Content Marketing: Creating An Effective Strategy for Marketing Solutions

Why Content Marketing?

Visitors on WWW relate to content more than visuals albeit both are important promotional elements. Content is King may sound cliche but remember it is here to stay. 

“Content is king, but distribution is queen. And she wears the pants.” ~ Jonathan Perelman

In the case of online marketing, things need to move and hit the target. Content is king but it becomes effective when skillfully conceived and distributed as mentioned in the quote above.

According to a survey the preferred goal conversions according to respondents were: 

• Brand Awareness 45%
• Website Traffic 37%
• Lead Generation 36% 
• Increase in Sales 26%
• Customer Loyalty 23%

According to Statista 91% B2B and 86% of B2C marketers use this strategy worldwide to reach business associates, clients, and customers.

Successful Types & Formats

This is one of the best strategies, and a powerful method for brand promotion, creating awareness, enhancing sales, and achieving high traffic goals whatever the purpose may be. The strategy is based on promotional content as the title suggests but then the approach is complex and requires ingenuity, intuition, experience, and familiarity with diverse platforms on the World Wide Web. The write-ups could be long form, short form, or even tag lines, comments, messages, and tweets that draw attention and eventually end up creating awareness on a mass scale. 

The write-ups should carry all the nitty-gritty of writing and weave an emotional story to hook the visitors and indulge in constant engagement. The readers should be incited to know more, fall into the riddles, or become desperate to seek the final denouement. Depending upon the marketer's ingenuity anything works even thoughtful leadership expressions, carefully crafted influencer blogs, and authoritative articles - all work. It may be the tag lines or titles that attract but it is the crux that leads to the ultimate success. 

Content Marketer Inspiration & Team Effort  

As a content marketer one has to be on the alert even during the off time. Inspiration may dawn in a bathtub. Remember Archimedes!  An energized and motivated team deals with the diversity of paid and organic mediums since it is not possible to overcome the challenges singlehandedly. 

After a successful awareness campaign, the visitors often leave behind various social signals, especially on social media. A like, subscription, following, comment, or a mail of appreciation indicates that visitors are turning into prospective customers and are ripe for the next stage which is consideration. Usually, visitors that are not interested leave behind a bounce rate metric that is a warning to the creators to up their efforts enough to leave a deep impact on the readers.   

Goal Conversions: Creatives and Quality Contents   

Engaging attributes are a must for consideration however small they may be even in a terribly constricted space in terms of weight, dimensions, or characters. A trendy slogan, spectacular image or infographic a promotional video all work fine in order to hook the prospective customer in a post. 
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Attributes plus quality contents complement each other and are pummeled by CMS, dynamic websites, and anecdotal or informative blogs. There is no shortage of popular media it could be news sites, press releases, white paper publications, annual or quarterly company performance reports, and customer testimonials highlighting product experience and features. These are effective goal conversion tools when utilized as a final follow on the customer journey pathway.   

The objective could be attained on social media, by website visits, videos, or webinars all of which are good enough to engage prospective customers. Creativity plays a major role in empowering content that eventually strikes the target. 

Remember customer journey is rarely short and simple, it is a complex process, and conviction and final conversion can be time-consuming in the case of the major campaign the exercise becomes a team effort. These strategic efforts are applicable to both organic and paid media and should be well planned.  

Bottoms Up Approach

Once you have undergone the Content Creation process and ended up with a good blog post you need to sit down with an in-house editor, and SEO for a final review and editing and proofreading of the content before it is eventually published.  Immense importance has to be given to relevancy and intent when creating posts.     

In the first step during the review the following steps are involved:

• Relevance is Utmost Important 
• Check for Grammatical Errors 
• Check for Story Gaps
• Verify Facts 
• Wordsmithing
• Include SEO Elements
• Add Scannable Inputs 

In crafting killer content during the pre-publishing stage one needs to check the grammar to increase readability and engagement. Check for excessive use of passive voice, check for punctuation marks, etc.

