Overcome your 'oops' with agile content marketing

All was well in the best of possible worlds...

July 2011. We were all excited: we had just launched phase one of our first major online content marketing campaign. We released on time and everything was all well in the world. So we continued preparing the content for phase two, and we released it as per the tactical schedule. Still with beaming smiles on our faces. Two months after the launch of the campaign, we thought: 'I know this is a long-term campaign and we’ve got many more phases to come, but how is it performing so far?'

Oops!

We had everything in place: the content and the promotion, and the page views coming in. Except we’d forgotten to instrument some of the calls-to-action and hyperlinks on the landing pages to see how visitors were behaving on the site.

Oops!

We didn’t have all the data we needed to…

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…

How B2B companies are using content marketing to drive engagement, trust and transaction

In my recent post on making the case for inbound marketing, I talked about how the need for information has led to the emergence of new approaches to the promotion of credibility and experience through content marketing. Interest in content marketing shows no signs of abating, but many companies still seem to find it difficult to review the impact. In a recent B2B content marketing benchmark survey, B2B Marketing found that although 56% of respondents saw content marketing as having an impact on sales, there were more concerning undertones: 15% saw little or no increase whilst 29% simply could not quantify the impact of content marketing on their business 46% found demonstrating content marketing return on investment a key challenge Finding good relevant B2B examples online often proves challenging because although everyone is talking about doing it, there are hardly any examples…

How to showcase your business through expertise and experience

We all know content marketing is important. It trends daily worldwide. There are now conferences, magazines and institutions dedicated to it. The Content Marketing Institute in the US. for one, does a nifty job of covering it all. Famously, Marketing Profs declared recently that 91% of b2b marketers profess to using content marketing for the following three reasons: to engage customers and prospects (82%); drive sales (55%); and educate the market (44%).

Tapping into the need for information

Technology, as we see daily on this site, has facilitated a significant shift in how people in business interact with the companies they buy from. We know that business professionals now use the Internet increasingly as a…

Integrating content and social media marketing

The vast majority of businesses will first experiment with social media long before they get underway with content marketing. Creating a coherent plan is the key to success in both. A content plan helps to integrate content and social media marketing activities. I will be explaining the approach I recommend in more detail in the next Smart Insights webcast. This post gives some of the background. [caption id="attachment_25503" align="alignright" width="150"] Which way first?[/caption] Companies tend to work first with social media marketing because social platforms are…

A content marketing productivity tool for faster content marketing

[caption id="attachment_23960" align="alignleft" width="257"] Little Bird - a great way to find and learn about key people online fast[/caption] If you spend time like I do, writing content for special interest groups online, then you probably love to hear about content marketing productivity tools that can help you optimise your time during the different stages of the content marketing continuum, and  improve your return on content marketing effort (ROE). After years working as a publisher, I’ve now got a new job as a startup CEO, managing a content marketing agency, as well as doing the digital marketing for a…

How can B2B companies use video to attract, engage and improve conversion without falling into the gimmick trap?

Integrating video into a website and sharing through video sites has great potential to build awareness and establish trust before a transaction. We're now seeing many more marketers using video as discussed in my previous post on inbound B2B marketing. In this post I'll use examples to review different approaches B2B companies can use video to really bring their offering to life.

Using video to help with visibility in search

At the last check, it was estimated that approximately 48 hours of video were being uploaded to YouTube every minute. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how valuable is a video when video search dominates internet search? This data from YouTube is further supported by a recent survey which confirmed that B2B marketers need to focus on videos and images as part of their SEO…