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Rescooped by
Ally Greer
from SEO Marketing Strategy
November 8, 2012 12:29 PM
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Infographics stand out in a sea of text. Infographics condense information into a friendly visual format to make it easier to consume, understand and remember. Here are five reasons to include infographics in your content marketing format mix...
Ally: Heidi Cohen, marketing consultant, outlines eleven great ways to creat infographics that work. Though this genre of content creation/marketing may take a little (read: a lot) more effort than blogging or curation, it's important to include infographics in your mix. When it comes down to it, people don't have the time - or willingness - to read long articles with lots of stats and information. With a visually pleasing and entertaining illustration, you're more likely to get your more complex ideas and stats across while also encouraging sharing.
Via contentmarketingdigest
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Scooped by
Ally Greer
November 7, 2012 8:12 PM
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Michael Brenner, cofounder of Business 2 Community, took some time to write some simply, yet accurate, definitions of all the terms you need to know to get started on your content marketing journey.
The list includes: -Content Marketing -Content Strategy -Content Curation -Persona -Editorial Calendar -Response Manager ...and more!
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Scooped by
Ally Greer
November 7, 2012 2:10 AM
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From everythingpr:
But while the advent of the Internet allowed for anyone to publish virtually anything they wanted to, splashing random content haphazardly across the World Wide Web is not an effective marketing strategy. Success in the content world involves proper planning, the right staff and, most importantly, successful execution of a marketing campaign that combines original, quality content with brand awareness. With that in mind, here are some tips for those looking to implement a successful content marketing strategy.
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Scooped by
Ally Greer
November 6, 2012 2:56 PM
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From Jay Baer on Convince and Convert:
"It’s an interconnected world, folks. Your customers are impacted by a lot more than just the marketing tactics of your narrow competitive set. That’s why it drives me crazy when I hear stuff like, “These B2C examples aren’t relevant to us, because we’re B2B.”"
Ranging from an example of Amazon using tabbed navigation for the first time in 1998 to McDonalds Canada publicly answering any questions that their customers may have about their food, Jay Baer explains the importance of embracing tactics that are being used by big companies.
Although it may seem like McDonalds has nothing to do with your business, what matters is that they're using content marketing and everyone knows it. That should be the only reason for you to get into it. If everyone said "well, no one in my industry is doing it so why should I," where would industry leaders come from?
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Rescooped by
Ally Greer
from BI Revolution
November 5, 2012 8:26 PM
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Want Your Content Marketing To Create A Big Show? Content Marketing Tent Poles
Imagine A Circus Imagine a large circus tent. Now look up. Poles stick through the roof bowing the canvas keeping the tent aloft as if it was a large billowing sail. Tent poles are the silent strength of the circus. No one thinks about the relationship between pole, show and audience, but no poles means no circus.
Content marketers, and we are ALL content marketers now, must create the equivalent of tent poles to bow the canvas of their content. A content strategy without tent poles is either arrogant or uninformed. So what is a content marketing tent pole?
Content Marketing Tent Pole Defined A Content Marketing Tent Pole is a piece of content that stands taller than the rest of the content inside the tent where "taller" is achieved by virtue of the content's importance to the marketer's positioning (an internal thing) or the viral acceptance and support of the content (an external thing). Here are examples of each:
Internal More and More, Faster and Faster, Better and Better http://scenttrail.blogspot.com/2012/07/internet-markeings-secret-more-more.html
External 5 Magical Do More With Less Curation Tools http://www.atlanticbt.com/blog/internet-marketing-5-magical-do-more-with-less-curation-tools/
Internal Explained More and More, Faster and Faster, Better and Better is a critical tent pole for ScentTrail's key Internet marketing macro themes such as Search Engine Optimization, storytelling and content marketing.
External Explained 5 Magical Do More With Less was a surprise. When this article went viral with a potential audience of close to a million via Retweets it lengthens the pole. Not only does this pole get longer becoming a tent pole, but the content should be evaluated for it touching an important nerve such as Do More With Less.
When an article surprises you like this it is a good idea to do a deep dive on WHY since there is usually a bigger thing going on that you tripped over. In this case, after a deep dive, I think there is a bigger trend - the pressure to do more with less.
What are your "tent poles"?
Within a major content silo such as SEO there may be 3 to 7 tent poles. Common tent poles include:
* Tools and Tools reviews (also reviews of addons and plugins). * Infographics or other visualizations. * Amazing and serendipitous User Generated Content (UGC). * Your About Page (more on this soon). * Mega-viral content (look for the deeper trend). * Anything you wrote that predicted trends BEFORE the wave broke.
When you create content stategies don't forget the tent poles.
