Content for social media success

Micro content, I keep hearing this term and thought it’d be useful to explore what it means; why content marketing is evolving and diversifying and what the practical applications of micro content are for marketing.

Essentially, micro content is as it sounds - short form content. Typically low cost, high value content appropriate to social channels. To all intents and purpose it’s social media content.

It’s not that detailed articles or long form, rich content are any less important, it’s simply a case of being relevant to the social media platform in question, and accessible to an ever detached consumer who’s on the move with a low attention span for your brand.

Social and mobile are leading the change

As the world shifts towards mobile devices, and accessing information via social networks on a mobile, micro content becomes a more important and…

Combining conversations from different platforms

It started with a moan over dinner. I was chatting with sometime Smart Insights blogger Yusuf Bhana about how well things were going on the Musicademy Facebook Page but how frustrating it was that we end up hosting one (somewhat limited) conversation about a blog post on the blog and then another (altogether more animated) conversation about that same blog post on the Facebook Page.

"My philosophy has always been to host conversations in the places where your community want to have them and over the years as Facebook has become such a mainstream place for content marketing for many consumer brands, inevitably a lot of the buzz we create online has moved there, away from the blog".

Centring your content sharing and discussion on Facebook has advantages in terms of virality (albeit organic reach right now is shockingly poor do to yet another algorithm change…

5 SEO activities that integrate with your content marketing activities

Although SEO and content marketing are often still managed separately, there are many activities that overlap between them and some would even argue that a large part of SEO and content marketing are the same. Although I would consider SEO and content marketing to be different disciplines (at least at this stage in their respective evolutions), the lines between both activities are becoming increasingly blurred and opportunities to integrate SEO and content marketing should always be considered.

When planning content marketing activity, you should always consider the organic search benefits great content can bring if executed correctly. These are give specific techniques you can use to help ensure that SEO is supporting your content marketing efforts and vice-versa:

1. Keyword research

Whilst I firmly believe that great content should not…

How the Met Office plans and evaluates its content marketing

The weather is always a talking point in our daily lives, especially since many have experienced floods and extreme weather recently. Events like this attract even more visitors to the Met Office website - the site has anywhere from 6 million to more than 24 million unique users per week, depending on external influences such as severe weather conditions and even astronomical events. As we will see, other types of events can also generate interest in the weather.

Digital marketing at the Met Office

In 2009, a dedicated digital team was introduced to manage the organization’s online portfolio,  Simon Swan, is head of digital marketing at the Metoffice. You may also recognise Simon's name as a Smart Insights Expert commentator on digital and content marketing strategy. A key part of the digital strategy for the Metoffice today is to use content to give site visitors an enhanced…

4 essential steps for planning content marketing

Content marketing is now seen by many as an essential part of the overall marketing strategy of any business. Ignoring content marketing is equivalent to choosing not to engage with a large section of the customer base. This just goes to show how important content marketing can be. So much so that many companies now rely solely on content marketing and related tactics like SEO and social media marketing to get the word out.

However, there are many companies that get content marketing wrong. Months and even years of blood, sweat and tears and a lot of money gets them nowhere. Their content goes unnoticed, there are no new leads generated, there is no increase in the volume of web traffic and barely any customer interaction.

One of the main reasons why content marketing fails for many…

Which channels matter most today? An analysis of the effectiveness of 40+ marketing channels

Several months ago, I created a simple spreadsheet of 40+ marketing channels available to marketers to reach and influence consumers today. I shared this on the Smart Insights blog and readers added to my base list - thank you for the recommendations! In this article, starting with the original channels, I've added attribute data about each channel to provide a better picture of channel versatility, cost, purpose and function. This blog post will cover an analysis of a new all channel spreadsheet available via my site to determine which are the best channels for functionality and value.

Cross-functional channels

Venn Diagram

The four segments in this Venn diagram show the functional intersections for channels used for different types of customer interactions. The four functional categories are: Marketing, can the channel be used to market to customers? Service,…

8 tips on how to plan and execute your animated video to support conversion

A tailored marketing video can engage potential customers and start them on their journey through your sales funnel. Since there’s a lot to harmonize on your website and across your marketing channels; often irrelevant, complex and tedious information will drive your visitors away. A video can take the place of text and provide a far more appealing method for communicating with prospective customers. 1.Target your market Appealing to the right consumers with your online content is crucial. An animated explainer video placed across your online platforms can be highly effective at achieving this.  A tailored animation can captivate your audience immediately and tell them about your product or service in an engaging way. Whether your video is viewed on your landing page, on a streaming site like Vimeo, or on one of your social networks, including the right content and style will…

A step-by-step Guide to producing Sitemap.xml to help Google crawl your content

An XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) sitemap is a form of markup language and is consisted of tags that define pages that should be indexed by search engines. XML Sitemaps are designed for search engines and not for users. If you're new to the idea, and  want to know how a sitemap looks like, they're typically available to see as a file sitemap.xml on the site, for example http://www.dell.com/sitemap.xml and these may link to other sitemaps for different countries and content categories, for example, http://www.dell.com/content-uk-sitemap.xml. In this simple way we can easily identify if companies have a sitemap.xml and if the values in the tags, for each page, are properly implemented. These are some important tips that you need to consider when deciding whether to use XML Sitemaps. The XML optimisation will help us boost the indexation process of the site amongst search…

A summary of new research showing the level of investment in digital marketing in 2014

It's always useful to be able to compare the way your marketing budget is divided between different digital tactics. Particularly if changes in allocation are highlighted and ideally if the budgets are for similar companies.

The fifth annual international survey from Econsultancy and Responsys Marketing Budgets 2014 helps with the first question. Over 600 businesses participated in the survey, note that some of these were agencies estimating their clients' investments.

This summary post includes what I believe to be the three most useful insights from the report Marketing Budgets 2014: Effectiveness, Measurement and Allocation Report.

Proportion of marketing budget allocated to digital channels

[caption id="attachment_35349" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Proportion of marketing budget spent on digital marketing. Source: Econsultancy 2014.[/caption]

This chart suggests that if you are…

A step-by-step guide to integrating Facebook with an online store

You will know that worldwide, Facebook is the largest online social network, there are over 1.5 billion active Facebook users. This data from Global Web Index on active social media network platform active usage  shows the continued dominance of Facebook. How can retailers best take advantage of all these Facebook interactions? This post looks at Facebook fan engagement for e-commerce websites specifically - I hope the examples I show will give you some new ideas.  The Smart Insights Guide to Facebook marketing has more details and guidance with retail examples too. We will explore how to structure your page and what types of status updates to choose in order to gain the most relevant and loyal audience of your future customers. You will also find out what applications work best. 1. First…