Bridge the gap in your content marketing

A recent Financial Services Content Marketing survey for the UK found that although over 80 per cent of respondents believe content marketing will be more important over the next 12 months, yet only 41 per cent have a strategy. Research on B2B Content Marketers' use of Content Marketing from the Content Marketing Institute in the United States shows a similar situation with a large proportion not having a documented content marketing strategy:

So, what is required for a successful content marketing strategy? Here are my rules to bridge that gap:

5 Content Marketing Rules

1. It’s not just a tick-box exercise

There’s more to content marketing than just churning out content via every available channel – from Twitter to Pinterest. The greatest ROI comes from mapping a funnel of engagement and taking a customer or prospect on a journey. You need…

6 ideas for growing Facebook fans regardless of company size

Facebook may be the most widely used social network, but that doesn't make it any easier to gain traffic and leads. Competition is high and it's a fragile form of interacting that can make it or break it for brands. Tone of voice, what is said on-record along with your social media numbers will be the basis of first impressions. This article will show you is how to improve this one aspect of your Facebook marketing recognising that evaluating success on Facebook goes beyond Likes, but that many marketers are judged on this.

Six Tips on improving your Facebook numbers

As I work with Facebook Pages I see six different common shortcuts to gaining fans in a short space of time, some of which are most appropriate to smaller businesses, others that apply to all sizes.

1. Exchanging Likes

Smaller businesses starting on Facebook will find…

Examples showing that Why is often more important than How and What in brand storytelling

Have you ever wondered why some companies do what they do?, Why do Hotpoint make washing machines?, Why do Dyson make hoovers?, Why do Casio make watches?,Why do Yale make locks? or Why do Baxi make boilers?

Why does Alexander Dennis make single and double-decker buses? (you probably didn’t know this right? You do now)

If you haven’t already then I urge you to read a book called ‘Starting with why’ by Simon Sinek. It’ll change the way you think about marketing and differentiating your business from the competition. The book talks about how some companies became so successful by communicating the why’s (beliefs, causes, visions) before they communicate what they do & how they do it.

Simon…

KPIs and Tools for optimising mobile marketing results

As mobile marketers get to grips with planning activity and budgets for 2014, this post takes a look at using tracking and analytics tools to optimize your mobile investment and performance. Consumers expect and demand an exceptional user experience on their mobile and tablets, competition for their attention and loyalty intensifies, and your internal stakeholders will be looking to maximize their investment in mobile. A structured approach to tracking and analytics provides three core business benefits which will help justify your mobile investment. 1. Conversion Rate Optimisation Your #1 priority must be converting traffic to your mobile site or downloads of your app to delivering key goals -  such as generating leads, quotes, bookings or sales. 2. UX improvements Use customer journey tracking to identify the best / worst performing pages on our site or apps.  Focus on pages which experience high drop off (eg registration, check-out). 3. Better informed…

What and Why and When And How and Where and Who?

What and Why and When And How and Where and Who are words we use throughout the day, but not necessarily together! Combining them gives a simple check that you’re you're using the right approach for business planning. In this post, I’ll outline what to consider and link through to some posts giving more detail. I like to think of them in this order when relating to planning, although they don’t have the nice poetic rhyme which their original source has, as I explain at the end of the post.

WHY plan?

Start here, since the need to plan isn’t obvious, or at least making planning happen isn’t obvious according to our polling which shows that over half of businesses don’t have a digital marketing plan - here are 10 reasons why we think…

The advantages of claiming your online identity for SEO and brand authority

As search continues to advance, the concept of authorship and identity will grow in importance. Many opinion leaders believe that over time, websites will begin to be ranked based not just on the keywords they contain and the inbound links they attract but also the people and authors behind the content being produced. Earlier this year, Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt stated: 'Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification'. At the time, some commentators suggested that this statement was proof of ‘AuthorRank’, a situation where Google will give certain pieces of content a rankings boost based on the author of that content. However, whilst there’s no definitive evidence to suggest that AuthorRank is in effect now, authorship mark-up is in place…

Are you looking in the right place for ideas generation?

We recently launched our Plan to Succeed campaign and as a part of our Slideshare deck we feature a whole bunch of ideas to help marketers improve their planning. One factor in effective marketing planning is building up strategic ideas around which you can build a plan - these are specifically customer problems to solve, or outcomes they are seeking. As the brand representatives, we all too often explore in the wrong areas to seek answers to those questions, or focus in on a single area. We created this simple graphic to help you find the sweet spot. We feel there are four dimensions that provide a starting point for strategic planning: Your brand: This is the where marketers are most likely to start, and unfortunately end, their thinking.…

Using data for marketing campaigns

Even with all the discussion of content marketing, buying in data to support sales campaigns and increase the customer base is still crucial to many companies to grow their business, even though the starting point for some businesses is to focus on relationships with their current or lapsed customers and advocacy/referrals. Although the traditional sales funnel has changed and social media provides more opportunities for outreach, this doesn't mean that buying in external data lists is extinct. Far from it, you can still supplement data collected from other sources.

If you're looking for data and how to use it effectively for your marketing channels, whether email, direct mail, outbound or mobile? This infographic from The Data Octopus provides tips for addressing this process :

Proposition and Target market: I won’t explain how to suck eggs as we are all familiar with this.Legally compliance: Ask the right questions…

How stimulating the full range of senses can affect consumer behaviour

Over the Summer, when we had a hot day and I was stuck on a commuter train I kept getting a whiff of somebody’s sun cream that has that coconut smell that instantly flooded my brain with thoughts of a summer holiday, sat on a beach, looking out to the horizon which takes my mind off being stuck on a commuter train. This smell got me thinking about neuromarketing, which considers all the senses and their response to marketing stimuli. We focus so hard on what we can see, we forget about our other senses, touch, sounds, smell. As marketing is now integrated with multi touch points I wondered how many people are putting these in action? In this post I would like to introduce and show learnings from the relatively new science- neuromarketing taken from the fantastic books by …

Examples of creative content ideas show it is possible

Compelling content is the key to successful marketing. You know that. Your boss knows that. So why are so many marketers still half-hearing it? Folks who work in 'boring' industries have an added challenge. Let’s say you are a marketing specialist in insurance or for a mortgage bank. Even if your company and services are important, these topics have snoozefest written all over them. The good news is that there are some simple tactics you can use to make your marketing campaigns more exciting.

Create a Voice with an Attitude

Creating a brand voice is nothing new or at least it shouldn’t be if you write content for your company! Some of the most influential brands have created strong voices that their audiences connect with. Just think of some of today’s largest companies - Coca-Cola, Salesforce, Apple. You…