Via Martin (Marty) Smith
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Suggested by
Guillaume Decugis
November 5, 2012 6:19 PM
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Very interesting read for anyone who's using blogging as part of a Content Marketing strategy.
From a blog that focused simply on "covering" Buffer itself and providing tips for doing well on Twitter to a blog of over 400 posts on lifehacking and business in general, the Bufferapp blog is an example to be studied by all content marketers.
I took away many important things from this piece, but here are the key takeaways I got from each section:
1. Truly understanding your audience – who will read your blog, who should you write for? Referencing a presentation by Rand Fishkin, CEO of Moz, this section brings up the "Relevance scale," with the goal of making your posts relevant not only to your customers or porential customers, but the people who interact with those customers as well.
2. Achieving top quality – Ask: Will anyone email this article to a friend? Pretty self explanatory. The answer must always be yes.
3. The structure of your articles is as important as your content "Most readers are skimmers. Accomodate them.
4. Maximize your own excitement – What is the stuff we ourselves love to read about? Make it easy for your entire team to want to become involved in the blog.
5. Pictures are more powerful than you think: The science of using images properly Did you know that a statement shown to people accompanied by an image was more often marked as true as one without an image?
While reading all of this, keep in mind the inspiring quote from Rand Fishkin:
“Content marketing exists to build familiarity, likability and trust.”
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Scooped by
Ally Greer
November 5, 2012 12:56 PM
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Scott Stratten, also known as @unmarketing, spoke at BlogWorld 2012 about being great on social media. His presentation was themed: “Social media is not about being everywhere. You just have to be great where you are.”
When taking to social media to promote your brand and your content, it seems as though if you're good, you're great, but if you're bad, you're really bad. Scott Stratten added to his presentation that "being great on social media only really requires you to be average, because everyone else sucks." That said, he addressed the "7 Deadly Sins" of social media: Gluttony, Pride, Sloth, Greed, Lust, Envy, and Wrath. Sound familiar? Check out this post by PR Newswire to see them in the context of social media strategy.
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Scooped by
Ally Greer
November 5, 2012 12:58 AM
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Before the web and social media, brands had many less opportunities to tell the story of their brand. With the development of blogs, social networking, etc, content marketing has become the most important kind of marketing and the way to tell the story of a brand.
Making sure that the story of your brand is the right one, the most interesting one, the most memorable one, and the one that allows the brand to connect with its audience isn't an easy task, but it's certainly a deal-maker or breaker.
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Scooped by
Ally Greer
November 3, 2012 8:59 PM
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When using current events to create content, make sure to avoid a Newsjacking faux-pas.
From Business 2 Community: Content marketing thought leader David Meerman Scott coined the phrase to describe the “process by which you inject your ideas or angles into breaking news, in real time, in order to generate media coverage for yourself or your business.”
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Scooped by
Ally Greer
November 3, 2012 3:16 PM
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Every year since 2009, Joe Pulizzi and the Content Marketing Institude community make some predictions about the upcoming year in content marketing. Last year's best prediction involved PR departments and ad agencies moving strongly towards content marketing. It's safe to say that came true.
This article also lists some of the worst predictions, which are quite fun to read. Interestingly, one of the failed predictions references Google Plus brand pages becoming a "big thing." Though this could definitely be seen as an overall fail, I'd like to point out that, for some reason, Scoop.it has about double the followers on Google Plus as on Facebook.
Hmmm....
What's your prediction for next year in content marketing?
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Scooped by
Ally Greer
November 3, 2012 3:03 PM
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Make sure that your messaging is clear and easily understandable for your audience. The main goal of content marketing is to give answers to the people with questions about something which you know very well. If they can't understand what you have to say, they'll go elsewhere.
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Scooped by
Ally Greer
November 1, 2012 6:17 PM
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Whether you're using these to find out the best types of content to put out, or actually sharing them yourself, here are some great stats to be aware of.
According to the article, sharing statistics tends to increase your engagement and get you more followers. As an experiment, I tweeted out one of the stats from this page, and automatically got about 5 RTs/responses!
Building up your authority and finding out the best way to put out the right content for your audience are equally important in content marketing strategy.
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Scooped by
Ally Greer
October 30, 2012 4:23 PM
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Scoop.it announced its new partnership with HootSuite, the most popular Social Media Dashboard, this morning.
HootSuite has now added a Scoop.it app to its gallery and users can now monitor their followed topics and Scoop.it searches, and publish more content to their social media feeds.
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Scooped by
Ally Greer
November 7, 2012 10:23 PM
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If you ever for one second are feeling uninspired on what to write on your company blog, check out this amazing list of 50 different examples of things to write about. Your blog will be full for months!
