Online Marketing Blog

Companies all over the social web are confronted with the need for  ROI in corporate blogging.

Despite blogs being named as more influential than social networks in shaping consumers’ opinions and purchase decisions, many marketers and communicators  are falling short.

Why? A focus on self-promotion has many brands running out of content  ideas and time to show a return on their blog content investment. Tolerance for quantity of content and superficial social engagement metrics as a basis for results is diminishing.

Despite these challenges, blogs provide an incredible content marketing platform for connecting directly with prospects, the media, customers, new employees, investors and the industry at large.

To offer companies a roadmap to realizing these business blogging and content marketing benefits, I will be giving a presentation at the inaugural Social Media Marketing World conference in San Diego on Tuesday, April 9th.

Brands often struggle to hit that elusive mix of creative, timely content relevant to their audience that still directly aligns with their brand. If you have something of a sense of humor, entertaining your audience isn’t that hard. Yet for your social content to be effective in marketing, at least a good portion must be relevant to your brand, as well. You know the deal, though; if you’re only talking about your brand or products, fans get bored with your self-promotion.

Special occasions and holidays offer marketers a great chance to get creative with their social content, to capture the attention of an increasingly attention-deficit audience.  Yet simply being an Irish company doesn’t make your product or service relevant on an Irish holiday. Being a Canadian, or American, company doesn’t guarantee relevance on holidays specific to North America, either.

With all of today’s hype about content marketing, taking a step back and looking at what content is in the first place might bring some signal to all the noise.

Defining a thing as broad as “content” is a bigger task than you might think. You’re probably thinking of a definition of content now and it’s likely a bit different than mine.

Content is many things to different people and situations due to context. Fundamentally, content = information. Content = experience. Content = nothing specific. These are all observations shared with me by digital smarties ranging from Avinash Kaushik to Joe Pulizzi in a poll I ran on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook last week.

In a recent study by Content Marketing Institute, it was reported that 54% of B2B marketers will increase their spend on content marketing over the next 12 months. Pouring more money into content doesn’t automatically result in success.

As with wise investing for financial success, marketers need to back up their content investments with a plan, resources, goals, measurement and many other answers to questions their competition aren’t bothering with.

This doesn’t mean you need some grand, perfect strategy to see a return on content development spend. But it does mean having a clear vision and approach. To help guide you in this content marketing journey, here’s advice from some of the top content marketers in the industry including pros from Intel, SAP, Kraft, and the Content Marketing Institute.

Video has exploded as an online marketing tool over the past few years for B2C marketers. As the interent’s second most popular search engine, YouTube has reduced the barriers to entry to almost nil. As a result, marketers quickly jumped on board with vloggers and other personalities to capitalize on video’s ability to capture and hold the interests of an increasingly attention-deficit consumer.

In fact, video is second only to feature articles as the content marketing tactic with the greatest ROI, according to eMarketer. Video allows marketers to connect with web and mobile customers, across websites, social media and apps, in order to offer targeted information in a visual and auditory format appealing to a wide audience.

About today’s guest post: As companies mature their online presence though more robust social engagement, individuals within those companies are advancing use of social technologies to communicate and collaborate publicly. At the same time, consumers’ evolving use of social platforms has lead to increased expectations for brand information discovery, consumption and engagement. Surfacing organizational culture and expertise helps companies better connect with their customers in terms of who they are and what they stand for.

Tapping into the collective wisdom of an organization’s thought leadership has enabled social business transformation in ways we never would have imagined 5 or 10 years go. In today’s post,  Ethan McCarty, IBM’s Director of Enterprise Social Strategy, @ethanmcc has offered to bring some clarity to this opportunity and to share one example of what IBM is doing about it. 

The increasing popularity of the visual web as evidenced by the growth of sites like Pinterest and Instagram along with the recent updates to the Facebook News Feed and Google+ cover images has raised the bar on creative content marketing.

Not long ago, it was progressive just to create blog posts and a few social shares every day. Now so many brands have adopted a publisher model for content marketing that the web is flush with content marketing tactics.

Brands are hard pressed to stand out with their content marketing, often taking a “more is better” approach. As David Meerman Scott says, the marketing one hundred is now the marketing ten thousand.

Intuit Shares a Social Media Marketing Roadmap for Brands in 2013

Intuit shared an incredibly helpful infographic on their Small Business Blog to guide marketers in their social strategy this year. Path to Social Success in 2013 assigns a theme for each quarter; we begin the year by taking a social media inventory. As we enter the second quarter next month, it’s time to focus on working on relationships. The third quarter is all about integrating everything, while at the end of the year it’s time to take stock and look forward.

Of course, these are all important aspects of social media management throughout the year. Intuit’s guide is a good reminder to help marketers remember to revisit each area and concentrate on it at some point in 2013.

The mantra for digital marketers interested in conversion optimization is ABT “always be testing.”  That mantra fits well with the perspectives TopRank has been advocating for years: optimization is a continuous process.

Although consumer needs remain fairly simple when it comes to achieving an outcome after they arrive at your website, the opportunities to test different elements to improve conversion performance has grown in both sophistication and complexity. From eye tracking studies to monthly A/B tests, converting more visitors into buyers is both an art and a science.

The Internet is not a static environment; change is constant and consumers’ expectations have evolved along with web technology. The challenge for marketers is to make sense of the customer journey and provide the right information at the right time to inspire a desired outcome.

LinkedIn has quickly achieved top status as “the” business to business social networking destination.  In fact, less than two years after going public, LinkedIn’s value has risen from $4 billion to over $18 billion.

Not only has LinkedIn’s value increased significantly, but their capabilities and engagement have as well.  The same Wall Street Journal article that included the valuation above also shared the following insight:

• In the most recent quarter LinkedIn’s page views have risen 67%
• LinkedIn’s new “content” features include news aggregation and hosting of expert blog posts

If your company hasn’t quite figured out the secret sauce needed to really make your executives’ LinkedIn profiles shine or how to make meaningful connections, you’re in luck.  Whether you want to increase your brand or individual online visibility, this post shares insights into the 5 elements of an optimized LinkedIn profile.  

SES New York is coming up in just a few weeks and I really can’t wait.  New York is easily one of my favorite cities in the world and I’m looking forward to joining thousands of marketers who feel the same March 25-28.

Today’s online marketing draws us in many directions and with the ever changing landscape of search, social media and technology, the demands on marketers to view their world from 360 degrees is more important now than ever.

At this year’s SES New York event, I’ll be giving a brand new presentation, Creative Content Marketing: Winning the Hearts, Minds and Wallets of Today’s Distracted Consumer on Thursday March 28th at 9:30am, which digs down into why, for who and how of tapping into ongoing creative ideas for content marketing that actually works.

Companies of all sizes are in search of answers towards better social media strategy and at TopRank Marketing we’re helping to make that happen.

This week Jolina Pettice and I completed giving a 2 day social media and content marketing workshop for a $400 million company and a few weeks ago I gave a presentation to executives at a $22 billion company on how social media could advance some of their objectives. The way forward with social media is top of mind for many businesses and organizations.