10 Lessons Your Competitors Can Teach You About Content Marketing

There is nothing wrong with a healthy dose of competition. In fact, competition shows that each party is striving to do their absolute best in order to meet some sort of overall goal. In the world of content marketing, competition can be a bit cutthroat to be seen as the best of the best. Every company wants to be the industry thought leader, the go-to source for quality content or products, and the big brand name that instantly enters clients’ minds. It is a big world out there in content marketing, and competition can feel like it is lurking in every corner.

If you think that this is a bad thing, it might be time to change your tune. Sure, competitors can get in your way, but what I’m trying to show you is that there is a lot that you can learn from them. Whether you are the competitive type or not, analyzing the competition can bring big benefits to your own business. Let’s take a look at what your competitors can teach you about content.

1. Competitors Help You Find Prime Marketing Opportunities. If you are in an older industry that is generally stuck in the 80s advertising mindset, this is a prime opportunity for your company to rise to the top. Take the vacuum industry, for example. Remember when salesmen would go door-to-door selling vacuums, and it actually worked? It is relatively safe to say that, in 2014, door-to-door sales are not what they used to be.

You would be surprised with how many industries are out of touch with modern marketing techniques. This may be more prevalent in smaller towns, but industries such as home improvement and plumbing have huge opportunity to out scale their competitors with modern techniques. A little bit of content and social media marketing can go a long way for small town businesses.

If you happen to be one of those small town business owners, and your competitors insist that old marketing still works in today’s market, the door is wide open for you to dominate your niche with great content. Their refusal to get with the times can quickly put dollars in your pocket, and put you on the fast track to becoming a thought leader in your industry.

2. Competitors Can Show You How To Use Social Media (The Right Way). Thanks to social media, it is easy to see how your competitors handle customer service issues on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In general, responding to customer inquiries as quickly as possible is best etiquette. Unfortunately, many companies drop the ball when it comes to customer service on social media. Analyzing your competitors’ response time and customer conversations can give you great insight on how to handle your own customer issues.

Competitor social media profiles will also leave clues for what content is performing the best and drumming up the most engagement. If you are scoping out the competition on Facebook for content ideas, take a look at how many likes, shares, and re-tweets their content has. This will give you an idea of what kind of content can work for your company, too.

3. Competitors Can Teach You How To Be a Real Person (With Content). All too often, companies can market themselves with little to no personality elements. Lack of personality in content marketing can be a big turn off to your audience. Customers want to feel as if they are engaging with a human, not a robot. Using scripted responses on your website with content that is dryer than a textbook will put almost any prospective customer to sleep. If you want to drive away sales, un-engaging content might just do the trick.

On the other side of the coin, injecting a little personality into your content can go a long way. There are several ways to implement this technique without going over board, such as:

• Make fun of yourself
• Tell a story
• Ask questions
• Respond to questions
• Add humor

These are just a few ways of keeping your content a little less dry, and showing that you are, in fact, human. Writing with personality can be a little tricky to master, but you will be a step ahead of the ho-hum content produced by your competitor.

4. Competitors Can Force You to Up Your Content Game. If your competitors happen to be successful content marketers that hit the nail on the head almost every time, you know that are faced with some tough competition. Instead of throwing in the towel and envying their every keystroke, you can turn the situation around and come up with some smart marketing of your own.

For example, there is a super popular and memorable UK Christmas campaign happening right now with Monty the Penguin. Monty is the brainchild of John Lewis, a UK-based department store that sells products from iPads to clothing. With this Christmas campaign, Monty the Penguin is the story of a penguin and a small boy who are best of friends. As time goes on, Monty starts to yearn the love of another from his own kind. The boy does an act of selfless love so Monty can experience true happiness, but there is another big twist that happens in the end. The story of Monty and Sam is a real tearjerker, and it is no wonder it has been a huge success in the UK.

As an attempt to one-up the story of Monty the Penguin, another UK-based company known as Sainsbury’s developed their own Christmas content strategy that tugs on the heart strings. The story is a three-minute video called Christmas is For Sharing, and it spotlights British and German troops during the World War I. On Christmas day, the soldiers set their weapons aside and play soccer with each other instead of firing off guns and driving around massive tanks. The video was well received by its customer base, as it uses the marketing tactic of emotion to draw in the consumer.

Although Christmas is For Sharing invokes emotion, I personally think that John Lewis did it better with Monty the Penguin. Then again, I am biased toward adorable animals.

