Month: July 2019

Effective Content Marketing is as important as creating quality content. After all, if you aren’t able to deliver your content to the right audience, it will not deliver any value.

Previously we discussed free ways you can market your content, but when that’s not an option or isn’t enough, you have to rely on Paid Content Marketing techniques.

After all, while Organic content marketing helps retain value over a long period of time, Paid Promotions are quite effective for gaining engagements in a short period of time (or based on your requirements).

Paid promotion includes a variety of techniques, from display ads, paid social marketing and paid searches, to content distribution networks through which you can promote your content.

Paid Promotions on Social Media

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram is a hub of content where users spend the majority of their time everyday. This usually makes Paid content marketing on social media more effective than other sources.

Social media advertising platforms also give you the option to customize your target audience, which is beneficial because social media platforms actively track user behavior. This lets you show your ads to the right audience, and even customize your ads based on your target audience.

For example, if you have recently searched for baby products, prepare to see an ad on Facebook featuring baby products!

Furthermore, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter let you create campaigns based on your business’ goals, whether it is to create awareness of your brand or product, drive traffic to a website, or increase sales. The respective ad platforms also let you monitor and analyze data on the go, so that you can react to changes and optimize your campaigns accordingly.

Remember that when designing your ad creatives, you should include images or videos that appeal to your target to get the most engagement from users. If you have a decent sized budget allocated for your campaign, run more than one ad in each campaign, testing different creative elements and call-to-action methods.

Most users also get confused about which social media platform to run paid promotions on – the answer to this is simple. First figure where most of your audience is, and accordingly divide your budget. Facebook is the easiest choice for most businesses, while more corporate services may be more appropriate to run on LinkedIn.

Paid Search

Paid search (also called Search Engine Marketing) includes putting your ads on a search engine’s result pages. This technique comes in handy when you want to get your content in front of customers when they are about to make a purchase decision.

Two of the most common tools that are used in Paid Promotions for search engines are Google Ads and Microsoft’s Bing Ads.

SEM functions better as a responsive advertising mechanism as it goes beyond simply linking users to a site, but also encourages them to take specific actions, such as signing up for a trial version or downloading a PDF document.

The first step for SEM is building a keyword list relevant to your business. When prospective customers are searching for these keywords, your ads will be shown to them. Several tools like Wordstream’s Free Keyword Tool and chrome extensions like Keywords Everywhere are useful for researching relevant keywords.

As per your ad budget, you can choose the kind of ads you want to run. For example, an Exact Match ad is one in which the user’s query must exactly match the keywords you run your ads for. This type of ad provides strict targeting at a low cost per click (CPC) and lower traffic volumes. A Broad Match ad brings more traffic volume, but has a higher CPC and looser targeting. While it does generate more traffic, it might not be the kind you are looking for.

The next step is to create compelling ad copy that is as specific as it can possibly be, as users show intent by searching for very specific search items.

If you are providing gated content (content which requires a step as an initiation from readers eg: asking them for their email addresses), let that be known in your ad text. However, make sure you emphasize that they will be getting exclusive and informative content that others will not.

Lastly, once you have engaged with your prospective customer and convinced them to click on your ad, you need to drive traffic to a relevant landing page. Make sure you deliver what you promised on your ad. Do not redirect them to a generic homepage as this will cause a majority to lose interest and leave.

Display Ads

Display advertising is defined by banner ads that appear in specifically designated areas of a website or social media platforms. While plaintext ads can be run, you can get much more out of your campaigns if you use images, videos, or animations that grab the attention of users.

Paid promotions here are in the form of banner ads are distributed across the web using an ad server like Google Display Networks, which shows ads from Google. Display ads are often used for retargeting, where a user who has previously visited your site will see ads for your site while they are surfing elsewhere on the web.

For example, if you have looked at a specific microwave oven in Daraz, you might come across related ads while you are reading a blog, an online news portal, or even in email newsletters, depending on how the ad server is working with several other sites.

