content marketing
December 29, 2017
4 Marketing Strategies Every Startup Can Afford
You don't need to outspend your competition. You just need to out-think and out-work them.
Do your products sell themselves?
Having a great product is essential, but that alone isn’t enough to make your startup successful. Aside from your fantastic product, you’ll also need a stellar marketing strategy to grow your startup. But for many entrepreneurs, it's simply not realistic to spend a lot of money to acquire new business.
Instead, consider a few of these cost-effective marketing strategies that can help generate early successes.
Affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is the most cost-effective marketing strategy that works. I believe all businesses -- regardless of size -- should adopt referral, or affiliate, marketing. I've used it with a good deal of success and put it to work in all my online businesses.
Here's how it works: Encourage people to recommend your products to others, and pay a commission only when someone purchases your products through those referrals.
Start by setting up an affiliate program though networks such as ShareASale or ImpactRadius. You then can promote your affiliate program by featuring it prominently on your website and inviting customers to join the program. Additionally, you can choose the right reward structure -- one that’s compelling enough for your network's members to engage.
Email outreach also can serve as an efficient tool when communicating with influencers:
- Create a list of influencers and experts in your industry,
- Send an outreach email requesting they try your product for free, and
- Explain the monetary rewards they could earn by referring a user.
Content marketing.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, nearly 90 percent of brands use content marketing to grow their businesses. It's the perfect marketing strategy for startups and small businesses because it works within the confines of limited resources.Even though content marketing is extremely popular, not everyone finds success with this tactic. Lack of a documented content strategy is one of the primary causes. Without this crucial piece, your efforts will be less effective. As a result, you could face significant challenges when you attempt to implement content-marketing tactics.Streamline your content-marketing process by creating an editorial calendar. Identify any bottlenecks and evaluate your content planning. Measure your strategy's progress, tracking how well your content is performing to attract the audience.Do-it-yourself PR.
More than 540,000 new businesses launch each month. That means you'll encounter some serious competition to grab your target market's attention. If you want to generate favorable and frequent public-relations mentions, build quality relationships with the journalists and bloggers in your industry.Be prepared that you might not always get a response when you make your pitch. You can increase the likelihood of getting coverage if you differentiate your pitch so the tone or angle of each is exclusive to the journalist and her or his publication. Do some research to discover which writers or videographers cover which aspects of your industry. Then, tailor your press release, teaser, or pitch-by-phone to fit those respective beats. Free tools such as Help a Reporter Out can assist in your quest to gain access to email addresses that belong to journalists looking for interviews in your space.Piggyback a popular platform.
When you’re launching a bootstrapped startup, the real challenge is coming up with a marketing strategy that requires little to no funding. Piggybacking another well-grown platform is a great strategy to get your product in front of potential customers. Airbnb’s integration with Craigslist is a perfect example of ad hoc integration for user acquisition.Craigslist doesn’t allow integration with any third-party services that cross-post listings to the site. To build a backlink and attract users, the team at Airbnb reverse-engineered how Craigslist's forms worked -- then made Airbnb's own site compatible with that workflow. Just a few clicks allow users to easily cross-post a listing to Craigslist while also placing a backlink that points to their own site.The general rule of thumb: Find the right platform you can leverage to grow your startup and create a strategy that works to acquire customers.
Syed Balkhi • Guest Writer - Entrepreneur.com
Photo by: Jason Briscoe - Unsplash
December 14, 2017
7 Mistakes You’re Making With Video Content
With more than 75 million people watching online videos every day in the U.S. alone, video has become a driving force in delivering marketing messages. Increasing brand awareness, explaining products, optimizing landing pages, developing social media content, and providing educational tutorials are just a few of the ways that video is used as an effective marketing tool. The fact that viewers are likely to retain around 95% of a video message vs. 10% of written text is one reason that video works.
On the other hand, attempts at using video content for marketing can go awry if some of these aspects don’t get enough attention:
Wrong Channel
While YouTube does maintain activity for at least 1/3 of all internet users, other video channels may be more effective for your particular target audience. Since Facebook is the most popular social media channel in the world, you may be missing out on your target audience if you’re not using it. Demographic studies can help to better understand the preferences of your audience and pinpoint which channels will perform best.
Bad Titles and Poor SEO
Just because content is video form, doesn’t mean that SEO can be tossed out the window. Titles, descriptions, categories, and tags all act as critical identifiers to draw your target audience in. Of course, using misleading tags in order to get more views is a really bad idea. Remember that it’s not massive numbers of people you want watching—it’s the right people.
