are so many social media platforms out there and almost everyone uses at least one for personal reasons. When it comes to business and content marketing, how do you choose between the wide selection of sites? Which platforms will drive the most traffic to your site?
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Content repurposing is the process of remodeling larger pieces of content into bite-sized pieces that may be shared across the web (however sometimes the opposite is true, with the larger pieces of content coming from many smaller pieces).
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Your marketing is in order and your site is getting traffic. People are visiting your site but for some reason other numbers are not really moving up. When this is the case it is worth taking a good hard look at your landing page - where people eventually end up after browsing your site and deciding that they like what they see.
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Google favours fresh content, which means you need to ensure that your content is updated regularly. A maintenance plan is as important as a content strategy, without it, your website content can be very easily forgotten once it is out there. The maintenance plan should outline how your team will keep the content accurate at all times and how to make sure your company branding and message stays on track.
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Writing for the web requires much consideration in terms of what image you want to create in the eye of the user, however the only way to achieve this type of uniformity is by integrating the entire process with your content strategy.
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A well planned publishing schedule is essential in getting your content strategy off the ground. As well as ensuring your content is published consistently and maintained regularly to ensure your users receive only the most up-to-date and relevant content.
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Is SEO a tool meant to make only poor quality content rank high? Does good quality content also need the support of search engine optimisation initiatives?
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Most marketing managers can speak advertising fluently. They can thus chat to their ad agency and have a good idea of what is going on and of how their brand and product or service is faring. Communication of this sort is really important. A company’s marketing manager needs to have a solid idea of where the company is in terms of advertising their brands, products or services.
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It seems that even ad agencies think that social media and content marketing are just more channels to go down, like advertising on a bus or building. But the shift in advertising is not just about the fact that companies are spending more of their marketing budget online, it’s that people are turning away from advertising as a whole and looking for value within content.
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Content marketing is a strategy that appeals to businesses trying to cope with the recession
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Banner ads are booming, against all probability — the click through rate for banner ads is down to 1 in 1000. And a lot of the time, that stat is made up of people that have clicked on a banner by mistake. Yet, companies seem adamant about pouring their marketing budget into something that has been proven not to work.
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Content farms have been lying fallow — or if not completely fallow, there certainly has been a significant drop in traffic for many of the content farm sites.
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How do you maintain a consistent flow of content for your blog? Is it better to use someone in-house or to outsource?
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In order to remain up to date, companies now need to consistently generate fresh content that can be published across multiple digital channels.
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Old school marketers use the word branding in nearly every sentence but what is Branding?
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Picking the right keywords is essential for search engine optimization, but the type of keyword worth optimizing is not as obvious as it seems.
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Digital Natives are people who roam the cyber-landscape unhindered by the inexperience that some people struggle with.
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There is an increasing number of examples of products that became overnight online successes. No branding, no run up and no traditional media!
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How banks are tackling their digital marketing in a world where bank e-mails are bad news.
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Is traditional advertising really out of the window? Is there a chance that digital advertising might be throwing the baby out with the bath water?
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