And while it’s true that SEO marketers used to employ less-than-ethical means to generate “SEO juice,” those times are pretty much over. People haven’t necessarily become suddenly moral; it’s just not effective for them to cheat the system anymore. Search engines such as Google penalize websites for overoptimized content and unnatural backlink profiles.

Here’s what you need to know: marketers must absolutely leverage basic SEO techniques to improve content and get found online. And while that’s not easy, it’s critical that they learn the ins and outs of this practice.

Zemanta recently shared an article on its website offering tips to help content marketers overcome typical issues with SEO. Making sure content is “findable and understandable to search engines” takes a little bit of tweaking, the article says.

“Search engine optimization … doesn’t always follow our intuition for site building, and Google rarely gives a firm answer of what works and what doesn’t,” the article states. “In order for search engines to be as enchanted with your site as your human visitors, they have to be able to find, read, and understand your content.”

Here’s a wrap-up of the best advice from the Zemanta article.

1. Use Screaming Frog to get a list of the URLs on your website: Screaming Frog is an intuitive tool that will scan your site for the list of URLs on your site. It’s free for the first 500 URLs, very easy to use and highly recommended by marketing agencies. Hold Screaming Frog close in your SEO tool arsenal. It is the fastest way to troubleshoot a site on the fly.
2. Index your pages to get search engine attention: If you’ve just launched a new website or important new section to your site, it’s critical to be proactive about notifying search engines. Don’t wait and sit around for search engines to find it. Tell them! Be proactive and log in to Webmaster Tools for Google or Bing and give them a heads-up. Make sure you check to see if the link to the page is buried or has a 302 redirect and fix those issues.
3. Optimize your page titles: Whatever you do, don’t ignore your page titles or headlines. Conduct an audit of your website and make sure your page titles are especially highlighted in order of importance. Do this by using H1 tags to display them prominently on your pages to users and search robots.
4. Maximize your meta descriptions: Google shows up to 156 characters of your description. A well-written description increases click-through rates. Thinking of meta descriptions as a conversion opportunity will push you to write them with a reader in mind.

Source: Zemanta, May 2013

CMI compiled a list of the top female marketers worth following on Twitter. These women discuss content marketing topics in ways that are fun, timely, informative, inspiring and thought provoking.

“This year’s list includes professionals who might not fit the ‘classic’ funnel-driven definition of content marketing,” the article explains. “Instead, it’s comprised of women for whom content is an inseparable component of their professional, and often personal, lives. It’s a list of women who not only produce epic content, but also live it.”

Here’s a wrap-up of the top four women from CMI’s list.

1. Jennifer Burnham, @jennydburnham,(here’s her LinkedIn) is the director of social strategy and content at Salesforce in San Francisco. CMI says Burnham’s “Blueprint of the Perfect Post” series is top-notch. On SlideShare, the series has been viewed more than 7,500 times and downloaded more than 250 times. Clearly, Burnham gets social media and content marketing.
2. Pamela Vaughan, @pamelump, (here’s her LinkedIn) is the inbound marketing blog manager at HubSpot in Boston. The article says that the HubSpot blog generates 10,000 new leads a month, which is impressive. Vaughan’s posts are among some of the most bookmarked posts on CMI’s lists. Marketers would do well by checking out her articles here.
3. Nilofer Merchant, @nilofer, (here’s her LinkedIn) is the self-declared “Jane Bond of innovation,” who works at the Harvard Business Review in Boston. CMI says that Merchant created VMware’s $200 million strategy. It isn’t always easy putting together a high-profile inbound marketing strategy, but she gets it. Her track record and status as a best-selling author is proof you need to check out her social updates online and connect.
4. Clare McDermott, @soloportfolio, (here’s her LinkedIn) is a content marketer, strategist and writer at CMI. Check out McDermott’s tweets and social media updates. It will be evident to you that she is great at outreaching to influencers online. She has cred working with CMI; however, she is out there content marketing hustling it daily.

Source: Content Marketing Institute, March 2013

Wired.com recently shared an interesting article about how this shift is impacting e-commerce and what firms can do to capitalize on the trend. Thanks to image-heavy social networks such as Pinterest, online sellers are spending an increasing amount of time optimizing pictures rather than text, the article says.