Too Long
Most people today have a short attention span and want instant gratification. Around 2/3 of viewers prefer videos that last one minute or less. Time is a commodity and asking people to use their time by watching your video should offer some sort of payoff. Creating content where the first few seconds grab the attention should help earn trust. Be sure to maintain trust by making your video short, to-the-point, and valuable.
Ho-Hum Content
Striking the perfect balance between a boring video and ridiculous hype can be a challenge. Videos should send a message. Whether it is meant to be helpful, entertaining, or moving, your video should provoke the viewer to feel, think, or respond in some way. Enthusiasm and emotion are what make videos share-able and gain traction online. Building curiosity by using cliff-hangers may be an effective way to lead viewers on the buyer’s journey.
Morphing into a Sales Pitch
Remember, the last message you want to be sending is that you are trying to sell something. Video content that resembles infomercials makes it about your needs (selling stuff) rather than about meeting the viewers’ needs. Video content included within a larger marketing plan is part of the whole picture of leading your potential clients through the buyer’s journey, without a pesky sales pitch.
Forgetting the Call to Action
When you can identify the direction you are taking your viewers, you can help lead them along on the road toward conversion. A video should move the audience toward a call-to-action without fading to black so there is no opportunity to back out prior to the call-to-action. Driving viewers to watch another video, sign up for a free trial, download an eBook, or respond to some other type of CTA will lead them further along on the buyer’s journey.
Missing Analytics
Determine who is watching your videos, which ones they watch, how long they watch, and which parts they watch. This information is critical for measuring effectiveness, telling you where the viewer is in the funnel, and allowing insight into what type of CTA and/or follow up would be most effective. For instance, if viewers are consistently dropping off about halfway through then you can assume either your videos are too long or that your titles and tags are not leading them to what they want. In the same way, knowing that viewers are skipping certain sections but watching others repeatedly helps you to optimize the content you already have.
When well executed, video has the potential to be one of your most effective marketing tools. But if you aren’t researching, planning, analyzing, and optimizing, then your efforts will likely fall flat.
Written by: Roman Kniahynyckyj
Photo by: Jakob Owens
December 1, 2017
How AI Can Enhance Your Content Marketing Strategy
An interview with Alexavier Guzman, senior full stack developer at Forbes, who is responsible for developing BrandVoice special features and internal tools and solutions to support various departments across the organization.
Artificial intelligence is driving market gains, revolutionizing industry – and, some argue, gearing up to destroy humanity once and for all. If we’re still around, it will also drive innovations in branded content. Here, courtesy of Forbes techie Guzman, are three AI-enabled applications that could transform content marketing.
BIOMETRIC SENSORS
What it is: Guzman asks us to imagine a male college student standing next to a sensor-equipped bus-stop LED screen one morning. He’s wearing a Lacoste shirt, carrying a knapsack and drinking a Starbucks caramel latte. “That screen will serve AI-generated branded content themed to male students who like French polo shirts and expensive sweet coffee drinks and take public transit to class,” Guzman said.
How to play it: To avoid intrusiveness, smart content marketers will cultivate next-level AI’s ability to predict a target’s moods. That could mean something as obvious as sending an upbeat, and contextually appropriate, content asset to a target’s phone. But it could also mean sending him nothing at all.
“The content that succeeds here will be the content that avoids annoying people,” Guzman said.
DECENTRALIZED APPLICATIONS
What it is: Dapps, for short, are peer-to-peer applications that function via blockchain. They’re associated with cryptocurrencies, the distribution of which they render fast, frictionless and cheap.
How to play it: “After the AI capability feeds users content customized to their specific interests, content marketers can pay them tiny sums of cryptocurrency to incentivize consumption,” Guzman said. “Do well on a quiz about the sponsored content you just read and you’ll immediately receive a transfer in your mobile e-wallet.”
At scale, this could make economic sense, with better engagement metrics leading to higher rates to make up for all those incremental crypto disbursements.
AI + IoT
What it is: Imagine that much-discussed IoT-enabled fridge of the future that notices your milk is running low and orders you another quart via FreshDirect. Now imagine it fitted out with neural network-enabled AI.
How to play it: Publishers could feed client content to consumers based on an appliance’s feat of pattern recognition. Your coffee maker, for instance, notices that you keep ordering a non-fair-trade coffee, triggering your reception of an agricultural NGO’s content about the challenges that Latin American farmers face – either aurally, via Alexa or via a text post beamed to your phone.
