Content

Five Key Components of Effective Content Marketing

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Designing content that is likely to be referred and shared, for Content marketing that brings results, here are the Five Key Components.

Content Marketing Objective

Define your Content Marketing objective and  understand the reasons your audiences are likely to share your content. Create a check-list for each content marketing effort to understand the purpose of your content. A simple checklist can help you understand the content and the reason it is likely to be shared. An easy way to decide on your content marketing is to see where your content resides among the following key reasons; usefulness, discovery or reliving experiences.
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Content Marketing Strategy Framework

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Content Marketing Strategy Framework that enables brands build scalable operation and  serve the right content at the right time involves a five-step process. The questions that your Content Marketing Strategy needs to answer are:

The five steps in Content Marketing Strategy framework are

Purpose & Goals – Defining the purpose for your content. The question you need to answer is ” How we can create Business value from the creation of an engaged audience”
Audience – Defining the target group for your content and how they derive value from your content
Story – What are the unique ideas for your content for each stage of the buyer journey
Process – Process lays down the format for activating your plans
Measurement – Measurement includes gauging your performance and optimizing your efforts.

framework

With the Content Marketing Strategy framework, marketers are able to work out Content Marketing Strategy Statement that is aimed at a cohesive approach for Content Marketing efforts. Here is an easy template to help you work out your Content Marketing strategy statement.

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Use the Content Marketing Strategy statement to choose topics and add the same to your editorial checklist.

Purpose and Goals

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Purpose and Goals answer the reason for Content Marketing that could range from Increasing revenue to  boosting sales or deepening Customer loyalty to raising awareness. Content Marketing Purpose centers around the value proposition that your content brings with a view to creating value from an engaged audience and answers the question “Why are we creating the content in First place?’

Audience

audience

Define who your audience are and whom you are targeting with your content to turn them into subscribers. Some of the questions that you need to answer to get a clear picture pertain to understanding the needs, behaviors, current user state and any other defining characteristics.

Story

story

The story is a unique idea that lets you monetize audiences that gather around it. The story focuses on Why it happened. A story is a selling tool that is intended to deliver business value. With a story you can deliver unique business value by building customer relationships. With an effective story, brands can build thriving customer communities. At the heart of the story, is Value Creation and purpose. It does not necessarily have a beginning or an end. The story is a way to build a rapport and earn Trust of customers to turn them into loyal fans and supporters.

Process

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The Process is an operational plan that will enable your business to meet the Content Marketing requirement. The operational plan lays down the steps involved in publishing content and the order in which they should be executed. The process is a step-by-step plan that spells out the owner of each task for the team involved.

The Process also covers modus operandi for producing different content format and the best practices that should be followed. The Process also lists stakeholders (Creators/ Contributors and Distributors). The level of support, resources required and timelines form the Process for Content Marketing. It includes Site Navigation, standard routing process and work-flow, required Team and Skill set,  Editorial Style and communication guidelines, Channel Plan and required tools and systems for optimal production and creativity.

Measurement 

measurement

Measurement comprises of Key Performance Indicators and Metrics that help you ascertain your achievement of goals within a timeline. Determine the goals that are required to be achieved to eventually deliver on Key Performance indicators. E.g. if you are required to get to a rich audience database prior to generating qualified leads, you need to measure your performance for the goal of a rich audience database.

5 Ways To Make Content Marketing Work For You

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If your content marketing efforts are not yielding results, here are five things you need to pay attention to, to make content marketing work for you.

Documentation

You need to document the workflow of your content and the results. According to Huffington Post, documenting your content marketing efforts, will help you identify the missing link, between what is working and what you’re doing.

According to CMI research 53 percent B2B marketers who reported a documented strategy, found content marketing to be highly effective.

Highly Relevant Content

Target your customers with highly relevant content. Very often marketers confuse creating content with content that is considered valuable by target audience. To meet the needs of the audience, it is important to create content that meets the content marketing needs of the audience. This can be done by creating highly relevant content by assessing the users content needs and serving highly relevant content in a personalized manner.

Distribution Strategy

An effective approach to Content Distribution strategy combines three different forms of distribution; paid media, owned media and earned media.

An effective distribution strategy combines different channels and forms of distribution to arrive at a streamlined effort.

Create Credible content

There are several factors that can make your content credible. Some of the ways to make your content credible are:

1 Address real concerns

2. Solve customer issues

Measure the right signals

In case you are measuring the wrong signals, the results from your content marketing will appear flawed. To measure the right signals define the most important KPIs.