Content Audit: Analytics & Reporting 

Analytics are provided by search engine companies and some social media platforms also provide insights and statistics on the performance of your posts.  Besides ranking, the statistics, and traffic, it is important to pay attention to the demographics and audience profiles. Keep a tap on where you are heading. Are you moving in the right direction to influence the target audience or going wayward?   

Story Gaps 

Check for story gaps and the flow, especially for time jumps. If you recall a TV series you will notice that the episode ends whence something is about to happen and the mystery remains unsolved. You are bound to watch the next episode out of intense curiosity. This is how the film companies keep their TRP high. By keeping us engaged in the serial one episode after another.   

We can follow the same strategy in our blog posts. Why Not?  Leave an answered but related question at the end of the post.

The blog posts should make the readers go for a related post or a post on the same topic with advance discussions. 

Get to Know Target Personae

Well, an effective content marketing strategy will begin with getting to know the Target Personae and the Objective. What do you wish to do? Whom do you target?  

Getting to know the brand, the company, and the products and services if you are a service provider is a must.  

Brand Promotion: Create Authencity & Connection & Touch Points

Content marketing strategy accords room for a wide spectrum of activities. When you create awareness and engage the audience with a great degree of consistency you are bound to create a connection with the brand and for that matter the services in another case. 

Constant endeavors create brand authenticity and connection with prospective customers, and it is a well-known fact that shoppers prefer to buy branded products that have found a space in their minds. As many as 59% of shoppers buy branded products that are known to them. 

Frequent encounters through well-formed content and visuals are vital touchpoints that make customers loyal and create an inclination to buy. Trust is an important factor and those prospects who are not convinced or do not relate to the brand are definitely going to move away. Remember brand identity must be well aligned with offerings 

Content Creation for Publishing

It is essential to create exhaustive keyword research for content creation. 

Content creation is based on defining the objectives and creating a campaign for the following. 

• Awareness 
• Consideration or Engagement  
• Goal Conversion

The purpose of content creation is to focus on creating awareness followed by the consistent engagement that will make the prospective customer consider possible goal conversion. 

SEO Content Creation 

Finalizing keywords used by prospective customers throughout their buyer journey is important hence the research precedes the other steps. It is important to understand keyword optimizing and semantic inclusions naturally. The basic principle of using terms in title/meta, headings, and subheadings of the posts should be followed. The body should not be overoptimized as it is written for the readers and not for search engines hence. keep the term saturation to 4 or 5 % strictly so that search engines do not label the posts as spam.      

Retargeting a Crucial Marketing Strategy 

Constant engagement creates trust, highlights products or services, and helps in retargeting, thanks to the visible appreciation signals that are added.  The third stage is creating content that highlights the brand or services such that the customer makes a purchase or subscribes to services as a client. 

Online community building is the key focus of social media networking sites. A large base of followers/subscribers relates to greater response and aids in the success of marketing campaigns. 

Marketers should be prepared to create diverse write-ups that cater to all the stages of marketing and resonates with the customer journey funnel. Be mindful of seasons, events, and occasions when purchasing level peaks. Depending upon the products and services the peak time may differ so be on the alert. 

Invaluable Data Acquisition 

The marketing campaigns should not focus only on goal conversion, since the engagements help in the acquisition of invaluable data based on the target personae.  Data acquisition is a collateral benefit that accrues due to constant interaction with interesting profiles that can help in achieving the goals in the future. Another benefit that accrues as you overcome the social media challenge is greater success in organic campaigns and less reliance on paid media. 

Multipronged Marketing Strategy: Taking the Platforms by Storm 

Since the arrival of social media, a number of stable platforms have emerged for marketers to test their ability to utilize them for promoting their campaigns using quality content and attributes. Social media is quick to judge promotional content, and this manifests as high traffic, a great number of followers,  engagement, and often conversions. 

There are a number of ways that social media manifests appreciation of the posts. The signals usually like, follows, comments, shares, and offers of friendship. Though not confirmed yet, that these signals aid in ranking high on SERPs or act as search engine optimization metrics, they are nevertheless a signal for the likelihood of a post going viral on the medium.   The viral impact though rare multiplies visibility by leaps and bounds. A post going viral is a rare phenomenon, and hence the efforts call for consistency in promotional activities online. 