“Again, it’s going to be a matter of making the experience positive for people,” Guzman said. No consumer wants to be caught in a running argument with an appliance about his or her eating habits.
A recurring theme here, of course, is the need for restraint in using this transformative technology. “A soft touch will be necessary,” said Guzman. “The rise of ad blockers indicates that people can find poorly done advertising intrusive. Imagine what they might think of this technology if it’s not used gracefully.”
It’s no secret that social media content has become more and more about visual marketing. Why? Because it plays a significant role in attracting people to your content and accelerates sharing.
Do you want to stimulate online growth and drive up engagement, traffic, clicks and conversions? If so, using visual marketing will play a key role in your overall content marketing success.
Creating strong, consistent, craveable and relatable visuals has become a must do in the content marketing world and the push for visual content is only becoming stronger.
Consider the following:
- According to a Citrix report nearly two thirds of the posts on social media are visual content
- A Pew research study found that 54% of all internet users have posted original visual content that they personally created.
- Content with images gets 94% more views than content without, according to another study.
Standing out with visual content is critical, and watching what works for others in your industry can help you create content that drives branding clicks and conversions with your own audience.
In this article are 11 unusual visual content marketing tips to inspire your own endeavors and will also provide you – at the end of the article – with a bonus list of visual content strategies to help revive your tired marketing tactics.
Content that works
First, let’s better understand the characteristics of content that resonates well with your audience and prospects.
Gary Vaynerchuk provides six great insights in his book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. He says –
- It shouldn’t interrupt the user experience – it should blend seamlessly into their experience, not come across like an ad. Replicate the kinds of experiences that people are looking for in their preferred platform.
- It should be native – in other words, while social media platforms may have some overlap in terms of functions, the audiences and their values can be quite different. While one caters to short content forms, another is for artsy photos. The differences in each make a difference to the audience and, in turn, can make a huge difference to your marketing efforts.
- It doesn’t ask or demand, but offers – It doesn’t ask users to buy or click here but offers something that is of value to them. It offers social content that is in the form of a story.
- It should be bite-sized and snackable – In other words, think micro-content – an example being a tweet for Oreo cookies during the 2013 Super Bowl blackout
- Prove that you understand your audience – Show your fans and followers that you understand them. Everyone consumes culture via technology, whether it be music, videos, GIFs or other media through portable mobile devices. So, create content that shows you understand the issues and news that matter to them.
- Be consistent and self-aware – Every piece of content on social media platforms forms part of your brand identity, and you want your identity to be consistent. In other words, no matter how the story is told, your personality and brand identity must not change.
Keeping this in mind, let us look at 10 unusual ways in which visual marketing can drive branding, clicks and conversions.
1. Create custom tweets
Most tweets get lost in the live feed; however, with some custom formatting, a tweet is likely to catch a reader’s attention. For example, add line breaks or a unique font and/or a visual to add a change to the usual form of tweets. Consider adding emoji or a fun symbol as well.
How to do it
- Sign in to your account.
- Go to your Settings and click on the Design tab.
- Go to the “Customize Your Own” section.
- Click on “Choose File” to upload a background image. Note – images justify to the top left of the screen. Image size needs to be 2560px by 600px and a maximum file size of 3MB.
- Check the box to “Tile Background” if you want your picture to repeat across the background.
- Choose whether your Background position will be left, center or right.
- If your image isn’t very large, choose the background color that will show behind the image.
- Choose a color for links.
- Choose a black or white transparent overlay.
- Click “Save Changes”
2. Make your product real to buyers
I usually skip over commercials on TV or on the web. However, this one ad caused me to stop and watch. It’s a commercial about printers, for an office supplies company, and HP shows how something as seemingly boring as a printer can affect a family. Check it out below.
Discover how your product or service truly impacts the lives of your customers, and run with it. Your audience doesn’t care about your product or service. They do care about how using your product will change their lives. Tell that story.
How to do it
- Get in touch with your customers to find out WHY they use your products and HOW they use your products
- Observe how your customers use your products
- Craft a story around them.
- Share the story directly with them.
- Create or facilitate communities where they tend to hangout. For example, on Facebook, you might find that the organic reach of Facebook pages of businesses continues to decline. An alternative that entrepreneurs and businesses should consider is the creation of Facebook groups. It allows members to opt in and to receive direct notifications about updates.
3. Insert embedded calls to action
To generate more engagement or leads, consider adding a call to action button that drives clicks and traffic. While you may have call to actions on your website and blog posts, consider adding them to social media posts like Facebook like in the example shown below.
