Q&A
Get answers to the commonly asked digital marketing questions.
Get answers to the commonly asked digital marketing questions.
Consider outsourcing immediately if any of these apply to you:
- Your business is making enough money to hire a professional content team.
- You want to focus strictly on growing and improving your business.
- You don’t have a team to dedicate to content marketing.
- You don’t have time to develop, produce, edit, and publish content.
- You want to scale your business and increase traffic.
Because e-commerce is content-rich, good content and effective content can become so entangled that they blend and it becomes difficult to tell them apart.
Managed service provider marketing, or MSP marketing, can use your company’s content in ways that launch its ROI to otherworldly levels. Also, MSP marketing can automate and scale the entire process of recruiting influencers to work with you as part of a suite of services and at an affordable monthly retainer.
5 ways a full-service marketing agency can help you stand out in a competitive online space:
1. Identify your audience.
2. Set goals and objectives.
3. Plan a content marketing strategy.
4. Develop a comprehensive SEO strategy.
5. Integrate automation.
With the help of your full service marketing agency, you can create a digital strategy that appeals to your customer base. Marketing campaigns can be tailored to the needs and desires of your recurring buyers. Focus on building an ongoing, close relationship with your customers. This will help to assure future profitability.
1. Create a customer loyalty program.
2. Using a customer referral program.
3. Increase your focus on corporate responsibility.
4. Leveraging the power of digital content personalization.
Designing a financial services content marketing strategy comes with unique issues. Here are an actionable steps for creating a repeatable strategy for financial service companies, that solves problems to engage and attract new customers in this niche:
1. Consider the goal.
2. Create unique, detailed personas.
3. Identify bottlenecks.
4. Create simple rules to swarm bottlenecks.
5. Get help with financial services content marketing.
These are some other branded content marketing best practices:
1. Engage the visitor with compelling videos.
2. Use videos on social media sites that are focused on the target content.
3. Create stories to engage the audience and evoke an emotional response.
4. Strengthen brand loyalty by focusing on the brand rather than the product.
5. Select the correct social media channel for brand content messaging.
6. Use storytelling to engage visitors and grow brand loyalty.
7. Create value with branded content and encourage visitor loyalty.
8. Develop a buzz about the content for various social media sites.
Branded content is content designed to deliver the company’s vision and values, and inspires audiences to connect with an organization’s values.
Branded content marketing, when done right, establishes relationships with an audience on personal and emotional levels rather than on a logical level. Its storytelling method is unique in marketing.
Basic financial serrvice content marketing starts with:
- Infographics: Helping your audience understand processes and digest information with visuals that are easy to decipher.
- Blog posts: Quick-hitting articles that answer common questions, address typical challenges, cover relevant industry topics, and offer actionable takeaways to establish value with your audience so they come back for more.
- Long-form content: Establishing thought leadership and authority in the industry.
- Customer stories: Showing potential clients how you’ve helped people like them so they have a real-world (and more reliable) explanation of the value you can offer.
You’ll derive the most benefits from your employee advocacy program when you have a sense of what goals you want to achieve. Here are the most obvious areas of focus.
Marketing: You can significantly extend your reach. Your employees will also garner a more positive engagement with their followers since it is more organic and authentic. Prospects love it!
Recruiting: You may have already asked your employees to post about current openings. When your employees advocate on your behalf, you will reach more highly qualified candidates. You’ll also improve your brand positioning and exposure.
Sales: Encourage your employees to be authentic about your company. It’s a great way to influence buying decisions. And that’s how you effectively make those sales.
Here are a few of the primary benefits:
1. Achieve cost-effectiveness. Investing in a strategic content marketing plan costs less than traditional advertising.
2. Grow brand awareness. Content consistently presented across different online channels goes a long way towards making a brand more familiar to the public. This is especially true if it offers useful, interesting, or fun information.
