Content Marketing Strategies You Can Steal

What’s the profile of a modern, best-in-class content marketer? By modern I mean someone who is using new tools and resources (social media, video and data) in concert with traditional marketing programs. And by best in class I mean someone who is driving real results.

How To Use Your Content As A Marketing Magnet!

Content Marketing is all about creating content that your audiences will find useful, helpful, educational or entertaining. Hopefully you can achieve all of those things in one shot.

I *think* it goes without saying that each piece of content you create — whether it’s an article, an ebook, or a checklist — should have some sort of quantifiable goal. That’s where the “marketing magnet” comes in. Many times the marketing magnet is used to grow marketing or email lists.

And even if you think you don’t know what a marketing magnet is, I bet you do. In fact, you probably eye these prime pieces of content on a daily basis on some of your favorite Facebook pages, blogs or websites. 

Earth Day: 7 Step Plan to Reuse Your Content Marketing

Just as we celebrate Earth Day by setting up processes to preserve our natural resources – recycling and reusing products like paper, glass and plastic – content marketers must consider how to conserve their scarce resources, namely content, budget and employee time.

Similar to being green, content marketers can achieve their goals by rethinking how they use their limited business resources.

To this end, marketers, regardless of company size or budget, must plan ahead to get the most out of each content effort.

5 Steps to Creating a Content Marketing Budget

According to an Ad Age survey presented by Marketing Charts, content marketing comprises an average of 12% of overall marketing budgets. A full 10% of marketers spend more than 30% on content marketing, and 9% spend 19-30%. This means that approximately one in five marketers with a budget of $100,000 would spend up to or more than $30,000 per year on content marketing. Also worth noting is that 55% of those surveyed indicated that they would be increasing their content marketing budget for 2013.

The results of the survey are below:
 

5 Ways to Get Links Through Content Marketing

Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you know that content marketing is an absolutely necessary addition to your online marketing strategy in 2013. If your primary goal is to boost your rankings, you’re in luck because content marketing done correctly can lead to many great links back to your website. Here are five types of content you can use to build backlinks for your website.

Lists

Lists are one of the easiest types of content you can create on your blog or website. They tend to get a lot of traction on social media and ultimately attention from other bloggers and website owners in your niche or industry who are happy to share your list with their audience on their blogs.

How to Get More Content for Your Blog

One of the biggest challenges that bloggers face – whether they are blogging for themselves or their business – is creating enough content. Most people can’t just write a blog post in 15 minutes. Creating quality content takes a major investment of time and resources. If you’re struggling to create enough content, then here are some great ways to get additional content for your blog.

Supplement with Content Curation

If your challenge when it comes to content creation is coming up with original blog topics, then one way to fill up your editorial calendar is by adding curated content.  Curated content is simply compiling and organizing content from other sources into one post. The Ultimate Resource Guide to Guest Blogging and Blogger Outreach is an example – it is simply a list of networks and posts from other sites on how to have successful guest blogging and blog outreach campaigns.

How Inbound Marketing Can Fuel Native Advertising

If you're a CMO, you may have heard the term "native advertising" bandied about recently. While there are many varied definitions of the term, it can best be described as a form of advertising that consists of relevant, valuable content that's part of a media outlet's editorial offering. In plain English, that means paid editorial.

Wait ... What Is Native Advertising?

Native advertising can, in its most popular format, take the form of a sponsored blog post or article. Or it could be a sponsored story on Facebook, a promoted video on YouTube, or a promoted account on Twitter, among other things. Basically, it consists of natural content that appears in a medium's organic content stream -- with the caveat that its placement was purchased rather than appearing organically.

The Ultimate Content Marketing Plan Outline

Content, marketing, SEO — it’s all the same to me. And that’s exactly how you should approach your content marketing strategy. Every good project start has a great exploration phase before the strategy can be put together. The questions you ask upfront, the research you put in, the benchmarks you set and the expectations you define are all part of a great content marketing plan. So today, I’m going to share with you a guide for the content marketing plan outline — a great start to creating a thorough content marketing strategy.

This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but a fantastic start to touching every part of a business so you have the data you need. What comes next is creativity and flexibility — how you will use this data to create a great strategy for the business, and how that will change over time based on performance, new data or new initiatives.

4 Questions to Create Buyer Personas: A Client Story

Developing buyer personas can be time consuming and challenging. While there are expensive options, such as focus groups, sometimes all you need to do is talk to your customers. Recent customers know what your target audience is looking for and the pain points they are experiencing. So start interviewing!

After you have interviewed several recent customers, you are ready to get started creating your buyer persona. Here's a Kuno Creative example:

4 Questions for Understanding Your Customers and Your Product

How to Make Video a Successful Part of Your Content Marketing Strategy

When developing your video strategy, it’s important to ask yourself in a serious way what you’re looking to gain from it.

Start by defining your approach and establishing if your goals are realistic and attainable.

Should you be aiming to be the next viral hit on YouTube, or to strategically improve your site’s SEO?

YouTube Isn’t Your Best Friend

Why Content Marketing is Not Branding

It would appear that our buzzword du jour is “content marketing.”

You might have noticed that they talk about it a lot here on Copyblogger.

(If you haven’t noticed that, you’re either new or you don’t pay attention very well.)

At a gathering in Boston recently, I threw out this one: “Content marketing is weaponized storytelling.”