There are various ways in which you can retarget, an audience. It can be based on time period, frequency, or even specificity. Retargeting, like paid searches, is used to get direct responses or actions from your audience. So, it can be used to generate highly qualified leads.

To start paid promotions with display ads, figure out your target audience first. For example, one way to start promoting new content would be to use Pixel-based retargeting, which is a way to re-display your material to any anonymous site visitors.

Once you track your audience, offer them ads promoting relevant and unique content. When you design an ad, creative assets are very important. Make sure you ads stands out from the crowd and has a clear call-to-action. In display ads, it is important to use colors that pop out, or images that will stand out to get more engagement from the users.

Email Marketing

In content marketing, you need to offer your audience a way to get regular updates about your content to make sure they keep coming back which helps to accelerate your brand building process.

One way to do this is by collecting email addresses via a specific CTA. You can then send regular newsletters to people who have expressed an interest in your content, with new content as well as summarising recent highlights.

FeedPress is one such platform used for email marketing. It offers basic analytics so you can track your subscribers and the progress of your work. It also provides a customizable newsletter template that you can use to make your emails fit your brand.

If you are regularly producing content with the same format, you can also set up an RSS (Rich Site Summary) feed that will allow your readers to subscribe to your updates automatically.

In order to avoid legal complications, make sure that your subscribers opt in for your newsletter voluntarily.

While Email Marketing isn’t technically a paid promotion technique, most platforms aren’t free or only offer limited capabilities for free users.

Content Distribution Networks

Content distribution networks (CDN) are quickly becoming powerful tools for engaging new audiences and expanding the reach of creative content.

This method of online advertising provides content that is within the context of a user’s experience, making the native advertising feel less intrusive and more like part of a discovery process, while also increasing the odds of users clicking through to your site.

If you see recommendations like “If you like this, then read” or “You might also enjoy”, then these are paid placements from content distribution networks such as Taboola and Outbrain.

For content creators, this Paid Promotion method is effective for improving the end user’s experience, increasing ad impressions, improving conversion rates, and strengthening customer loyalty.

Looking for ways to promote your brand using Paid Promotions?

Call us or fill out this form today to book a free 1 hour consultation with our Content Marketing Experts! We can help you figure your entire strategy and help you build your brand using both organic and paid promotions.

We always focus on content creation as the most important part of marketing our products and services online. However, most companies fail at content marketing due to a lack of appropriate strategies. Content marketing isn’t only about creating useful content and posting it online.

According to Hubspot Academy, “content marketing is a strategic marketing and business process focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience, and ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Internet is a very crowded place, and while you might have amazing content, there is still a lot of content that is already available. You need to put a great deal of effort from day one.

In this blog, we will reflect upon some free techniques that you can use to market your content to your audience in an effective and efficient way.

Building an audience

When you create content for your audience, you go through brainstorming and prioritization phases. If you have sorted your content and segregated its target audience, you’re already off to a good start.

Some of the key tools that might help you market your content better are:

Influencer marketing

Influencers are industry experts who are experienced in generating and nurturing large audiences, and have the clout to influence those audiences. They are the ones who are listened to closely by your target audience. Networking with influencers is an effective way for marketers to gain brand recognition.

For influencers, both high social authority and a high number of followers are good. However, social authority can be more beneficial than large amounts of followers. It indicates that the influencer has an engaged audience rather than a passive one.

You can reach out to specific influencers through a tool called Buzzstream. Once you fill in your information with specific keywords, it generates contact information for people related to those niches. This will help you connect with the influencers and ask for suggestions, advice, or even quotes to include in your writings.

You can add the influencers’ websites and social media account links to your blog as payback and request them to share your content once it is published. This will increase your market exposure and increase the credibility and reputation of your content and brand.

Comment marketing

Have you observed irrelevant or promotional links commented under blogs and social media videos? These tactics are mostly ineffective and the comment usually gets zero recognition. In extreme cases, it can even get you banned from sites that keep an eye on posted comments.