All elements of online communication are included in the awareness campaign at the start.

• Email Marketing 
• SMS Marketing 
• Direct Calls 
• Networking of Social Media  

The most important part is networking on social media and online publication platforms. These are best for content publishing.  Content marketing strategy includes ungated content like blog posts, article publishing, press releases, and creating ebooks. The ungated contents including posts on social media and networking sites accord dual benefits besides the fruits of a winning piece they are best for authoritative link building a crucial part of SEO in digital marketing. 

Guest posting and outreach to relevant influencers besides enhancing traffic are good for lead generation and search engine optimization. 

For organic success there is no holds barred policy. Greater efforts are carried on for organic gains that come for free by the team involved. Paid media inclusion would depend on the budget and company policy.       

Some of the major publishing platforms are:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Wizzley
• Hub Pages 
• Adobe 
• Medium 
• Wakelet
• Bebee
• Abilogic
• Sooperarticles
• Ezine Articles
• WP Blogs
• TypePad Blog
• Blogger  
• New Sites
• Reddit
• Quora

Each platform works fine if properly scaled by publishing informative relevant posts with visual attributes.  Publishers (Team) have to create authoritative and popular accounts in order to avail maximum gains. 

The platforms are good for SEO although some of them are nofollow they nevertheless help in creating referrals and add to authoritative factors that search engines value. 

Company websites and blogs add immense value to this holistic exercise. These two are factors very much in our control hence greater attention should be paid to them. 

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Uday provides a search engine optimization service for digital marketing. He provides website content and content for authoritative links. He also works as SEO Content Writer for digital companies on a remote WFH basis.

He also teaches digital marketing in his home town Jabalpur. He can be contacted at: 

pateluday90@hotmail.com

09755089323          

Introduction to LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

A Blog on LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

Understand how marketers and brands use Linkedin channels to market products and services, enhance brand reputation and eventually convert people by offering solutions to their pain points. Understanding these solutions will help formulate a perfect social media strategy for brand promotion, enhancing audience reach, and creating connections that matter for businesses and professionals. Thus, LinkedIn is not just a job search and recruitment site. It is much more read-on... 

Introduction 

LinkedIn has over  810 million members in over 200 countries with 77% members outside the USA. It has a global presence with a platform available in 25 languages. It has a specific business focus and is the 3rd largest among the social media sites preceded by Instagram (1.2 billion members) and Facebook (3 billion members).

Creating a LinkedIn Page 

Besides reaching followers, you can use the page to boost images, videos, events, and text posts to increase reach, consideration, and conversions by fixing the objectives. After creating the page, you can assign yourself the roles of paid admin and paid media admin.

Paid Admin Types

• Sponsored Content Poster (Share and Update) 
• Lead Gen Forms Manager (Download Leads)
• Landing Page Managers

Remember you need to be an admin to create a sponsored content post.

Complete the page for thirty percent additional weekly views. Add logo, keywords, and the URL besides describing your company and the mission. If you post 4 times per week you will get 2 times the lift. Gain 150 followers to get greater engagement. Now you are ready to boost a post and whence you begin LinkedIn automatIcally creates a Campaign Manager.

Campaign Manager 

Campaign Manager is LikedIn's Ad management platform. On this platform, you create an Ad. launch it, and evaluate the performance of the campaign.   

Roles 

• Account Manager: Ideal for someone who will be overseeing overall account actions from managing users to creating and editing campaigns.
• Campaign Manager: This is ideal if you’re only focused on running campaigns. You won’t be able to manage users.
• Creative Manager: You can edit and add new creatives, but won’t be able to create new campaigns.
• Viewer: You’ll be able to view campaign data and reports but not edit any ads or campaign details like targeting or daily budget.
• Billing Admin: You’ll be able to change billing details and have the same access as an Account Manager to other features.

Billing Options 

• Credit Card No Minimums
• Insertion Order for those who have a LinkedIn Ad Rep.
• The minimum spend for monthly invoicing is $3,000 USD per month for 2 of the last 12 months
• Must have a LinkedIn Campaign Manager account

Advertisement Best Practices 

A good mix of brand awareness and conversion is advised while creating an Ad. B2B 50% and B2C 60/40%. Highlight insights, add real relevant images, and do not use stock photos. Besides clear content and call for action cite third-party sources for credibility. Use # tags to build online communities.