Either way, Sainsbury used John Lewis’ leverage of pulling on the heartstrings to create their own compelling campaign. You can piggy back off of your competitor’s ideas, just be sure to always add your own twist. 

5. Competitors Can Help You Find Content Gaps. Once you understand what makes great content, it is easy to spot gaps and missing information within the content of your competitors. Even if the content gaps are not so obvious, customer comments can leave clues. Take your time to read through your competitors’ comments section, and take note of questions customers are asking.

Finding content gaps from competitors is beneficial to you for several reasons. First, it gives you an opportunity to create brand new content that the competition was not able to provide. Second, it helps to position you as a thought leader. Lastly, it helps you be seen as a reliable and educational resource in your industry. The best content always educates, entertains, and provides value to the audience. Filling in content gaps give you the ability to meet the criteria from all of the above.

6. Competitors Help Teach You The Value of Good Content. Have you ever went to a website that did not contain the information you were looking for? If so, what did you do next? I am willing to bet that you clicked the back button and went to another source to get your information. Am I right?

This is a shining example of what can happen when your website is filled with bad content, or even no content at all. Lucky for you, bad competitor content can send visitors straight to your website in this instance. Unfortunately, there are companies out there that still fail to see the value of good content. The truth of the matter is that bad content can literally mean losing money. If customers can’t get the information that they need from you, they will find someone else who can provide.

Compare your content to the competition and see how you stack up to one another. If they have considerably more content from you, carefully analyze what you are missing and strategize a plan to get better content on your own website. This might consist of simply adding an About Us page, or taking the steps to setting up your own company blog. If your competitor has higher quality content on their website compared to yours, it is likely that customers are clicking in their direction.

7. Competitors Can Teach You a Content Schedule. If your competitor is on top of their content game, pay close attention to their publishing schedule. How frequently do they post new content? This matters because you can be prepared with similar content around a similar publishing schedule, which will keep competitors on their toes.

Analyzing your competitor’s schedule is also beneficial, because you will get an idea of what kind of content works best in your industry. Use their schedule to build your own base schedule with your own fresh content.

8. Competitors Can Teach You About Content Curation. Content curation is the act of sharing third party blogs, articles, and other forms of content to your own audience. When you are creating content, you want to find the best possible content available in your industry. Sometimes, that content happens to come from your competitors. When this happens, there is no need to hold back sharing competitor content. In fact, you can actually benefit from curating competitor content for several reasons.

• Curating competitor content can help you establish relationships with said competitor. You might be competitors, but that does not mean that you are always at war. Good and valuable content deserves to be shared, and your audience will thank you for it.
• Curating competitor content also puts you in the position as a thought leader, as you are not afraid to admit when your competitor created something spectacular.
• This form of curated content also helps with branding. Since the two of you are in the same industry, sharing content gives you an opportunity to build your name in your industry and establish credibility.

Curating content from your competitor does not equal defeat. It means that a door has opened to new content marketing opportunities, and possibly new and lasting relationships.

9. Competitors Can Teach You About Repurposing Content. If you are running short on ideas for your own content, you can repurpose competitor content with your own twist. Blog posts can be turned into slide shows, info graphics, and even videos. The trick to repurposing competitor content is adding your own twist. For example, you don’t want to repurpose a blog post into a slide show with the same exact information. Use that content to branch off into another direction that provides value, enhance the presentation, or find a better and smarter way to turn that topic into an influential piece of content.

10. Competitors Can Help You Find Your Content Identity. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this post, everyone wants to the thought leader in their industry. If you are just starting out with content marketing, you might not be too sure as to what message you are trying to convey to your audience. The key here is to fill your content with what your competition is lacking. This can take a bit of serious brainstorming and creativity, but finding your identity is essential to building your brand and creating the most compelling content possible. Once you have your voice and understand your customers’ needs, your competition doesn’t stand a chance.

As you can see, there is a lot to be learned of content marketing from your competition. However, once you become a content marketing rock star in your own field, they can learn a thing or two from you, too.

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How to Create Awesome Infographics Without Being a Designer

If you’re anything like me, you learned how to use programs like Photoshop and Gimp out of necessity to do minor changes to photos. You might have even dabbled in some easier graphic design projects for your own website, but it takes you hours to get the image or the design looking just right and you’re left exhausted. You might even spend time looking up tutorials on how to achieve a certain effect and still have trouble re-creating it.

In short, while you do know your way around the programs like Photoshop to a certain extent, it takes you forever and there’s absolutely no way you’d call yourself a graphic designer. But then, you’re surfing around the web and you noticed some really cool infographics on things like fashion, music and food and you can’t help but wish that you could create something like that; even if it’d take you a week.

Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s definitely possible to create some awesome infographics in any category that you choose, EVEN if you’re not a designer. In this blog post, I’m going to introduce you to three awesome tools to create the best infographics, tell you how to use them AND how you can share your infographics in different channels all over the web. So, let’s get started!

Introducing Easel.ly

First of all, I love the name of this tool, it’s a great play on words using easel (as in drawing pad) to play on easily’.

Launched two years ago in 2012, Easel.ly has hundreds of awesome infographic templates and design objects that even the most design novice can customize and share online. You can drag and drop design elements however you see fit or even upload your own background image from scratch as a template. The best part? Easel.ly is free!

Easel.ly is super popular with students, teachers and business owners who need to put together lesson plans or concepts in easy-to-follow visual forms. In fact, Easel.ly received the 2013 Best Websites for Teaching and Learning Award from the American Association of School Librarians (AASL).

So how does it work? Simply go to Easel.ly and click on ‘Create an Infographic’. Once you land on the page, you can pick a blank template or one of the other several hundred and get started!

Choose a category to find the best template that you want and then work your magic, dragging and dropping different backgrounds, themes, shapes, objects and putting in text. Then you can save it and share it through a browser link, a web link you can embed into your blog and share it via Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest!

In terms of going the extra mile in sharing your awesome infographic via social, you could even try attracting new audiences on LinkedIn, Google+ and Instagram and even using new tools like Glossi to create a new platform like an online magazine featuring cool infographics before sharing them. Creativity and a little out-of-the-box thinking can go a long way.

How to Describe Piktochart

Piktochart is another awesome online tool for creating cool infographics. It’s little more in-depth then Easel.ly in that it’s a software platform that allows you to embed videos, change the fonts, colours, add different line elements and even charts.

You can even import Google or Excel spreadsheets to create your own charts and customize the infographic by uploading your own images or using the more than 2000 high-res, print-ready graphics in the Piktochart library. Note: While you can change the colors of the icons and graphics from the Piktochart library, you can’t use the program to change the colors on your own images. You’d have to make the changes on an external program first

When it comes to sharing your Piktochart infographic, you can choose the size and the orientation, down to the paper size that you want to print it on. You can embed it in an email campaign and send it through your email campaign client such as MailChimp, MyEmma or Constant Contact and share it via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+ just by uploading it to your status update.

You can even include it in online Flickr galleries and share it in your Google+ communities, LinkedIn groups and Google Hangouts to help MAKE ONLINE collaborations a little more creative and visually informative.

How ReciteThis is Different

OK, so up until this point, I’ve been sharing a couple of really cool infographic tools with you that help you make IMAGE-based infographics. So they’re all a little more visual. But, what if you want to create a cool infographic using quotes or proverbs?

That’s where ReciteThis comes in. You can turn a quote into a masterpiece simply by typing whatever quote or proverb into the text box, or choosing a quote from the ReciteThis database. Then you select a background from a slideshow at the bottom of the page and press ‘Create’.

Afterwards, you have the option of posting it to Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or StumbleUpon to share with friends, downloading it for printing purposes or to share with other platforms like LinkedIn or e-mailing it to anyone you want.

So now you know how to create some amazingly fun, creative and detailed infographics-even if you’re NOT a graphic designer! Keep it locked here for more great tips on content MARKETING new social marketing and online tools AND tricks on how to better reach your audiences.

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6 Top-Secret Content Marketing Growth Hacks

These tips and tricks can help you make the most out of your content marketing efforts. Can you work them into your strategy?

When working in a specific area for awhile, either on purpose or by pure serendipity you tend to uncover hidden gems. Working in the content marketing industry over the last few years has been no exception.

Go All in on Ranking Blog Posts

Have you ever had a blog post that with little effort started ranking in the top one to three positions on search results for an important keyword? Then all of a sudden you see that this blog is now driving a significant number of organic search visitors. 

Go all in and covert that blog post into a fully built out and expanded page on your site. Increase the value the visitor gets from coming to the page by adding additional content, including videos, expert opinions, and more.

In addition to developing more value on this page for the visitor, optimize the page for conversion by experimenting with conversion offers and different call-to-action styles and placements.

It's likely that converting a blog into a fully built out page will also bump up a search listing even higher in the results.

Gain Free Eyeballs

Collaborating with other industry experts on content has a great deal of benefits and I'd highly recommend doing it on a regular basis.

