A few weeks ago, I asked work colleagues to share their own experiences on how they interact with a brand and convert on the web. The exercise was to screen capture the process and tell their story on the path of the buyer’s journey. Amazingly, we were able to find some common trends, as well as few unique instances. [Read more…]
On Tuesday, May 24, Google made some exciting new announcements for Advertisers using AdWords and Analytics products. Three years ago, Google saw a shift to mobile in the search landscape and started to incorporate enhanced campaigns into their AdWords platform, which allowed for mobile bid adjustments. Today, continuing on with its mobile first approach, Google wants mobile bids to be more than just adjustments. Soon advertisers in Adwords will have more flexibility and options across all devices. There will be an anchor bid for a device and then adjustments for all the other devices (mobile, tablet, and desktop). Google talked about brands, their mobile experiences, and the testing they embarked on to help those brands capture the “moments” when people need to make decision or complete a task. These are the “I want to know, go, do, or buy” – moments. [Read more…]
Adding a video component to your marketing strategy is a powerful way to increase the reach and impact of your brand. The statistics for online video views are staggering and continue to grow. Comscore reported that in March 2014 over 187 million people watched online video and the average American watched over 17 hours of online video in the month.
Most marketers today are faced with the challenge of driving more leads that turn into more sales. If you are not including video in your campaigns and leveraging them for SEO, you are missing a key component for success. One out of four marketers say they use video in email marketing campaigns, but 43% of marketers cited a lack of video content as a key reason for not using video in their marketing programs. [Read more…]
Content marketing has become a major trend in marketing today and organizations are spending an increasingly large portion of their marketing budgets creating and distributing content. According to the Content Marketing Institute, “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
In a world of competing demands for the marketing budget, why should an organization create a content marketing program? Here are five reasons it’s critical to create and Content Marketing program today.
1) The buying process has changed and customers are in control.
The Internet has dramatically changed the buying process. At one time, companies that sold goods and services controlled the flow of information to buyers. They provided product information through sales people in stores, at events, over the phone, and through outside sales teams in the form of brochures and other printed documents. Sellers controlled the buying process through the flow of information and buyers often faced an expensive and time-consuming task to get the information needed to make the best decision. The most important information such as reviews and real-life experiences from other customers was often the most difficult to get.
Today, buyers can get access to product and service information much faster on a company’s website, and they can also access articles, videos, reviews, white papers, e-books and other information that is provided by the sellers, their competitors, industry experts, amateurs, social media and even other customers.
Content Marketing lets you engage with potential customers by creating and distributing information that is important to your customers whenever they need it.
2) You need to get potential customers engaged early in today’s complex buying processes.
It’s no secret that the sales cycle for most B2B products is getting longer and that there are more people involved in the process. Since every organization is under pressure to make good decisions and keep costs low, buying committees are created and include people from disciples such as engineering, finance, marketing and IT. These committees develop purchase criteria and evaluate products over long periods of time to make good purchase decisions. Your sales team may only be engaged by the committee late in the process, but they are all consuming content to better understand your offering. If you wait until the end of the process when they are actually taking to vendors, you will miss the opportunity to influence the team as they set their decision criteria and even select possible solutions. By providing good and valuable content early in the process, you will be able to influence the team weeks or months before they reach out to your sales team.
3) It’s critical to establish thought leadership and set the purchase criteria schema so that you win.
Good content is more than a nice product brochure or pretty web page. It can influence the buyer to establish decision criteria that positions you to win. Well-written white papers or e-books that help the buyer understand how to diagnose a problem or understand a technology can help them, can be delivered in a way that features your strengths in the marketplace. These thought leadership documents are not written to promote your product, but designs to help properly frame the question. If you are successful in creating the framework for their buying decision, you’ll be much more successful when you present your solution to the problem.
4) If you have content, you can leverage social media and search to cost effectively drive engagement, leads and sales.
Social Media and search marketing have become major tools for marketing professionals. By taking advantage of organic search traffic and social media sites, you can generate traffic to your website without paying for advertising, and this in turn makes lead generation much more cost effective. The key to success in social media and search is good content. Search engines such as Google highly value new, original content on your blog and website when they decide on search engine rankings. In social media, it is the marketers with engaging and relevant posts, articles and videos who are successful in turning likes and followers in to website visitors and sales.
5) If you don’t provide the content, someone else will control the conversation.
Buyers have many choices when they are searching for information to help them solve a problem. You may feel that if you stay out of the content marketing game, buyers will still engage with you as they did in the past. The reality is that they have too many choices to go back to the past. If you don’t provide the content that sets the agenda and influences complex buying teams early in the process, you may find that are you left out completely when it’s time for the buyer to actually talk to the sales person.
The SEO landscape continues to shift, making it harder and harder for those that are using unearned tactics to appear within the search results listings. In an age when content is king, Google’s Matt Cutts announced in January the decay and fall of using guest blogging for SEO.
“Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.” – Matt Cutts January 20, 2014
Guest blogging at one time was a great way to gain links, promote content and your brand. As more and more SEO marketers were hungry for places to post content, blog and site owners saw an opportunity to capitalize. They started accepting payments for content placement. This content in most cases had keyword seeded anchor text and links pointing to pages to help increase page authority, which would then increase rank.
Websites like Search Engine Leaks – have been outing services that engage in the tactics of content placement for payment. So how do you promote content now?
Guest blogging when done correctly is still appropriate to use. If the guest blogger is trusted and known in the eyes of Google then the likelihood of being penalized is greatly decreased. Google’s authorship is one way to gain that trust. The other way is to not have your guest post links pass along page rank. If you “no follow” your links when citing and referencing from your post you are still within Google’s guidelines.
In 2014 let your content speak for itself, if worthy and valuable, others will naturally promote it and share.