Prepare 4 to 5 different creatives. More creatives will lead to more people in your audience.  Keep changing headlines but not the images and do not forget to optimize the page for smartphones.. 

The first step is: 

Creating an Ad Account. For this, you should have a LinkedIn profile, paid media admin access to a LinkedIn business page, and an accepted payment method. 

You can access the campaign manager directly/campaignmanager or from the home page. 

Upon opening the campaign manager open an Ad account. Create 1st Ad Group for creating related Ads and then plan, manage and optimize the campaign. After creating a group you can change the name and settings. There is a default option to create a new Ad this is terms as New Campaign Group. 

Campaign Hierarchy 

1. Campaign Group 
2. Campaign 
3. Ad

It is possible to create multiple groups and ads and delete the one's not required.

The campaign journey starts by selecting an  Ad Group and creating a campaign, followed by creating an Ad and initiating the launch.

Select Ad Group

Set the Budget and the Schedule, if you wish to limit the process to a week or a month so to say. You can thus manage the status, view performance, and send reports if required. 

In order to create an advertisement first choose the objective and define the target audience. This is then followed by choosing the format that matches the objective and then follows the placement, optimization, and bid preference. You can also gauge the forecast that could be the outcome after the launch.   

Defining the Objective

LinkedIn categorizes the Ad as follows:

Awareness

Brand Awareness

Impression-based campaigns are good for creating awareness.

The outcome leads to increase visibility and share of voice

Consideration 

Objectives 

• Website Visits
• 
  
• Video View (bid and optimize based on CPV.)
• 
  
• Engagements (Increase social action = comments, likes, shares, etc.

The outcome leads to deeper engagement for relationship building.

Goal Conversion 

(downloading white papers, filling out forms) Must include the conversion tracking feature.

• Lead generation
• Talent leads
• Goal conversions
• Job applicants

The goal conversion leads to actions

• Event Sign Up
• Job Application 
• Purchase Decisions

Define the Right Audience

On LinkedIn, you can target C-Suite, influential decision-makers, and individual contributors. Run a full-funnel marketing campaign to influence the entire buyer community.

Target members using demographic information, retarget website visitors or upload lists of contacts, or target companies for account-based marketing. For precise targeting exclude individuals and companies. Remember member profile data helps in inferring the age and gender on LinkedIn.

Reverse engineer profile data to discover more target audiences. Also evaluate profiles for trends, job functions, titles, and skill sets. Estimate audience size through the forecast feature. Get 30,000+ (niche) to 300,000+ embers for Sponsored Content solutions and between 20,000+ (niche) to 200,000  members for Sponsored Messaging solutions.  Optimize creatives, rotate between 4-5 Sponsored Content and 2-4 Sponsored Messaging.

LinkedIn Ad Targeting Best Practices

• Define Location (mandatory)
• Audience Attributes 
• Company 
• Traits and Interests
• Job Experience
• Demographics

Use the Global search feature to expand targeting categories or the exclusion feature to minimize. Add not more than 2 or 3 targeting facets. Keep target audience over 50000 for sponsored content and text ads and over 15000 for message ads.

Matched Audience

Need 300 members to run this campaign(known accounts and contacts). Combine LinkedIn's 1st party data with your business 1st party data to fetch company addresses or Email lists for ABM or account-based marketing with company targeting. In this feature, you can exclude a list of current customers and add potential leads (PL) to nurture. MA helps in engaging using website retargeting and contact targeting. You can use the audience expansion feature or build a look-alike audience.

The advertiser can choose any option mentioned above or choose all, using the full-funnel marketing content strategy.  

There are 4 types of matched audience targeting 

• Account Targetting
• Lookalike Targeting
• Email Targeting
• Account Targeting 

Matched Audiences to significantly improve cost per lead by up to 14%.