This is why you need to focus more on effective ways of being visible. Instead of being too obvious and posting links everywhere, search for people who are writing interesting things correlated to your content. Converse with them in the comment section, but do not mention your product, services, or your content.

The key purpose of comment marketing is to establish yourself as someone who is interested & knowledgeable in a certain topic. This will build your reputation and will help you gain followers in the long term.

Guest Posting

For content marketing, it is not necessary for your content to be visible only on your website. Through guest posting, you can create content for other websites with similar target audience but with higher reach. Guest posting is useful when you want to gain authority, qualified traffic to your site, relevant links, motivated leads, and their conversions.

You need to search for websites that have good page authority and domain authority and start commenting on their posts to build a relationship with them. Pitch the editors of those websites with exciting blog post ideas that are relevant to their sites.

If you want to try guest posting, find websites with credibility and relevance to you. Publish unique, relevant, and interesting content that will make readers seek you out.

Outreach / PR

Another avenue for promoting your content is Outreach and Public Relations, whose foundation lies in relationship building. In both of these cases, you find out what the writer or reporter is actually interested in and carefully tailor your pitches to make sure you send relevant information to them. This will encourage them to write good things about you in return.

When networking, Twitter is the most reliable source for finding people you want to target. For Twitter, Followerwonk is a great tool to search for influencers, journalists, writers, or even hashtags related to what you are writing about.

Once you know who you need to target, you need to work on your pitch.

Journalists and writers want to touch subjects that are new and exciting, rather than something cliche and reposts. They will appreciate you valuing their time and putting some thought into the transaction and what they will be getting out of it.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing includes more relationship building than just straightforward promotional activity. Content and social media teams work together to create relevant and interesting content they can readily share.

When promoting your content on social media, you need to choose the right channel for your product/services. Some content will market readily with Twitter, however, some will go perfectly with Facebook. You should know your audience well enough to know where they would want to see certain content.

Post your content at the right times with social media management tools like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and Buffer. These tools work with the built-in analytics in social media to give information on what day(s) and the time your target audience is active.

Although hashtags are overused nowadays in social media posts, it can be one way to get eyes on your content. Follow hashtags that might be relevant for your industry and include them in your posts.

These are the ways in which you can market your content by building an audience for which you do not require money. Besides these, there are also paid resources which can promote your content on social channels.

Hopefully, you now have all the information you need to get your content out into the world to the widest audience possible.

Need more tips and tricks to promote your content?

Call us or fill out this form today to book a free 1 hour consultation with our experts.

There is no debate about the importance of content marketing for your business – good content is the lifeline of most successful digital marketing campaigns.

But what makes content “good”?

Simply put, focus on what your audience is searching for and create relevant content, because haphazard content without proper planning might result in loss of credibility & quality traffic.

What is Content Strategy?

Content strategy focuses on planning, creation, delivery, and governance of content. The goal of any business’ content strategy should be to create meaningful, cohesive, engaging, and sustainable content.

Some people might confuse Content Strategy with Content Marketing Strategy. Content marketing strategy is a strategic approach, which also includes content strategies. A content marketing strategy encompasses your resources, limitations and gives a sense of direction to your communicative approaches.

How to set up a successful Content Strategy for your business?

Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure effectiveness of content

When formulating a strategy for your business, you need to first identify your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

A KPI quantifies the success of a goal or other qualitative measures you would want to track. E.g. you want people to sign up for an event by filling up a form. In this case, the number of forms filled up in a specific time period would be a relevant KPI.

When setting up your performance indicators, remember to follow the principles of simplicity, relevance, timeliness, and instant usefulness.

Keep in mind that performance indicators may also vary from business to business, or even change with time within the same business as well.

Follow this simple exercise when choosing your KPIs:

1. Write down 5 major short term goals for your business.
2. Write down 5 major long term goals for your business.
3. Write down 10 actions you want your audience to take as a result of your content.
4. Evaluate each of the actions against your goals.
5. Choose actions that most directly support your goal and identify metrics that measure each of these actions.