With the right approach, you'd be surprised how easy it is to get others to collaborate with you for free. The key is to find industry experts or complementary companies with a big social following made up of the same personas your content is trying to target.

One of the biggest benefits is that typically those who you collaborate with will also share out the content to their audience. This opens the door to a whole new audience that you would likely never be able to get in front of and as they come to your website to read the blog, you can convert them into your audience. 

You can take it one step further and create a mini paid social campaign to promote the blog post and use the contributor as the way you target who see's the post.

Shorten the Process

The standard flow of the user's experience is: read a blog, click a call to action, visit a landing page, and fill out the form. But what if you could eliminate steps to make this process easier?

HubSpot recently did a study where they experimented replacing the call to action with a mini-landing page module. This module had the content offer and a form to fill out right on the blog.

So what did they find? When HubSpot took a look at their results, they found there was a four times increase on lead conversion when using the mini landing page module vs. the call to action linking to a landing page! You can read all about their experiment here: "Which Works Better for Blog Conversion: A Standard CTA or a Full Form?"

I can't say this is always going to be the best option for every offer and every company. The best thing you can do is test and measure this approach and see if it works for your particular case.

Give New Life to Popular Old Content

There's a good chance that you have written a few blockbuster hits over the years - content that was very popular, got lots of shares, and converted or assisted in converting a great deal of leads.

Over time, especially if it was time-specific, that content slowly fades into the shadows and you move on to create new content in hopes of creating the next big post. However, sometimes the best way to ensure a successful post is not to create something new, but rather to polish and revive something that was already successful.

Take the time to go back and identify your best content to find new ways to breathe new life into it. This could be by expanding on the idea, updating it based on new best practices, creating an expanded video, or getting other industry experts to add their opinion. 

Then you can re-promote the content as "new and improved." Because that topic was so successful the first time around, it's likely that the expanded version will also be very successful.

Tweak the Time You Post on Social

At any given time only about 7 to 10 percent of your Twitter followers are logged into Twitter. This means if you're lucky and share content at your busiest point, only about 10 percent of your audience will even have the chance to see it.

Just like sending out email blasts, it's important that you strategically pick the times you share out your content to help maximize its exposure and results.

Depending on the size of your audience and which social network it is, I typically identify three to five peak times to schedule important content posts around. You can find out when the peak times are by either digging into your insights on your social pages or using social tools such as Followerwonk.

Make sure each time you post, you're creating a unique post that holds value to the user and not simply copy-and-pasting the same post over and over.

Get More Out of Your Thank-You Pages

As valuable as your landing pages are, your thank-you pages are equally important. Think about it - you've built enough good will and trust with a person to get them to convert once, so the likelihood that they would be willing to do this again right away is very high.

This makes thank-you pages prime spots to drive additional conversions and continue to move them down the funnel. Typically you will want to put whatever the next lifecycle stage conversion offer is on the thank-you page. So if the lead just converted on a top-funnel offer, there should be a middle-funnel offer on the thank-you page.

This can also be a great way to use progressive profiling on your forms in order to gather even more data on a lead. Just make sure the second follow-up offer has enough value that they will be compelled to submit even more detailed information.

You may also want to experiment with also including your newsletter sign-up and social following buttons. These both often see great results from those who land on your thank-you pages.

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How 3 Brands Won Big with Content Promotion

Content promotion and distribution, as an industry, is starting to grow up.

More and more marketers are finding new and creative ways to ensure their content gets seen by the audiences that matter most to their brands. From native paid channels to influencer outreach, new tactics of content promotion are becoming popular.

There’s also an ecosystem of tools that have cropped up to support content promotion. Marketers and PR folks are earning media and influencer coverage for their content while distributing and broadcasting their owned media, too.

However, before content promotion was en vogue, the brands below figured out a way to get their content in front of millions of eyeballs. The lessons learned through these narratives are valuable and they all have two things in common – great content and a story to tell.

The Rodon Group – Cheaper Than China

The Rodon Group is one of the largest injection molders in the U.S. It has been manufacturing high volumes of small plastic parts and molds for almost 60 years.

With all types of manufacturing moving overseas to places like China, their competition is truly international. Many would-be customers just assume that contracting oversees is more cost effective.

However, The Rodon Group challenged this notion in its Cheaper than China campaign which kicked off in 2012.

This message didn’t just resonate with their target audience, but resonated with much of the U.S. working class and the media that serves them, so much so that their campaign was covered by virtually every major media outlet.

It was also during this time that the Presidential campaign was in full swing. President Obama decided to stop by The Rodon Group to give a stump speech espousing the same message as the Cheaper than China campaign. His presence drove the massive amounts of media attention described above.