3. Nurture relationships. Content marketing enables companies to move away from one-sided advertising into a two-way street. Customers today want to engage with the brands they’re interested in. Give them the chance to react to social media posts, comment on blog posts, and more. Then watch your brand blossom! Plus, ongoing dialogue builds trust.
4. Grow social media following. Publish quality, shareable content and people will pass it along to their social networks. Watch both your following and your quality of leads grow.
Aside from removing internal pressures, consider these other tangible benefits that come with outsourcing your content:
1. Quick and easy start. Getting started is key. Simply share your goals with your partner, detail your target audience, and outline your style guide. Your partner will handle the rest and you can see ROI increase.
2. Gain expertise. Gaining access to a team of qualified, experienced, and knowledgeable writers can easily breathe new life into your strategy. Let your partner create industry-centric content.
3. Eliminate internal bias. With an external team to identify areas of improvement, you can make your content even more effective and boost your publishing abilities.
4. Create customer-friendly content. People actively working in an industry tend to speak jargon. This doesn’t always translate well to a customer base. Your partner will ensure that content is written for your target audience and that it solves their pain points in words they can easily understand.
5. Cost savings. With content development outsourcing, you empower your staff and bolster your budget. Freeing up these two assets allows you to focus on core competencies and growth, without pouring money down the drain on stagnant marketing strategies or costly employee resources.
When selecting a managed service provider for your content marketing strategy, ask yourself the following:
1. What are my business’s goals and overall mission?
2. What do I need in terms of resources and staffing?
3. What kind of budget can I allocate for marketing?
4. What is the track record of the managed service provider?
Your audience is far more likely to respond to the types of content that answer their specific questions.
Different types of prospects may have different questions, and they are looking for different answers on each step of their buyer’s journey (awarness stage, consideration stage, decision stage).
The benefits of content marketing services include reducing your workload, growing your online presence, and:
1. A trusted source of information.
2. Branding and connecting with your audience.
3. Getting results.
Remarketing involves contacting current or past customers and re-engaging them based on previous interactions or purchases. This is usually done via email. Through remarketing, you’re strengthening your relationship with consumers who either have purchased from you or have at least come close.
It’s a digital process that identifies consumers who have interacted with a company online, and then it targets them with ads. For instance, if a consumer visits your website or social media page, you can utilize tracking pixels so they see your company’s ads. In turn, the ads will hopefully lure them back to your website.
The good news is that you don’t have to choose. You can effectively integrate both remarketing and retargeting into your overall marketing strategy. Both have re-engagement goals, but the fundamental difference is how you drive each audience back to your website.
As you divide your marketing dollars into different channels, you want to make certain you funnel money to the highest-impact campaigns. As a rule of thumb, plan to allocate 25-30% of your marketing budget to content marketing.
It’s smart to start on the lower end of the spectrum and increase spending once you see which campaigns are the most successful. From there, further budgeting and allocation will depend upon the actual campaigns your company decides to invest in.
A B2B marketing agency is the most advanced marketing solution for business-to-business marketing. It can help boost your company’s revenue with effective content marketing, social media management, and lead generation.
Three the most popular services among B2B marketing agencies are:
1. Content development.
2. Social media marketing.
3. Lead generation.
Google often penalizes a website due to viewing it as a low-quality site that is not trustworthy. Follow the rules below in order to optimize content marketing and avoid Google restrictions.
1. Avoid duplicate content.
2. Be wary of keyword stuffing.
3. The most important step in good SEO practices for optimized content marketing.
The three most common forms of plagiarism are as follows:
1. Self-plagiarism.
Self-plagiarismSelf-plagiarism occurs when a person takes something that they have written or published in the past and re-uses all or part of it.
2. Source-based plagiarism.
This type of plagiarism occurs when the writer copies someone else’s work or takes someone else’s idea without citing the source.
3. Mosaic plagiarism.
As its name indicates, this type of plagiarism is more complex. The writer gets information from many different sources and tries to piece it together into a collage.