Define Ad Format 

Ad Types

• Single Image (Feed)
• Video
• Event Ad
• Carousel (Swipeable Cards on Feed)
• Message (Active Members)
• Conversion (Active Members)
• Text Ad (Desktop Right Rail)
• Dynamic Ad (Desktop Right Rail)

Budget & Schedule

Second Price Auction saves money.

Bidding Types 

• Automated (Max Delivery)
• 
  
• Target Cost 
• 
  
• Manual Bidding

Optimize for Conversion

High rate of audience response but no conversion.

Implement conversion tracking to let LinkedIn optimize the page. Make sure the offer is clear and the page is responsive. Use campaign demographics to better understand the audience and ad relevancy. Identify underperforming segments and improve conversions with more relevant and appealing creatives change them if required. Also, run a test with LinkedIn Lead Gen Form. Expand the audience with lookalike features as well.

Optimize Campaign delivery for a brand awareness campaign. First review content for an engaging offer. The intro text should be concise and the message relevant. Set bids higher the cost will be just one percent higher than the second. Set bid 10 to 20 % higher. Check the metric one week later.

Marketing Funnel 

Awareness - Focus on the right audience. Content Formats that work: Video, static images, carousels. 

Consideration - Stay engaged by thought leadership, seminars, webinars, research reports, and page follow. 

Conversions - Goal Conversion. By this time the customer knows the solution you offer and is ready for action. A conversion can be a product purchase, sales inquiry, or job application. Here Campaign Manager suggestions will help you optimize the ad format based on the objective. Remember ensuring a balance of brand with demand builds deeper relationships. 

Defining Marketing Objectives

You can define your objective by analyzing the type of content you are trying to promote. 

Awareness/Reach 

Run an awareness campaign on a video highlighting products and services. Make customers know about your business or products and services. The campaign should be bolstered by ungated content usually blog posts about the company.

Consideration/Nurture

Use middle-of-the-funnel gated content for consideration like case studies, Email marketing, webinars,  and detailed informative blog posts that provide a solution to pain points and gently promote the company. Promote case studies with lead generation form to collect information from the customers and create a solid potential lead. Shortlist the audience and nurture them with content to stay in consideration. 

Conversions/Acquire 

Invoke potential CFA or call for action with a backup plan.  Keep the potential leads in a loop with a follow-up within 30 days. Launch a single image ad with an offer of a live demo for example. Retarget website visitors and nudge them down the funnel for conversion. 

  

Benchmarking Campaigns

Keep an eye on the forecast tool on LinkedIn or study past campaigns before launching a new one. Keep an eye on audience demographic and, size, the budget spent, and results or ROAS. Understand what worked for better targeting, ad formats used, scheduling, and budget size.

Compare Metrics

• CPC: Cost per click, lead, impressions, and views.
• 
  
• CTR the click-through rate 
• 
  
• Reach the number of people who saw your single Ad.
• 
  
• Conversions How many website actions took place?

Past Creatives 

Ad formats that worked. Titles and ad text used. Compelling images and call to action that worked? 

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Glossary 

Key Results measurable value shows how well you are achieving marketing objectives.

 · Attribution: 

The tracking of user actions and assignment of values to these, as well as the channels in which the actions occurred. Three common models for marketing attribution:

• • • • • • First Touch Attribution: assigns credit for a conversion to the channel responsible for the first interaction
          • Last Touch Attribution:  assigns credit for a conversion to the channel responsible for the last interaction.
            
          • Multi-Touch Attribution:  distributes the credit for conversion across multiple touchpoints along the buyer journey.

 · Customer Relationship Management (CRM): 

CRM manages the company’s relationships and interactions with customers.

 · Marketing Automation System: 

Manage and automate marketing activities to improve engagement and efficiency.

 · Lead Score (LS): 

A methodology used to evaluate the quality of leads.

 · Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): 

MQL is considered a strong prospect. 

 · Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): 

Vetted and qualified as a prospective customer.

 · Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): 

Revenue is generated for every amount spent on the Ad Campaign 

 · Leads: 

Prospects who share personal or company contact information, click on an ad, download a whitepaper, etc.

  · Frequency: 

It is impressions divided by reach.