While the content was great and very timely, the promotion was a complete crapshoot. They literally won the content marketing lottery.

It’s doubtful that the most optimistic marketer at The Rodon Group could have ever imagined the attention their ebook would receive. Unfortunately, luck is not a content promotion strategy.

Campaign Verdict: Great content, lucky promotion, and coverage.

Slingshot SEO – Content That Advanced an Industry

Founded in 2006, Slingshot SEO was a pioneer in the search engine optimization services space. Early last year, it rebranded itself as DigitalRelevance to take advantage of the emergence of content promotion as an industry.

Prior to the rebrand, Slingshot SEO created the world’s most thorough Google and Bing click-through-rate study ever produced.

Disclosure: DigitalRelevance is the premiere sponsor of the publication I’m currently managing, Relevance.com.

This study solved an industry-wide problem for SEO agencies and SaaS companies. The calculations enabled them to attach a real monetary value to rankings for targeted keyword phrases – something that was spotty, at best, prior to the study.

It earned coverage and buzz from academia (Purdue and Cornell), media outlets, trade publications, and industry influencers around the world. Its impact was further felt when Rand Fishkin himself presented some of the results from the study on stage at HubSpot’s INBOUND 2012 conference.

The amount of coverage was by no means an accident. Slingshot SEO enlisted the help of a seasoned PR veteran to mount a full-on media blitz. The media amplified and promoted the study and got the attention of most in the SEO industry.

To this day, almost four years later, the study still helps deliver business.

Just like The Rodon Group, the study was great content. The biggest difference is that it was purposely promoted to prudent media and trade publications. When faced with such well researched, new information, the media had no choice but to cover it.

The coverage led to a cascade of influencer citations and social mentions that continue today.

Campaign Verdict: Great content and research with purposeful promotion.

Teradata – Content Promotion That Drove Eight digits of Incremental Revenue

Teradata offers a data-driven, integrated marketing management platform that’s on the cutting edge of marketing operations, campaign management, and digital messaging. Their integrated marketing application was obtained through its acquisition of Aprimo in 2011.

Through research, Teradata’s Integrated Marketing Management unit discovered that its prospects needed help and guidance navigating the world of Big Data and marketing. They discovered that more than half of the marketers they surveyed saw data as an underutilized asset in their own organizations.

One of the ways Teradata addressed this concern was by publishing the eBook “Be a Big Data Marketing Hero” in 2013. The eBook struck a chord with both their audience and the media to whom it was pitched.

In total, more than 46 media outlets and trade publications mentioned it – delivering over three million media impressions, a 25 percent landing page conversion rate and, ultimately, 30 global brand prospect meetings.

The campaign channeled owned media broadcasting, earned media coverage and native paid distribution to maximize the promotion and reach of the eBook – a converged strategy. It’s reported to have delivered eight digits of incremental revenue while returning 36x on the investment.

Campaign Verdict – Great content and promotion on all three media channels

Bonus: American Giant – The Greatest Hoodie Ever Made

This San Francisco-based apparel startup operates entirely in the U.S. and offers what Farhad Manjoo of Slate calls “The Greatest Hoodie Ever Made.”

American Giant’s CEO proclaims that its products are built to last a lifetime. They even have a former Apple industrial designer to help fashion these highly sought after products.

One way American Giant can produce 100 percent of its products in the U.S. is by cutting out the middle man. All of its apparel is sold online. A basic sweatshirt will set you back $69 and a zip-up hoodie runs $89.

In October 2012, American Giant’s CEO, Bayard Winthrop, cold-called Farhad Manjoo of Slate to pronounce his claim of creating the best hooded sweatshirt in the world. His story and product was irresistible to Manjoo. Winthrop convinced him that he did, indeed, have the greatest hoodie ever made.

Shortly after that conversation, Manjoo published his article telling the world about the hoodie. The demand that ensued likely surpassed Winthrop’s wildest dreams. In fact, he was forced to increase production 15 to 20 times their normal capacity and still barely met demand.

This bonus story is the only one of the group that wasn’t about content promotion, but rather, product and brand promotion. However, Bayard’s methods and story clearly align with the spirit of content promotion and both marketers and communications folks should take note.

Campaign Verdict: Great product and story with purposeful promotion.

Final Verdict: Great stories and content with purposeful promotion across multiple media channels is a recipe for success.

The examples above represent very different types of companies, all of which realized bottom line benefits when their content was aptly promoted. With the exception of one, they all were purposeful in their promotion; it was part of their plan from the beginning.