That way, people reading your post will have the opportunity to click through to it via the call to action.
How to do it
You can use this simple tutorial to do this.
4. Market across multiple social platforms
Share visual content across different social media platforms in formats that are native to the platform.
By regularly sharing across social media platforms, you can convert followers on one platform into followers on another platform, as well being at the top of the mind amongst your audience.
How to do it
Post the same content in formats that are suitable to the audience and in line with the characteristics of each platform.
For example, General Electric in their #TheNextFrontier series posted this across social media platforms including Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Google+ and Tumblr.
Facebook:
Google+:
Tumblr:
5. Leverage more from your photos and images
In blog posts, images have been found to increase engagement by 94%. According to an eMarketerreport, photos accounted for 75% of content posted on Facebook with an 87% engagement rate, while other post types received no more than 4% engagement. Adding a photo URL can boost retweets by 35%, according to research by Media Blog.
According to a survey by Software Advice, a social CRM research firm on social media content optimization, the top 2 ways most marketers optimize their content is by using photos or images and including hashtags and usernames.
Images are a great way to showcase your business and brand personality to drive conversions. Cover images on your social media platforms can drive action and sales so it is well worth your time and efforts to spruce them up if you haven’t done so in a while. Not convinced? Check out this case study on UNICEF.
How to do it:
- Using the same cover image across social media platforms reinforces branding and makes it easier for people to feel connected with you and your business.
- Post images that you have created or that you have a right to publish (like this example from the North Face).
- Mix up the types of images you post (e.g., banners, infographics, photos, memes, etc.).
- Take impromptu photos on your smartphone and post them in real time.
- Post “Caption This” photos. For example, post a funny picture on your page and ask your fans to offer their best caption for the photo.
- Avoid “selfies” unless you’re posing with a celebrity.
- Tag people in a photo
6. Manage your content
A challenge for most businesses is the ability to manage the different pieces of content and visuals. Yet engaging in content marketing requires a business to think like a publisher. It requires us to make sure we are making the most of our content marketing efforts and staying connected to our audience. Here is why:
- Content marketing requires understanding our audiences and giving them what they want in comprehensive yet easily digestible ways. It is a strategic process.
- If traffic growth to your site is a goal then make it a focus of your content creation and distribution process
- The editorial calendar makes your plan tangible to all those involved and helps build the accountability and discipline required for sticking to producing content consistently.
- Content that is focused on your audience needs will be welcomed and appreciated by them.
How to do it
A simple yet effective solution is to create and use a content calendar to schedule and manage the different content items. Use what works for you and your work flow, whether it be a spreadsheet, Google calendar, Trello, Viraltag or even a content calendar plugin like CoSchedule.
The biggest benefits to using a content calendar are to help keep your content consistent and relevant; to predict future engagement; helping at the buying stage; as well as helping with accompaniments like associated tweets, landing pages, nurture emails etc. Ensure these elements are part of your content calendar.
7. Crowd source user generated content
User-generated content gives you the benefit of leveraging a stream of content from fans who are constantly consuming – and sharing about – your brand. As a result, you get more credibility and extended reach from the authentic content that your loyal fans and followers share. Red Dress Boutique have tapped into this by running giveaways for customers who share a designated picture on social media.
Nothing showcases the value of your brand better than content shared by your community. It also provides a perspective of your fans’ experiences and interactions with your brand, giving you more insights into your fan demographic and their interests for future marketing efforts.
Rent the Runway, for example, is a business where women can rent high-end designer dresses and accessories for special occasions. The company asked users of their service to upload photos of their Cinderella moments to the site. They soon discovered, however, that users were posting photos to Facebook and Twitter anyway so decided to harness this organic sharing with a branded “Our Runway” campaign.
The campaign has since built a user-generated database of images aimed at helping the person looking to rent a dress find what works well for their body type. According to iMedia, women who view these user-generated photos are 200% more likely to rent than those who view the standard dress shot of a model.
How to do it:
Build an engaged audience with content that your readers find highly contagious and by being responsive to comments, tweets and emails like Frito-Lay’s does on their Facebook posts.
- Find out where your target audience hangs out.
- Offer incentives for user-generated content
- Create and encourage the use of related hashtags
- Ask customers to model with your products (or wearing your products)
- Ask people to guest post or be interviewed.
- Ask questions in a visual format to get people engaged like Frito-Lay did with a pop quiz to help fans understand their products better.
