Online Marketing Blog

Today I’m giving a keynote at the sold-out Communicator’s Conference in Portland, Oregon to 270 or so PR and Communications professionals.

The colliding or collaborating (depending on your situation) worlds of digital marketing and PR have left a lot of ambiguity about roles, goals and responsibilities between these 2 very important groups.

In this presentation I outline why PR should care about marketing, 3 big trends to watch for and 3 of the most common questions brand PR and corporate communicators have (I polled my LinkedIn network) about integrating PR and marketing. I finish things off with a plan for how PR and communications can tap into digital marketing expertise and contribute messaging and storytelling for more meaningful and impactful marketing / PR performance.

Conversion rate optimization is the marketing art of maximizing your investment in existing site traffic, through improvements and problem-solving rather than additional ad spend. At some point in any business site’s lifetime, CRO is a must; for smart marketers, it’s an ongoing process that pays dividends over and over again.

Once you’ve invested in attracting traffic to your site, whether to complete a purchase or take some other action, CRO helps ensure your visitors are engaged and converting at the greatest rate possible.

Some believe CRO happens only on-site, though attracting targeted prospects likely to convert through paid search ads, email marketing and landing pages, for example, is a critical step. Another misconception is that CRO is all about increasing the number of conversions. You like to make money, right? Optimizing for higher revenue conversions and increasing the value of each site visitor is another element of CRO that can’t be overlooked.

There are quite a few studies showing that companies publishing more blog posts and more content in general equates to generating more business than those that don’t.

I suppose if you’re starting from scratch, adding any kind of content has the potential to improve a company’s ability to attract people seeking to buy.  Since content creation is one of the biggest obstacles to companies realizing gains with content marketing, it’s no wonder that advice about how to produce articles, blog posts, infographics, white papers, and visual marketing has become so popular.

Which brings me to the point of this post. When looking for help with content marketing and content creation, there’s a difference between what one gets from a SEO agency and a content marketing agency. That difference is not so much about one being better than the other, but more about sizing up which is most appropriate for your situation.

LinkedIn Adds Rich Media Capability to Profiles

LinkedIn users can now add rich media content objects to their profiles, allowing designers, analysts, authors and others to share their best works in a visually interesting format. Users can now use videos, images and presentations to demonstrate their experience. Danielle Restivo, Head of Global Programs, Corporate Communications at LinkedIn, reminds us that brands have had rich media access on their pages for some time. “The ability to share rich media through company pages is already available for admins of the Company Page. So an employee of a company who has admin rights to update the Company Page can do this, but employees without admin rights could not,” she told TopRank.

The average consumer goes through more than five touch points with an ecommerce business before they convert. This number is trending upward, as companies and customers continue to interact across a greater number of platforms. B2B companies, with often greater price points and a longer buying cycle, may find the number of interactions with prospects prior to conversion even higher.

Good content marketers know that integrated, consistent messaging is critical across multiple digital platforms.  It allows us to connect with our customers how – and when – they expect to connect with us.

With so many touch points between first contact and conversion, how are companies able to break through all of the data within analytics? We need to determine not only which channels are most effective, but also how to customize marketing activities to the behavior and preferences of the audience in that channel, at that point in their decision.

Content marketing has exploded over the past year and will continue to grow in importance throughout 2013. Still, many marketers make the mistake of rushing to publish or producing content without a purpose in an effort to capitalize on the trend.

Quality rules the day when it comes to content creation. We write often here on the importance of content planning and optimization and Lee Odden offered a complete framework for optimizing across SEO, social media and content marketing in his book, Optimize.

Here are just a few examples of brands killing it with great content. Check them out and see what lessons you can take away to improve your own content strategy:

Where do advertorials, also know in politically correct terms as “native advertising”, fit into the content marketing toolkit?  To answer this question, we first have to understand what advertorials are – and also that the definition of content marketing itself is a hotly contested topic.

Adam Stetzer of HubShout, in his recent investigation into the purported Google penalization of Interflora for employing advertorial content, insists advertorials are NOT content marketing.

“Advertorials are advertisements, regardless of how you try to dress them up”, he says, “while content marketing is educational. Advertorials are biased; content marketing is free of any bias. The two may share a commercial motive, but are completely different and should be treated as separate entities”.

Inbound, content, social, mobile, converged, omni-channel, transmedia. The list of marketing channels and strategies vying for our budgetary attention goes on and on.

Where should companies invest to attract more attention and engage those that would influence or act on buying?

To answer that question, we could consider the promotional advantages of each discipline:

• Inbound Marketing – Inbound drives 54% more leads than outbound (HubSpot)
• Content Marketing - 61% of consumers say they feel better about a company that delivers custom content and they are more likely to buy because of that (Custom Content Council)
• Social Media –  74% of consumers rely on social networks to guide purchase decisions (Salesforce Marketing Cloud)
• Mobile - 41% of smartphone owners have made a purchase from their mobile phones & US m-commerce sales will reach $31 billion by 2015 (Visual.ly infographic)

Brands understand the importance of content marketing, yet most have not yet addressed their content needs on either a strategic or tactical level, according to Altimeter’s Rebecca Lieb.

Researchers for the company conducted interviews with executives actively engaged in content strategy or marketing; their findings were the basis of a new report, Organizing for Content: Models to Incorporate Content Strategy and Content Marketing in the Enterprise. Lieb and report co-authors guide brand marketers through a variety of organizational models for content, with recommendations to help companies execute an effective content strategy. Read the full report on SlideShare.

So you want your campaign to go viral…

Let’s keep in mind your business objectives, shall we? As these social marketing fails will show, campaigns may take off but go seriously sideways if companies place popularity above purpose.

Some companies can afford more risk and racier campaigns than others, yet risk in business must always be mitigated and justifiable based on the potential rewards. You might disagree with my opinion on the campaigns featured in this post, but I believe the risks should have been evident from the start and far outweighed the potential payoff.

These examples may cause you to shake your head, or enjoy a good belly laugh, but each is a fantastic learning opportunity for social media marketers.

While I’ve been in New York this week for the B2B Content2Conversion conference, I’ve been reflecting on some of the most common issues I see with companies trying to leverage content for increasing leads and sales.

Many companies new to content marketing miss important steps and without checklists or processes, content marketing contribution to leads and sales can be unimpressive.

Of course, not all content needs to “sell” in terms of inquiries or transactions, but for content designed with lead generation in mind, there should be some accountability or you won’t have anything to count.

While deciding the creative on your next infographic, the viral hook of your next video or which awesome thought leaders will be in your next ebook, step back for a second and consider these basic and often overlooked considerations for aligning content with marketing objectives.

At some point, most of us have been lost. We know our ultimate destination, but either through a wrong turn or poor directions we find ourselves in the wrong place and likely very frustrated.

Without landing page optimization, your visitors may have this same lost feeling when they arrive on your website. Whether the content was written 10 days or 10 months ago, it’s easy to make assumptions about your website visitors and assume the directions (read: content and calls to action) you are providing make sense.

If anyone has ever given you directions based on landmarks (turn right at the gas station) you can understand this feeling. And ultimately you are unsure and have questions such as: what gas station, what if there is more than 1 and good grief why didn’t you just give me the street name?