Today, there are still many brands playing the content marketing lottery like The Rodon Group did. However, the odds are stacked against them. The best way to get those odds in your favor is by adopting promotion tactics into your content marketing plan.

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The Difference Between Content Marketing and Advertising

Content marketing has been a buzzword in media for a while now. But that doesn’t mean that everyone knows what it is, how it works, or how it differs from traditional marketing. Much like social media, many marketers have attempted to use content as another vehicle for one-way blasting of marketing messages.

Content marketing, however, is quite different from traditional advertising, and the same rules don’t apply.

Saying vs. Showing

McDonald’s is attempting to apply the old advertising tricks to content marketing.

Advertising is all about making claims. United’s tagline, “Fly the Friendly Skies,” sounds nice, but the skies don’t sound as friendly when you know that United has the industry’s lowest satisfaction ratings from customers.

There are tons of brands claiming to be “The Most Trusted Name” or “America’s Favorite.” Advertising is all about talking the talk. Content marketing is about walking the walk. 

Subway backs up their “Eat Fresh” tagline with content that supports the brand’s healthy image. Brands like Lowe’s and Colgate provide useful, relevant content that shows their expertise. This content is relevant to their customers (DIYers/contractors and people with teeth respectively) and is more about helping than selling. The content is authentic and pertinent to the brands.

When content is not authentic, it’s easy to tell. However, that hasn’t stopped marketers from trying to hijack the content train. McDonald’s Moms Quality Correspondents content reads like it was written by the company's PR department. I question whether these moms are real people, because I’ve never heard anyone talk like this.

I groaned to myself when I read one “mom’s” assertion that “the family dining concept where the time spent eating with the family is deemed to be an important part of the experience. The PlayPlace and the toy are all designed to help to enrich that experience.” I’ve had a lot of family dinner experiences, and none of them were enhanced by me playing with a plastic Batman toy.

McDonald’s is attempting to apply the old advertising tricks to content marketing. They think, “If we say we are great, they will believe it.” Unfortunately for them, this is not the case.

One-Night Stand vs. Relationship

Advertising is about the quick sale. That's why traditional advertisers have trouble adjusting to social media.

Advertising is about the quick sale. That's why so many traditional advertisers have trouble adjusting to social media and attempt to apply the same broadcast/quick sale model.

Social media and content marketing are intertwined, because both are about building relationships. While advertising is front-loaded, brands can use content to address the customer’s concerns  at every stage of their purchase journey. While an ad can help inspire a purchase, content can keep the customer in touch with the brand before, during and after the purchase.

Mass Market vs. Individualized

Advertising is expensive. When buying a TV or radio ad, it has to appeal to as general an audience as possible. It’s the reason why so many Budweiser commercials feature pretty girls and cute dogs—it’s all aimed at the lowest common denominator. 

With content, you can craft pieces to reach the needs of all of the different segments of your audience. This can be in both tone and medium. The lower cost of content when compared to traditional advertising can allow you to create a piece of content in multiple forms—infographics, video, press releases. By distributing this content to social sites, such as YouTube and Facebook, you can let users consume your content where and how they want, rather than hoping they are watching TV when your ad runs.

Because it can be tailored to specific customer groups, another great feature of content is that it is sharable. When you create useful, non-advertorial content it is much more likely to be shared by bloggers or on social media. Think about it this way: lots of people send you funny or interesting articles to read (think Buzzfeed), but very few people send you a commercial to watch.

Not the End of Traditional Ads

There is still a place for traditional advertising. Companies will still need to launch new products, announce special offers, and drive general awareness. However, content marketing has allowed brands to be more useful to customers when they aren’t looking to buy; to become a useful part of their lives at every stage.

It’s more than marketing, it’s building relationships. It requires a bit of restraint and patience, but the rewards can be much greater in the end.

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Is Content Marketing a Definitive Strategy for SEO Success?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t the same as it used to be. You just cannot crop up an ugly website, publish mediocre content, build a few links and expect to rank well.  A well-crafted website, high-quality content, and thousands of links can fetch you decent number of social shares. But the real problem lies when it comes to scaling all of these. Building thousands of links is expensive and time consuming. And if you don’t have anything worth sharing on social web, you’ll not receive any social shares unless you buy them from spammy accounts. So how to build those thousands of links and naturally get thousands of shares? All you need to do is build a strong content marketing strategy.

Why content marketing?

