With this much search and social media activity every minute, content shock is increasing as a challenge for marketers in 2021. Take a step back and ask, what happens online in 60 seconds?

When planning your marketing strategy, it can help to look at the bigger picture of what's going online these days. In this post, we ask what happens online in 60 seconds to help visualize the impact of the internet and digital technology on your customers' lives. The number of Google searches, Facebook posts, and WhatsApp messages sent in a mere 60 seconds is truly phenomenal! What's more, digital media presents a huge opportunity for marketers, but that you need quality content to compete using digital marketing.

Managing Content shock in 2021

All that content and constant bombardment with messages presents an equally huge challenge…

Stay ahead of these major marketing trends to retain your edge over the competition this year

Marketing moves fast. Fads come and go, but big shifts in technology change the whole marketing landscape. The launch of the iPhone and the growth of social networks in the late 2000's massively disrupted the whole marketing landscape, just like the massive adoption of PCs did in the mid to late 90's, and TV did in the 50's and 60's. At the moment marketers are firmly concentrated on the latest big technological fads like chatbots, virtual reality and augmented reality. It remains to be seen whether these will create real value for marketers beyond a few niche applications, or if they are just over-hyped by virtue of their novelty. However, it is possible to identify some big changes in how marketers are using existing technology, and these major shifts have serious implications for brands in…

3 key steps for fueling your performance with the latest news and information

Google Reader is long-gone as a way of keeping track of the latest developments in digital marketing. The important industry information on platform changes that we still need is out there but it is coming at us from more sources than most of us have the time to track effectively. The good news is that, with just a little planning, you can still stay on top of exactly the information that you need to fuel your own performance and also give your bosses, clients, co-workers and followers great reasons to be glad that they have you around. Gathering business information is a full-time job for me; I publish a newsletter, Who's Blogging What, that highlights important blog posts for 20,000 subscribers working in social media and online marketing. Given this, Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights thought it would be useful…

Chart of the Day: Content marketing continues to be a key tactic for B2B lead generation.

Over 600 B2B marketing professionals were asked "How is your content production going to change over the next 12 months?", a whopping 71% said they plan on increasing production, with a quarter saying they will increase production significantly. Content marketing will continue being a major focus for B2B marketers in 2017. For those implementing an inbound marketing strategy in the year ahead, it is important that you find the right balance between quantity and quality. The production of only a handful of highly engaging pieces of content has the potential to keep you in leads for months with the right amount of promotion. Source: BrightTalk Data:over 600 survey responses from B2B marketing professionals. Recommended Resource: Content Marketing Checklist …

The number of social shares per blog post suffers from a massive 89% decline over the past five years

Mark Schaefer originally coined the term content shock 3 years ago. Since then we've seen a massive explosion in the amount of content produced - an almost seven-fold increase -but a huge crash in engagement with each post. An October 2016 study by TrackMaven analysed over 65,000 blogs and found that the number of blogs produced increased by 800%, but the number of social shares per posts crashed by a massive 89%. We can see this huge drop off in engagement is impacting brand's decisions - the number of articles published has plateaued since August 2015. In an attempt to cut through, brands have been driven to creating not just more, but longer content. The average number of words in each post increased by 100 words, to 750 words per post on average. But…

Case studies and best practices for producing truly outstanding content

With the ongoing rise in content marketing, smarter search engines and increased competition within the earned media space, what does it take to really stand out and gain attention? As we start the New Year, now is as good a time as any to aim for a new set of higher standards for the content we’ll be producing in 2016 and onwards. Recently, Rand Fishkin produced an excellent Whiteboard Friday explaining why the creation of ‘reasonably good, unique content’ must die: Rand’s main point was that the days of producing reasonably good, useful, unique content is no longer an acceptable level of quality for those aiming to compete by ranking highly and generate interest in search. Instead, we must set our sights much higher: Source:…

The thinking behind our new summary of the latest, most critical developments in digital marketing

You'll know that Digital marketing develops fast. Really fast. So, it can be really difficult keeping up-to-date on the latest developments from the marketing platforms like Google and the social networks. Businesses and marketers who are agile can take advantage of testing the latest tools, techniques and insights to get an edge on their more laggardly competitors. Given the rate of change, when we launched Smart Insights, one of our key aims was to help advise marketers on the digital marketing techniques that are most relevant to their personal and business success or, if you prefer, to help prevent you drowning in content. Some updates are critical and will massively affect marketing outcomes, others are interesting to know but unlikely to greatly affect your…