Save time and convert more leads – a sales team’s anthem. You can help them achieve these goals with versatile tools like phone dialers. Here are the top two dialers we found were the most proficient:
- PhoneBurner. PhoneBurner offers unlimited calls, has a reporting system and may email reports for the supervisor. Plus, the interface is user-friendly. This app costs $149 per user per month or $126 yearly.
- Fusion. Fusion has excellent HD voice quality and offers power calls and unlimited local calls. With toll-free numbers, your customers can call you directly without any charge. The price ranges from $10-60 per month, which makes it a decent, inexpensive option for small businesses.
These are five common mistakes in content marketing for small businesses:
1. Not optimizing the back end of your website.
2. Choosing the wrong keywords.
3. Creating poor-quality content for marketing for small businesses.
4. Focusing on content only at the beginning.
5. Trying to do it all yourself.
A style guide is a reference document that can speed up your approval process and help you communicate more efficiently with writers. Here are six tips to improve it:
1. Share your mission.
2. Establish a go-to tone and voice.
3. Choose the right readability level.
4. Don’t forget about formatting guidelines.
5. Tell writers about your objectives.
6. Optimize your style guide.
"Save time and convert more leads – a sales team’s anthem. You can help them achieve these goals with versatile tools like phone dialers. Here are the top two dialers we found were the most proficient:
- PhoneBurner. PhoneBurner offers unlimited calls, has a reporting system and may email reports for the supervisor. Plus, the interface is user-friendly. This app costs $149 per user per month or $126 yearly.
- Fusion. Fusion has excellent HD voice quality and offers power calls and unlimited local calls. With toll-free numbers, your customers can call you directly without any charge. The price ranges from $10-60 per month, which makes it a decent, inexpensive option for small businesses."
These are five common mistakes in content marketing for small businesses:
1. Not optimizing the back end of your website.
2. Choosing the wrong keywords.
3. Creating poor-quality content for marketing for small businesses.
4. Focusing on content only at the beginning.
5. Trying to do it all yourself.
Content marketing for small businesses demands cost-effective ways to implement the plan. These smart strategies will maximize success and minimize failure:
1. Post share-worthy content on social media.
2. Create visually-pleasing videos.
3. Do email marketing.
4. Use word-of-mouth techniques to scale up content.
5. Blogging to enhance SEO and drive traffic to your site.
Healthcare content marketing calls for strategies that help you connect in meaningful ways and create value for your audience. Here are five secrets for a content marketing program that drives results in this field:
1. Write for your audience.
2. Create content for the patient’s entire lifecycle.
3. Remember that branding matters for the healthcare content marketing.
4. Address content blind spots.
5. Amplify your content.
In a fragmented media market, an influencer marketing campaign can help you get your message directly to an engaged audience to boost sales or increase brand awareness quickly. Here are three the ost effective ways to do so:
1. Create an affiliate marketing network.
2. Provide influencer-specific discount codes.
3. Collaborate with influencers on exclusive products.
Unlike freelancers, an agency will create a style guide that is tailored to your company’s personality, provide quicker turnaround times, and track KPIs. Also, agencies enabling faster turnaround times for quicker company growth.
There are many challenges when it comes to hiring a content marketing agency. Here are the top ones:
1. No expertise in your industry.
2. No transparency in workflow.
3. Too expensive.
4. Problems with ROI and ROT.
Unfortunately, many companies invest time and money in an internal team and fail to get an ROI or ROT. Here are six signs your internal social media marketing efforts are failing.
1. Not posting enough content.
2. Posting to the wrong social media platforms.
3. Lacking clearly-defined analytics reports.
4. Seeing limited engagement and poor user experiences.
5. Lacking continuity between SEO, content and social media marketing.
6. Finding hidden social media costs.
Professional editors can enhance your content in five major ways.
1. Expel errors.
2. Promote readability.
3. Standardize formatting and language.
4. Zoom in on brand image and voice.
5. Streamline production.
Content marketing is about creating content fit for the right audience. Thus, B2C and B2B content marketing require different approaches. Here are the main differentiators:
1. B2C and B2B content marketing personas.
2. B2B and B2C purchasing processes and behaviors.
3. Touchpoints and information needs.
Here are three content marketing solutions to help you achieve a better return on investment (ROI) and return on time (ROT).