With the metrics in hand, you are now ready to start measuring your content’s effectiveness.

Understand the audience consuming your content

Now that you know what you want from your audience, try to understand your audience. One way to do this is to create and analyze buyer personas for your target market.

According to HubSpot, “Buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customers based on market research and real data based on your current customers.”

The goal of this exercise is to figure out how you can connect with your customers by focusing on the content they are being delivered, and how they perceive those messages.

Analyze the content your competitors are putting up

Now that you have an understanding about your customers, the next step would be to closely analyze your competitors.

A thorough analysis involves reviewing your competitor’s target market, products, market shares, and strategies. The most common tool for this analysis is SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats).

In this digital age, this can be done easily by mapping their web pages and social media presence. There are also various instruments through which we can assess the performance of our webpages.

An indicator of how well your content is doing amongst competitors is your SERP (Search Engine Ranking Pages) ranking. Although some amount of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is required to achieve a higher ranking, ultimately it is dependent on your content.

You can analyze your competitor’s website by answering questions like:

• How long did it take for the site to load?
• How active are their CTAs? How responsive is their customer service?
• What are they offering? Do some of their offerings coincide with yours?
• What are their prices?
• What are the main messages and tones that they are using in their content?
• What strategy do they follow while structuring their content?

Once you have answered the above questions, ask the same questions for your website as well. It will give you a decent reflection on where you stand in regards to your competitors.

This analysis is not about imitating your competitors. It is about finding out what they have been doing, where they lack and what you can do better.

If you think your competitors are doing better than you, it’s time to ask yourself some really serious questions, like:

• What is my ultimate goal with this channel?
• What does my audience want to do when they use this channel?
• Is my target audience active on the channel I use?
• Am I using the right CTAs?
• Am I pushing my brand offering too much?
• Am I talking about interesting ideas?

Understand your business and the kind of content right for you

When creating content for your business, it is necessary to set a guideline for the voice and tone. The choices that you make in order to portray your ideas might affect how your brand communicates to its audiences now, and also in the future.

For identifying the tone and voice of your content, you can do an exercise where you list some statements on how you want your customers to perceive your brand, or what the intention of the brand that you have created is. After that, suggest a word that will best complete the following sentences.

You can start with statements like:

• My brand makes people feel…
• If my customers described my brand they would say…
• I want my brand to be…

Segregate the words generated and choose unique or similar ones. Now, you have a smaller pile of words that you actually want people to list when they come across your brands.

Your brand’s voice is one of the key factors that will differentiate you from your competitors. Having a distinct tone and voice in your content makes it easier to retain customer attention, and sets you apart from other business entities who only focus on product sales.

Companies also need to be consistent with what they deliver. E.g. if you are formal and highly descriptive in your product catalog but casual in your customer service, customers might lose trust in your brand.

Consistency is the key in content strategy. Being consistent will not only establish your brand identity, but also supports brand awareness and increases the trust in your brand.

Ideate & Prioritize your content

Now that you know how you should be delivering your content, the next step should focus on what you deliver. Plan out your content. You can do this in various ways, like keyword research, competition research, or even a simple walk-and-think session. There is no set way to ideate, since it is very subjective in nature.

If you have the luxury of having more brains than one, plan a brainstorming session. Sit down with others, and discuss ideas and avenues of content you can explore. You will be amazed at how well brainstorming sessions work, provided they are done properly, of course.

A successful brainstorming session requires trust, respect, encouragement, and equality.

After you’ve brainstormed, sort through the ideas and implement the best ones. All good ideas need not be implemented. Prioritization is important. Rank your ideas in order of pursuing ability and importance.

Now you have content ideas that are not only relevant and valuable to your audience, but also supports your business goals.

The aforementioned tips will help you boost the quality of content you put online or even offline. Remember that these are just basic exercises, and there are many other things you can do to really bring out the best in your content strategy.

Have more queries on formulating your content strategy?

Give us a call at 9801136042 or mail us at info@act360.com.np for a free one-hour consultation with our experts.