- Create a contest around user-generated content. Frito-Lay tapped into the holiday season last year with this contest on Facebook.
- Ask for comments on blog posts via questions at the bottom of your blog post.
- Repost customer reviews on other platforms.
8. Use more video
If you think mastering video is too difficult and not really a priority, consider the following payoffs of using video in your overall content marketing (source):
- 80% of internet users recall watching a video ad on a website they visited in the last 30 days.
- 50% of users watch business-related videos on YouTube once a week.
- 64% of website visitors are likely to buy a product on an online retail site after watching a video.
- 75% of users visit the marketer’s website after viewing a video
- 75% of executives watch work-related videos on business websites at least once a week
Not only does video work well on landing pages, but with Vine and Instagram video you can reach your followers and fans on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Videos also allow for the insertion of calls to action. The longer people are on your social media account watching a video, the more likely they are to follow a link and check out what you have to offer. Specialized tapped into the Tour deFrance with its #ItsMyTour campaign involving video segments on Twitter. They were able to double engagement rates from the previous year because of video, and the fact that the company’s bike won 10 of 21 stages. Below is an example of the videos they pushed with Promoted Tweets.
How to do it:
- Your audience is always searching for new information and better ways to perform tasks so be informative.
- Be inspiring, like Upworthy which looks for inspiring stories to share with its large readership.
- Engage with your audience. For example, the Old Spice Man played by Isiah Mustafa answered fan questions on social media via short YouTube videos.
- Capture the moment. For example, when at a conference think about the end result you want before you start filming. Use your smartphone to capture the best tips from a speaker before or after their presentation.
- Be timely – get video content that is related to a current event, and share it sooner rather than later to tap into current interest.
- Keep it short and sweet. Record short videos with Vine or Instagram video and share directly.
9. Take risks
You have probably been told to produce awesome content, which implies that audience engagement rests solely on your ability to write well. Playing it safe guarantees nothing but the status quo at best, so take a few calculated risks that can prompt your audience to admire your businesses authenticity and transparency while they laugh, smile and share.
Buffer blogs post on “What Multitasking Does to Our Brains” really took off and got featured on Lifehacker. In the post, Leo Widrich plays the role of messenger by citing data and research about multitasking, thus creating a Them Vs Data argument. He cleverly used images and photos in the post to keep readers interested and reading. The post, at the time of writing, has a 148 comments on it.
The post on toilet paper orientation is another that resulted in heated debate and received over 12,000 shares. There is even a Wikipedia page on the topic.
How to do it:
- Research indicates that topics that create division within someone’s belief, behavior or feeling of belonging will generally cause them to confirm your stance or disagree with it.
- Consider piggybacking on a popular topic, fad or individual that people are already talking about.
- Use research or a credible source to create a Them vs Data debate as opposed to a Them vs You debate.
10. Tell a story with animated gifs
Animated GiFs are essentially short clips of images that play on a loop. These are a great way to engage your fans and show a little brand personality without necessarily focusing on your product or service. Consider telling a story, convey company culture and add a good dose of humor.
Forever21, for example, used humor that appealed to their audience to get them excited to shop during a clothing sale promotion.
On the other hand, GE – known for innovation – uses animated GIFs like the ones below to reinforce its reputation and company culture.
How to do it:
- Make sure animated Gifs are part and parcel of your overall content marketing.
- Make your own, using tools like Face to GIF, LICEapp, GIMP or Photoshop.
- Consider repurposing old content like webinars, articles or SlideShares into an animated GIF like thisone.
11. Use Photo albums
You can create photo albums on Facebook or Google+ that contain hundreds of photos. These are great for catalogues, and events like conferences or parties. The more pictures you have, the more people you can engage via commenting, follows and re-sharing.
However, as great as photo albums are for organizing photos, generally speaking, few people actually click through an entire collection, even if you break it down into smaller albums.
An alternative could be Flipagram, which is an app that allows you to create videos from still photos and then share them on major platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Instagram. Peg Fitzpatrick, for instance, used pictures she took during Social Boom 2014 to create the following:
Over to you
As you plan your visual marketing strategy for this year, you might want to look over your old marketing tactics and make them hip and fresh and in line with your plans for this year.
With this in mind, here are a few additional resources in a visual marketing strategies infographic that provides 65 strategies to help revive your tired old marketing tactics.
Let me know what content tactics you will be employing this year, and what challenges you face, in the comments below.
By: Vinay Koshy- Jeffbulas.com
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