It got a lot of retweets. And now, weeks later, I don’t really know if I even agree with that.

But I do believe that content marketing is a lot more like sales than it is that dubious (and yet somewhat important) word “branding.”

Here’s what I mean by that. 

The Valuable Content Marketing Strategies Of George Carlin And Sheldon Cooper – How It Has Helped Me

The same rehashed garbage!

They were my feelings in 2012 about to bloggers implementing content marketing strategies.

They seem to believe that just because they’re in a potentially crowded niche that revisiting topics which have already been covered is going to be successful for them.

These types of bloggers are usually deluded by this misconception:

“The 300,000-subscriber blog wrote about this topic, so if I do it too, I’m sure to get people interested in my content.”

Let me tell you something: it’s not going to work.  

6 Essential Questions & Answers About Content Marketing for 2013

For every social media, SEO or content marketing “expert” there are hundreds, if not thousands of smart business people that do not possess advanced knowledge in those areas. That’s not unreasonable, since running a business involves more than keeping up with the latest internet marketing best practices.

On this blog we often include the basics of search, social and content marketing because that’s where a lot of people need confidence and affirmation that they’re on the right track.  To support that approach, here are a series of questions my co-worker Miranda Miller shared with me as prep for an online radio show. Hopefully, if you’re responsible for attracting, engaging and converting new business for your company, you will find them useful.

What is content marketing and what is it not?

I’ll start with what Content Marketing is not. It’s not limited to creating compelling media. It’s not simply creating more content. Content Marketing also is not just a SEO tactic or poorly informed blogger outreach.

Evolving Your SEO: Moving Toward a Content Marketing Approach

The search industry is booming. Competition for keywords – organic or paid – has never been higher. All forms of digital content multiply and prosper.

Underneath it all, however, tectonic plates are shifting. Slowly but surely, almost everything that used to constitute search engine optimization (SEO) has become ineffective, risky, or inappropriate for most brands.

SEO tactics are being taken off the table and a gap has begun to arise between what is needed – digital visibility – and the tactics, tools, and business processes needed to achieve it. Brands that learn how to evolve their approach to SEO and content to fit this new world will emerge on top.

How to write an engaging content that is search engine friendly?

Are you desperate to have hoards of viewers thronging your website? Then, having engaging, reader-friendly content is something you cannot overlook. Worry not! Writing interesting articles are not as difficult as they seem to be. All it takes is a little bit of effort, the right usage of words and better framing of details. Here are a few tips to help you on your journey towards success.

Audience is the priority!

Content marketing for human action

According to a recent talk at Outbrain NY, one of the most powerful voices of online news discovery, Gabe Rivera, believes algorithms will never be able to curate as effectively as humans.

This is why your content marketing initiatives should never underestimate human action.

I love my role here at Econsultancy as Content Marketing Executive because it’s a huge opportunity as well as a nine to five. My job is to study best practices from the rapidly evolving field of Content Marketing and apply the principals to some of the most desirable information on the internet: Econsultancy’s reports.

Recently I gave a talk here in London at Daniel McLaren’s Sports Tech Meetup on 'How to Content Market for Human Interaction'. Across the Atlantic on the same day, Gabe Rivera (founder of Techmeme/MediaGazer) was speaking at Outbrain NY on my same principal: algorithms will never be able to curate as effectively as humans. Win!!!

Is it Time for Content Marketers to Abandon Facebook?

If you spend time on Facebook, you’ve seen a great weeping and gnashing of teeth as Pages realize that they’re only reaching a tiny sliver of their audiences with each post.

Facebook’s noisy, overvalued IPO means they need a better revenue model. Page owners are being encouraged to pay to “Promote” posts to get a wider reach to the audiences they built in the first place.

For a business with a really large Facebook audience, this can run into tens of thousands of dollars a year.

Does this suck? Yes, it sucks.

Why Content Marketing Will Matter in 2013

If you are only going to focus on a few online marketing strategies in 2013, make sure you include content marketing among them. Content marketing is when a business posts original blog posts, articles, long-form content and even social media updates across the Web.


The beauty of content marketing is that it helps businesses to establish a better online brand and meet their SEO goals. Below are two big reasons why content marketing is going to be a game-changer for business owners in 2013:

A Business Blog is for More Than News

The decision to launch a business blog should not be taken lightly. It’s a big commitment. Perhaps the most difficult thing about owning a business blog is keeping it active. So many businesses set out with good intentions only to leave their blog hanging after a few months. If a website visitor clicks over to your blog and sees that the last post was from three months ago, it just looks unprofessional.

We get it, it’s tough to create website content on a consistent basis. “What do I write about today??” is a common plea for blog content writers. What many business bloggers do, just to fill that void, is use the blog as a place to share news. This is OK to an extent, but the blog needs to be more than a news page.

Six Steps to Keep Your Content Marketing Squeaky Clean

I have been working on a project to clean up our content at Marketo and the idea for this blog post leaped to my mind! Well, to be fair a co-worker’s mind, BUT I was obviously the better person to write the post since I am Marketing Program Manager for all things content. Creating content is a fantastic way to fuel your inbound marketing methods, but too often companies focus primarily on creating content, and not enough on cleaning it up. You should be making sure that your content is relevant, current, and easy to find. Definitely a daunting task for any company that focuses on content as the big rock to their B2B marketing efforts.  You will want to determine what to keep, what to update or repurpose, and what to get rid of.