An infographic explaining how inbound marketing works together with content marketing
Whether you call it inbound marketing, social media marketing or content marketing, we're broadly referring to the same thing; at least that's how we see it.
Dave and I believe that inbound marketing starts with considered, quality content, well published and promoted that, in turn, drives the inbound benefit through sharing and search.
The 'free bonus' is that you're link-building and gaining social signals for search engine optimisation as well creating great content - something so often over-looked and under-valued.
The Content Marketing model infographic
This Content Marketing model was developed at First 10 Digital when working with a client who wanted to understand the full process for her team. We hope our infographic will help you plot your success too.
Content marketing blueprint
People liked it so much we thought it deserved a more polished design…
Last October I wrote about how to put hearts, smilies and other symbols into the the subject line to make it standout in the inbox.
Whilst there was debate in the comments on that post about whether it made the email look like spam or not, its certainly a technique that many marketers have been using this Valentines. Maybe too many?
My thanks go to Andrew Kordek of Trendline Interactive and Cathy Conk from Netflix for letting me show the examples below. Note how the iPhone in particular shows a coloured heart with 3D effect.
Mobile email version
Desktop email version
Everyone is going ♥ crazy...
What do you think? If you have run split tests using…
Insights and examples show why a mobile-optimised experience is becoming essential
The focus for many brands over the past ten years has been getting the fixed line website right. This is often the reason brands give for delivering their full site to customers browsing on mobiles.
The vast majority of brands - 83% according to research on UK smartphone usage by Google - still have not optimised their websites for mobile. This stat is mirrored by dismal bounce-rates for mobile sites, which stand at 88% on average. Clearly, consumers won't hang around on a mobile site which gives a poor browsing experience!
New Forrester research forecasts, published this week, shows that by 2016, one billion people will own smartphones, many of whom will be professionals taking these devices to work. By that year, consumer spending in the mobile app market will amount to $56 billion, and business spending on mobile projects will have doubled
As…
Questions to ask to make sure you're following the best approach to social sharing
Social Sharing tools are the technology behind embedding of buttons and other widgets onto your website to encourage social sharing, recommending or bookmarking within your site and blog.
We have a separate post on the social networks that are most important to shares in different sectors and countries.
Despite their ability to spread your content, increase your traffic and even aid your SEO efforts, many sites are still ignoring or not using the right sharing tools. The infographic below from popular sharing service AddThis shows why it is essential to implement these tools effectively.
Why do people share content?
Making the best use of Social Sharing technology requires content that is worth sharing in the first place. A great piece of research was conducted by the New York Times…
7 techniques to drive website interactions that generate leads and how to measure them
We find that there's lots of discussion online about how to reach and convert audiences, but not so much about encouraging the softer interactions. We reference this as "Act" within the RACE framework, it's about encouraging interactions on site or within your social outpost. You can think of Act in the context of the Forrester Social Technographics Ladder, where you are encouraging those that are watching or “lurking” to contribute, to get involved. These are people most likely with a problem or question, maybe a passion for a topic area; your challenge is how you get them to contribute.
These are the tactics I'm talking about:
Blogs
Social networks integrations
Widgets, tools and objects
Community
Content
Gamification
Review and ratings
The whole idea is to design specific communications techniques that encourage interactions on your websites or social outposts, an area we feel is more often…
Do magic words exist or are they a copywriting myth?
I recently received a copywriting advice email from Yale University describing the ‘the most powerful words in the English Language’. Here they are:
1. You
2. Results
3. Health
4. Guarantee
5. Discover
6. Love
7. Proven
8. Safety
9. Save
10. New
Although I agree that these are powerful words, I doubt Yale really conducted any rigorous research – and if they did, it’s certainly not something that the University chooses to share on its official website.
What is interesting is how long these types of list have been "doing the rounds". It taps into the insatiable demand for instant solutions. Human nature finds the notion very appealing that all you need do is sprinkle a few magic words into your writing like fairy dust and, Hey Presto, an instant increase in sales pops out of the hat.
Using magic words in the right place in your copy and in the right order…
Value: [rating=5]
Recommended link: Raven GA Config Tool
Our review of the tool
We’ve said many times that Google Analytics is a great tool “out-of-the-box” when you first setup the tags on your site. However, to really get the most from it, it needs a lot of configuration to tailor it for your business as we describe for the new version of Google Analytics in our online training course and Ebook showing 7 Steps to get more from Google Analytics.
I’ve recently discovered this free tool from Raven Tools that I wanted to tell you about since it's a nice tool to help with configuration. It makes some aspects of this an easier process since it steps you through what’s involved for a number of key setup areas of…
Models of human interactions that help manage the convergence of social media and mobile marketing
Social and mobile are two of the largest growth areas in the technology world. It is therefore inevitable that commentators are keen to identify (and understand how to monetise) convergence between the two. There is great synergy between the two areas. Both are focused on communication, both are undeniably personal and both are very immediate.
Which new propositions can you offer though combining mobile + social?
Whilst a computer is a window onto the web and into your social connections, a mobile, be it an iPhone, iPad or Android smartphone, is your personal window. And unlike a computer it brings extra data and functionality with it. With a mobile, you can share where you are and what you’re doing, generally in a much richer way than a simple status update. This is all becoming fairly commonplace and the…
You will have 7 days to update within the next few weeks
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Facebook blog update from 24/01/2012
About this update
You’ll remember the introduction of the Facebook Timeline feature on personal accounts back in September last year?
Well this alert is just a note to say that it will be mandatory for everyone using Facebook within the next week or two. Watch out for the message at the top of your page alerting you that you have seven days to preview and update. I'll need to give it some thought - of course my daughters have had it setup for ages - embarrassing being a late adopter...
Marketing implications of Timeline feature
This is mainly a personal alert to the pending update to your page. The Timeline won’t directly affect company pages since this feature isn’t being made available to these. It will affect placements of ads and…
What are the implications for posting updates to brand Facebook pages?
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Edge Rank Checker
And the answer is…
“The average Post Lifetime for a Facebook Brand Page Update is 3 hours and 7 minutes"
This nugget is baed on considering that each individual Post has a “lifetime”. A Post is considered dead when the growth in engagement is less than 10% of the largest growth of engagement between hourly snapshots.
This data was sampled for EdgeRankChecker customers for the month of December, 2011 across 500+ Pages and over 30,000 individual Posts. The average Page size was approximately 140,000. Page size was not found to effect this.
Of course averages, are just well, averages. So the study also looked at individual pages, Average Post Lifetimes for individual Pages were also examined: some Pages averaged a Post Lifetime of approximately 10…