Thanks, Jeff Bullas!
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Scooped by
Ally Greer
November 7, 2012 1:25 PM
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As content marketing becomes more and more prominent, everyone's always asking the question "How?"
How do I create content that gets my brand out there? How do I make sure that my content makes potential customers want to take action? How do I keep them interested?
Adarsh Thampy has some great strategies here; he takes it beyond the usual content marketing advice ("make it interesting, make it relevant") and presents some creative and useful ways to make sure your content does what it's meant to do: drive sales and brand awareness.
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Scooped by
Ally Greer
November 7, 2012 1:48 AM
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Inbound Marketer Greg Sherwood couldn't be more right to point out that "Return on Influence" is the new ROI. He highlights that:
"...we do know that influence is important to effective marketing in the digital age. In 2012, over 88% of adult Internet users in the U.S. used the web specifically to research products. These consumers were looking for information that would help them make purchasing decisions."
Before delving into his three useful tips for creating influential content (listening to your audience, writing "well and often," and learning from the pros), Sherwood highlights building your authority as a brand which in turn allows you to convince prospects to purchase from you.
I think that curation is an important part of building this authority. Creating content is great, and without question necessary, but a brand who only shares its own content is not going to be viewed as an authority in its space. The brand who is viewed as an authority is the one that shares a diverse yet relevant collection of content from all different sources, and places that content in a context that makes it even more relevant to its audience.
That, combined with Greg Sherwood's tips to great content creation, is the answer to becoming the most influential brand in your space.
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Rescooped by
Ally Greer
from Content Curation and Marketing
November 6, 2012 12:15 PM
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Rescooped by
Ally Greer
from Modern Marketer
November 5, 2012 8:09 PM
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Is it best to share on Tuesday or Thursday? Does it matter if your tweet is 15 words or 25? And does using a question mark really reduce your chances of viral growth?
There are many differences in content marketing tactics between B2B content and B2C content.
Via The Fish Firm II
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Scooped by
Ally Greer
November 5, 2012 2:35 PM
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It's pretty clear that RedBull knows what they're doing when it comes to content marketing. The Space Jump took place almost a month ago, and people are still talking about how genius it was for the company's marketing and PR.
The metrics in this post are proof that, if you find the right event and create the right content on the right channels, you can completely explode.
Also, check out the awesome "Event hijack" by Kit Kat.
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Scooped by
Ally Greer
November 5, 2012 1:02 AM
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via Content Marketing Institute
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Scooped by
Ally Greer
November 3, 2012 9:05 PM
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Your blog content means next to nothing if no one actually clicks on your links and reads it. Here are some tips on writing creative and enticing headlines.
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Scooped by
Ally Greer
November 3, 2012 3:26 PM
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From Econsultancy: "Content marketing is more than the latest buzz word. Done brilliantly it can be a powerful and versatile tool that will engage, educate, influence and importantly win you new business."
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Rescooped by
Ally Greer
from AtDotCom Social media
November 3, 2012 3:06 PM
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Marty Note Raise your hand if you have all the budget, people and time you need to do your Internet marketing job? No hands as I suspected. We IMers are the shock troops of the future. We are being asked to do more with less even as our world continues to SPEED UP.
This is why Robin Good's tool reviews are so important. We need TOOS to help. We also need processes and ideas. We need to work smart. I Scooped an article about working smart yesterday and linked my 5 Do More With Less Curation Tools to it. Now I an do the same with tools in the lead.
Tools That Can Help: http://www.atlanticbt.com/blog/internet-marketing-5-magical-do-more-with-less-curation-tools/
Processes and Ideas To Create More Content with less work: http://www.scoop.it/t/marketing-revolution/p/3182749153/5-ways-to-create-more-content-with-less-work
BTW, both of these posts are blowing up real good. My 5 Magical Curation tools post on the Atlantic BT blog is approaching an audience of a million due to power retweeters and the work smarter post from yesterday already has 63 views.
This kind of viral reception usually means the content is touching a nerve. Who needs better tools and to work smarter? Yep, that got all the hands in the room to go up.
Via Martin (Marty) Smith, John van den Brink
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Scooped by
Ally Greer
November 1, 2012 7:37 PM
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The key question that marketers need to ask when it comes to sales metrics is how often the content successfully turned consumers into customers. Baer stresses the same point as the infographic: “Content isn’t just about consumption, so don’t only track consumption. It’s also about sharing and leads and sales.”
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Suggested by
Guillaume Decugis
October 30, 2012 5:18 PM
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Content Marketing done right. Per Steve Farnsworth.
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