1. Creating editorial calendars.
2. Integrating social media and content workflows.
3. Automating repetitive tasks.
Using a content marketing platform can help you scale up your program fast, and in addition to that:
1. Manage your workflow from draft to publication.
2. Scale up your content marketing program by identifying bottlenecks.
3. Gain insight into how your content performs after publication.
4. Optimize your content with built-in SEO tools.
Here are five critical situations when you should outsource content marketing.
1. You need a skill that your marketing team doesn’t possess.
2. You land a big new client or expand an existing account and don’t have the internal resources to handle it all.
3. You don’t have a budget to hire a team of specialists.
4. You’re short on time.
5. You have no idea where to start or what to do.
Create an effective B2B content marketing strategy that drives bottom-funnel results by following 10 simple steps:
Step # 1 – define your goals.
Step # 2 – define your Audience.
Step # 3 – analyze your competitors.
Step # 4 – identify the best channels.
Step # 5 – determine content quality.
Step # 6 – analyze your resources.
Step # 7 – create a content publishing calendar.
Step # 8 – create your content.
Step # 9 – promote your content.
Step # 10 – measure results and make adjustments.
Curated content is content that you have not created yourself. It is publicly available on other websites, and visitors to those websites can see it. What you are doing here is taking a small snippet of the content from its original location and incorporating it into either a social post or a much larger article.
However, if you’re blatantly copying entire passages of the content itself, you run a significant risk of copyright violation.
Some ways to naturally optimize your website to improve SEO include:
- Creating a content marketing strategy before implementing anything new on your website.
- Researching how often the leaders in your industry post on their websites and trying to keep up with that frequency as much as possible.
- Researching keywords to find what search terms are getting high traffic and optimizing future content for these keywords.
- Making sure you fill out all metadata correctly before posting to your website.
- Ensuring that all of the images on your website have titles and metatags in order to tell the search engines what is in the image.
User-generated content is incredibly important for several reasons:
- Monitoring it helps to identify things that your prospective and existing customers like about your company.
- Similar to above, user-generated content is a great source of ideas for new products and services.
- As more people talk about your company, your brand value will improve, and you will become better known.
- If your company has a good brand and people are talking about you in a positive light, it’s going to be easier for you to recruit top-quality talent and retain the people who you have.
There is no set standard, but placing one image every 200–300 words is sufficient to support most article content.
Too many images within a blog post can distract from the message and story of the content.
Too few images will impair some readers’ comprehension.
When choosing the readability you want to target, you need to understand your audience and their expectations. This determines how complex or how simplified your content should be.
Once you know your goal readability level, or the score of a particular piece of content, there are a few factors to keep in mind when adjusting readability:
- Sentence length.
- Jargon and acronyms.
- Word choice.
On average, a person reads between 200 and 250 words per minute. If you calculate the total number of words in your article and divide it by either 200 or 250, you’ll find the number of minutes it takes to read it.
Our experience across hundreds of customers has shown that it takes approximately 12 months for a company to start seeing consistent bottom-funnel metrics.
At a minimum, a basic editorial calendar is a list of topics that your company plans to write as well as their publishing dates. However, advanced calendars go into a lot more detail than simply the topic and proposed publication date.
This type of marketing involves using content to gain attention or traffic using your social media platforms.
Whether you use images, text, videos or some other form of content, it can help you reach your goals.
1. Snappy subject lines
2. Direct body copy
- promotions
- loyalty rewards
- big announcements
- newsletters
- content campaigns
- new products/big changes/upgrades
3. Enticing CTA
In short, a content marketing platform is a unified system that has everything your company needs to manage your content production.
Content marketing platforms enable marketing professionals to create targeted and tailored messages. They also allow for the distribution of that material.