Content marketing is gradually evolving as an effective path to successful SEO. Not only does high quality content produce links at a faster pace, but it is also cost-effective. In addition, high-quality content gets naturally shared on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and also on Pinterest. B2B marketers are spending ¼ of their company’s budget on creating and delivering quality content for better search engine ranking.

Different forms of content marketing

Content marketing involves blog articles/posts, videos, infographics, power point presentation, eBooks, webinars, podcasts, whitepapers, press release, newsletters and web pages. These optimal types of content support SEO/keyword analytics. The trick is to work out the type of content that’s right for the audience

How can content marketing impact the SEO industry?

Maintaining blog content

Blogging consistently is the best way to facilitate working with Google search engine. Google is the best search portal in the world, with its own biggest ad distribution network, and leading keyword analytic tools, so bloggers who keep their content fresh, without incorporating any duplication, are always rewarded. Fresh and regular flow of content is always valued by Google and directly impact the ranking of words.

Creating engaging content influence search engines

Researched content goes a long way in making content valuable. New, informative, fresh and targeted topic is always preferred by Google. The latest buzz on Google algorithms is that dynamic content focusing on keyword analytics, instead of keyword placement, represents the best idea behind productive content marketing. To be consistent with content quality, here a few tips to check out:

Optimize the content

• Make sure the content bears a catchy title, relevant bread-crumb structure, alt tags, header tags and many more
• Publish and make the content accessible through social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, and Google+
• Measure the content performance through Google Analytics. Analyze the bounce rate, visit and time spent on site
• Based on the analytics reports, make corrections, re-optimize and re-publish the content on the website, as well as on social media platforms
• Creating new content consistently is key to a successful content marketing strategy.
• Being the content-authority in your own domain space not only let audiences find your site in the top searches but also find that the content satisfies their needs.

Google uses Query Deserved Freshness (QDF) to recheck whether there is any fresh content on the topic you’ve produced.

Impressive content can drive inbound links

Inbound linking technique is an effective technique for successful SEO. When your site receives traffic directed from premium sites, your page certainly experience boosts in search rank. This prevents your site from getting penalty from Google. Always remember, Google’s algorithm demands for legitimate and meaningful links. And building great content enhances your chances of being linked to by other sites. High-quality content can increase link to your site by 5 to10 folds.

Word count is imperative for SEO ranking

It has been analyzed that longer content that offers more information attract people who desire long term solutions to their queries. In a nutshell, higher word count means greater conversion and ROI rates. Content that is greater than 1,500 words on average receives 68.1 percent more tweets and 22.6 percent more Facebook likes. However, Google and its algorithm is completely against promotional content that typically includes keyword stuffing. Loading keywords in a web page is the easiest way to manipulate search rankings.

Use of keyword analytics tool

Different types of keywords represent different levels of interest and intent. Proper keyword research can increase your chances of being successful in search engine significantly. However, to do keyword research correctly, you need analytical tool to evaluate factors like competition of the keyword, the search volume or the commercial intent. Keywords and phrase research is also important for content curation. It is imperative to monitor key phrases that are driving traffic to your website, as this allow you to see if customers are easily finding your content.

Search engines have spider robots that browse pages on the internet and determine what those websites are doing about by reading the keyword on the page. The robots look into different areas including title, description, content structure, formatting and even the content on the page. Using keyword analytics tool supports marketers develop content elevated to improve web traffic by finding out queries that brings visitors to the content through search.

Content marketing is more than just sharing blog posts and articles to get back links. It is more of building brand as resource for consumers and becoming a source that people can trust when searching for information. With the passage of time, SEO is becoming much more content-centric.

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Marketing Automation Tools for Smaller Tasks

While they may not be looking for advanced solutions, small businesses can benefit from many simple, free marketing automation tools. Here's a look at several of the options available.

Marketing automation is a broad term that can mean something different to different people - and for small business owners, there's no doubt that marketing automation will mean something vastly different than it does to a large enterprise. While writing Marketing Automation for Dummies, I distinguished between Marketing Automation with a capital "M," and marketing automation with a lowercase "m." Even basic automations (think the lowercase "m" version) can make your small business run more efficiently.

The marketing automation revolution has created a ton of companies who serve this marketplace. There are also a lot of companies who are not "marketing automation vendors" and never show up on any analyst radar, but which can easily help you streamline your marketing via simple automations. Let's take a look at four technologies that I'd suggest small business owners take a serious look at as their first step toward full automation.