 

 

 

Top Ten Tips For Planning Your Holiday Season Campaign

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Holiday 2015 non-store retail sales grew 9 percent to a total of over USD 105 billion. Cyber Monday was the leading Sales day, the sixth year in a row, with more than USD 2.2 Billion spent on Desktop Computers alone. According to NRF, “Holiday sales in 2015 increased 3 percent to USD 626.1 billion — solid growth considering the unforeseen weather events across the country and an extreme deflationary retail environment.” NRF forecasted total growth, including online sales, of 3.7 percent.

Adobe reported mobile devices accounted for about 25 percent of sales and 45 percent of visits to retail websites from Nov. 1-Dec. 22. According to MarketWatch, Adobe said online sales in 2015 holiday season were up 12.7% to $83 billion. More than 31 days during the period between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31 surpassed the $1 billion mark in sales, a record that exceeds 25 days in 2014. Online sales grew 56% year-over-year on Dec. 23, up to $920 million from $590 million in 2014. “It wasn’t until the very end of the season that we saw a significant surge in sales, which drove the 12.7% year-over-year growth,” said Tyler White, an analyst with the Adobe Digital Index. “Phone traffic exceeding desktop traffic some days was one of the drivers of that growth.” The buy-online-pick-up-in-store option was a growth driver in the week before Christmas. Adobe had forecast 11% overall growth for the season, White said.

According to Marin, for the days between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, smartphone clicks grew by 87 percent YOY almost equaling desktop clicks. This reflects a dramatic increase compared to 2014 when smartphone clicks accounted for only 28 percent of all clicks.

Clicks grew across smartphones, tablets, and desktops, with the large increase in smartphone click share being attributed to growing smartphone adoption. The increase in tablet and desktop clicks YoY shows that people are using their smartphones in addition to desktop and tablet devices, not instead of them.

Marin saw similar trends across spend, with the ad spend share for mobile growing by 66 percent YoY.
Overall ad spend for mobile was up 101 percent with spend doubling on both Google and Bing YoY.

Cyber Monday beat Black Friday in terms of clicks and ad spends for both 2014 and 2015 with cost per click (CPC) prices markedly higher than any other day over the weekend.

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Top Ten Tips for Planning Your Holiday Campaign 2016

Decide on your campaign theme and core campaign idea.

Start with analyzing the holiday data that is available to you from last year as well as Back To School campaign data. Highest priority is to make sure all budgets and metrics are aligned to factor in any changes in consumer behavior.

Allocate budgets to optimize your campaigns across channels and devices with a single customer view. Key days are Thanksgiving, Cyber Monday, Black Friday and Christmas.

According to an SEO firm,WPromote the best practice is to begin setting up heavily targeted paid ads, display (video/image ads) product listing ads, and remarketing ads in Google AdWords and Bing Ads at the earliest to coincide with seasonal days.

Plan your Mobile engagement strategy. Optimize your every campaign for mobile, with mobile PLAs, a mobile website, and accurate device tracking set up in your analytics. In case you have an app then planning an app engagement campaign within your brand campaign can increase your conversions. Native Social Media Ads are important for Targeting Mobile users. Mobile App Promotion Ads can get your app installed and downloaded before the start of the holiday season.

Develop content marketing and promotion initiatives as early as mid-October and launch content systematically during the downtime between holidays, instead of only in limited windows around the holidays themselves. Follow up your content marketing with Remarketing and Retargeting campaigns.

Create holiday-optimized content, including an infographic or holiday gift guide, hosted on a website page instead of a blog, and leave it on the main site navigation until launch in order to get indexed in Google and start building equity as early as possible. This could improve CTR for holiday related terms.

Embark on a campaign of social network posting about holiday gift guides, sales, wish lists, and other promotions as early as October but no later than the beginning of November; budget for paid/promoted social posts to increase visibility and audience reach, especially in the run-up to Thanksgiving.

Set up a new email promotion workflow specifically for the holiday season based on what holiday products, promotions, or categories a user visits on your site.

Personalize your promotions, in particular, mobile, social and email promotions; tailor specific offers to customers’ needs to increase CTRs and conversions and turn mobile, email and social channels into huge revenue generators. Look for the mobile moments that are right for promoting your offers with push messaging campaigns. Create a Follow through marketing plan to optimize ROI from your campaigns, by analyzing reasons for cart abandons and setting a remarketing or an email marketing campaign.