 · Cost Per Mille (CPM): 

Money spent on ads divided by 1,000 impressions.

 · Cost Per View (CPV): 

Average cost per view. Qualified with 2 continuous seconds of playback with the video being 50% on screen or CTA. 

For Message & Conversion Ads 

 · Open Rate: 

The number of opens is divided by the number of sends.

 · Click to Open Rate: 

Here the percentage of clicks is divided by opens.

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Uday provides a search engine optimization service for digital marketing. He provides website content and content for authoritative links. He also works as SEO Content Writer for digital companies on a remote WFH basis.

He also teaches digital marketing in his home town Jabalpur. He can be contacted at: 

pateluday90@hotmail.com

09755089323          

Of Organic Back Links - Content Creation & More

Organic Backlink are also known as Natural Links!

The natural back-linking occurs whence a website owner places the link of your website or blog on his own. This is external link for your property and apart from increasing your popularity it plays a role in increasing the domain authority or DA as well as enhances your ranking on SERPs on relevant search terms. 

Why would person link your website/blog to his or her own?  

This connect happens whence your website or blog is found useful for future reference, enhances or adds to the knowledge base of the linking property. There can be innumerable reasons for a site owner to link to yours. 

In simple terms a widget for example a calculator is added to a site requiring frequent calculations. Similarly websites are linked for utility or information they provide.  This is the most popular and easiest way of value addition.    

The external links in any form have a great potential to invite referrals and this could be a non organic way of getting a response from your websites. This connect may be natural as well as created but if the latter has undergone editorial scrutiny it holds immense value. But we do not know how search engines treat such links. 

Creating Links 

The presence on SERPs pays for you whence your property ranks on the first page on SERPs after that ranking things fizzle out as few visitors go that far down.    

But linking is essential not only  for the fight on the SERPs for relevant terms but also for web popularity or web saturation. A large placement of your site links will have the potential to draw referrals. The latter is also known as referral acquisition and not as result of ranking. The click can take place on a social media platform or from a link placed on article or on another website. 

Fear or Penalization & Referral Creation 

All website owners strive hard to fight  out on the SERP since there is always a potential to rank on less competitive long tail search terms. At the same time they do not wish to lose the referral potential. This is a paradox that webmasters face while enhancing web saturation for referrals.   

Hence potential for referrals has to be constantly enhanced but this has to be done the right way to avoid penalization. Spreading the links on contents on large number of quality article sites and on sites that offer users to create contents and link. Most of these sites have strict editorial scrutiny...for potential web saturation you post articles and create contents on "nofollow" sites. But here also spamming can be lethal since search engines do read and credit "nofollow" links as well nowadays. Most of the links on Social Media are "nofollow" but the exposure on this medium far out-ways the potential of a link or link juice as some writers call it.

Hence link building should also be within the rules just do not rush.

Directories, forum, blog comments are not worthy of the exercise anymore until unless you are dead sure of their authority and relevance regarding your site.  There are some good directories but only few. Best is to avoid this method of linking. Also use anchor text that a user would type to search your property use exact match terms with great care and bare minimum.

Contents The Greatest Pull 

Yes website contents are a major draw as far as natural linking is concerned. The onsite or off page contents like the UGC do matter. Writing unique, informative and easy to read contents will always attract organic connect and if this is enhanced by attributes like videos, widgets, info-graphics and images nothing like it. Good formatting will assist readers and your write up will look smart. 

Hence good content creation is not only for conversion it is also for attracting followers who link your website to theirs. Good content creation skill development is through practice and from reading tips and advice from experts. Hard work is the key remember! No short cut! 

In search engine optimization content creation will always play a major role though technicalities are important as well. Always check mobile friendliness, down loading speed and usability factors.  Another important factors is relevancy in SEO...promote sites on terms the contents justify else you will end up with ineffective and useless workload.     

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Uday provides remote SEO and website contents in English. He teaches digital marketing in Jabalpur in summer holidays. Uday freelances as naturalist/birder in India. He loves to blog on SEO/Conservation and Travel.
Contact: pateluday90@hotmail.com
Mob: 09755089323