Content Marketing for SMBs

Content marketing is a large piece of marketing automation. Every bit of communication you have with your leads and customers needs to be following the methodologies set out by Seth Godin in his book Permission Marketing, published by Wiley in 1999. He advises marketers to provide people with value, and they will in turn value your relationship. In a world with so much noise from companies, this is the best way to engage and build relationships.

The biggest issue with content marketing for many small businesses is finding the resources to create content. Between finding topics to write about and creating an attractive finished product, content creation can seem like a major drain on time and resources - but it doesn't have to be. Here are a few free tools that can easily help you get over all of these humps.

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Letting Your Leads Choose Their Own Adventure With Dynamic CTAs

By employing a "Choose Your Own Adventure" technique with your calls to action, consumers will be able to feel that they made the choice to continue down the sales funnel on their own, instead of being forced into it.

Choose Your Own Adventure in Email Marketing

Email marketing is often used to help further a relationship with a prospect, as well as generate more leads. To best accomplish these goals, consider the following example: When crafting an email for lead nurturing, the Choose Your Own Adventure technique will help you:

• identify the stage of the prospect if you are using stage-based content 
• offer prospects opportunities for advancement 
• provide specific data for more relevant future communications

In your email there should only be a couple of calls to action when using this technique. If you are using links in your signature, I'd suggest removing them. You can check your email tool to see if these links are receiving clicks, but your click-through rates on links in your email signature are likely the lowest of all. If they are high, then your signature is more enticing than your content, which means you should reevaluate the message of your email.

There is a reason for only offering two CTAs (and therefore two options), and a goal. The goal is to drive engagement, and to help your prospects move themselves though your sales funnel. If you give more than two options, your email is not targeted to its goal, and will likely miss its target. The second reason for the two CTAs is because people will only engage with relevant content. So if you are offering two options, the odds are in your favor they will only engage with the more relevant of the two options. So if your content is crafted for each stage, they will tell you exactly which stage they are in, and if they are ready to move to the next stage of content they can do so.

Choose Your Own Adventure in Content Marketing

In content marketing, regardless of where your content is hosted, optimizing for engagement is always the goal. Let's focus, for a moment, on increasing the engagement after their first touch - so after the form has been completed, or after they arrive on a landing page from a keyword search. In the case of video marketing, consider giving your prospect different options as to what to do next after the video finishes playing. This will give them the option to stay engaged, and help you to identify where they are in the sales cycle. Using this technique with content marketing helps to:

• increase content engagement helping to further thought leadership 
• offer prospects opportunities for advancement 
• get more value out of the engagement you paid for/optimized for

For gated content, or content hidden behind a form, consider the following example. When your prospect fills out the form, they are saying, "Yes." This is a clear sign that they are willing to engage with you. Many people use forms that can automatically display messages, or what we call "thank you content," after they are completed. If you are using this technique, you can say "thank you," and offer two more choices of content. This will allow you to take advantage of the person's state of mind. They are in a place where they're hungry for content, so help feed them. Give them another option for more content in that stage, or the choice to a download a piece of content that will take them to the next stage.

Here is a great example of this being used by ATS. Notice the form changes after submission to offer more content. The offer is dynamic, so it can offer the most relevant content at the correct time.

Choose Your Own Adventure With Owned Media Channels

The Choose Your Own Adventure technique can also be used on your owned media channels. Let's take a look specifically at your website, and at a more advanced technique that can allow you to have dynamic content on your website. Many marketing automation tools and CRMs can provide this functionality to you. Using this technique with your owned media channels helps to:

• increase content engagement helping to further thought leadership 
• offer prospects opportunities for advancement
• increase on-site optimization 
• easily allow you to create a personalized experience

Marketing automation enables you to see where a prospect is in the sales cycle, and allows you to use dynamic content to serve up different content based on this information. So whether they're on your homepage, pricing page, or login page, you can serve up different content. I'd suggest using a few dynamic content blocks side by side, or one on top of the other. This will allow you to show a piece of content that's relevant to the stage a prospect is in, as well as give them a chance to move on to the next stage.

Here is a great example from Merchantry showing how they use targeted content options to help increase engagement rates by showing the correct content at the correct time. Notice how the orange block allows the prospect to request a demo, while the two blue blocks provide thought leadership content.

So if you're doing any type of content or email marketing, the Choose Your Own Adventure technique is a must for all modern marketers. I've taught this technique for years, and have seen companies double their content engagement simply by utilizing the Choose Your Own Adventure options. It also allows the consumer to choose, so they feel they made the choice, instead of being forced into it. Good luck with this technique, and please feel free to share examples of how you're using this technique in the comments below.

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