“Online shopping is coming to resemble … the modern, pre-Internet phenomenon of selecting purchases from the pages of glossy magazines,” the article says. “People are turning to pictures and social recommendations not just for handbags and jeans but for major purchases as well.”

This is why it’s even more important than ever for marketers to name image files with appropriate descriptions. Start off by naming all your pictures using short names loaded with keywords that your target audience would associate with the images. Don’t forget to consider the context of where you place it.

It’s also very important to upload images with a content management system. These solutions have built-in tools to give an alt text, or alternative text, description to an image. This is a great place to put a short phrase that describes the image in even more depth. It’s OK to associate it and give context to “where it is sitting” on your website.

Picture-driven sites are reporting huge success. Polyvore, a DIY style website, saw its revenue double last year. Photo site Houzz has seen its web traffic more than triple to more than 14 million monthly unique visitors this year, compared with 4 million last year.

“[S]hared images are rapidly proving themselves to be excellent proxies” for text in search engines, the Wired.com article says. “It seems like only a matter of time before a financially puny site like Pinterest, Polyvore, or Houzz grows to the point where it can give the Internet leviathan [Google] a run for its money.”

Source: Wired.com, April 2013

FullQuota: Let’s start by talking about why personas matter and why it’s so hard for people to get them right.

Adele Revella: So why do target buyer personas matter? Well, it’s no secret that marketing has always needed to understand who they’re communicating with in order to be effective. And so, typically in the past, marketers have been able to be a little bit casual about it and just learn some surface level information about their buyers because buyers for the most part were pretty willing to talk to salespeople early in the buying process.

Unfortunately, buyers have changed. They often enter the sales process informed about the problems they want to solve, the solutions available to them to solve those problems, and even the costs required to solve those problems.  According to a recent study by the Corporate Executive Council, buyers are getting 57% of the way to a buying decision before they ever contact the company.  Unfortunately, that means identifying ready, qualified buyers is no longer enough. Marketers need to focus on out-educating their competition and ensure they’re engaging their buyers at the very beginning of the sales process. Doing this starts and ends with identifying your target buyer – that includes understanding who this person is and how and why they make the decision you want to influence.

FQ: Could you tell me how many different personas you should have? Is it better to have more or should you try to really focus in on a smaller group?

Adele: Every single company I’ve done this work with has been shocked that they don’t need as many personas as they thought they did. Once they do the persona research, most learn that they need only a few personas. They may find that the marketing message that convinces the CFO to buy is exactly the same one they need to persuade the CEO. Or they might learn that it doesn’t matter what industry the CFOs or CEOs are in or what size company they are in, that they can have one buyer persona that encompasses several roles and industries.

The key to creating these accurate and insightful personas is a framework we developed the Buyer Persona Institute that we call “The Five Rings of Insight.” Instead of solely focusing personas on job titles and demographics, we want marketers to interview recent evaluators of the products, services or solutions they’re selling. We concentrate on just these five insights with them. We capture the demographic and industry data too, but we want to help marketers get beyond the basic demographic segmentation and instead create personas based on how, why and when buyers make the decision to buy.

FQ: Now I really want to know what the five insights are!

Adele: So, the first insight is what we call the Priority Initiative insight. It tells you two things. It tells you what happens on the day that your buyer is willing to invest the time, budget or political capital to go look for a solution like yours. And it tells you what is different about the buyers that make that investment.

Marketers typically will start with what we call pain points. The pain points are reverse engineered based on what our products do. So we start with what we do and we go make up scenarios where the buyers have those pain points and probably they do, but they’re not all investing time, budget and political capital right now to solve that problem. So what the Priority Initiative insight tells us is what’s unique about those companies who are making that investment and what actually occurred in the buyer’s organization to cause them to do that. It could be a management change or a new executive coming into that role who has had a prior experience with the solution or the old technology quit working. So there is a long list of things that are unique to every solution and they tell you why your buyer persona decides to go spend money on solutions like yours and that’s the first insight.

FQ: Tell me about the second insight.

Adele: The second insight is the Success Factors Insight, which tells us what the buyer expects to change as a result of making this investment. So this looks a little bit like benefit statements, but it’s from the buyer’s perspective. This is where marketers usually just reverse engineer benefits statements.

That’s how I did it. I’m not like pointing fingers here, because I have 30 years in technology industry marketing. But early on I caught on to this very simple idea that I could just ask the buyer who had recently evaluated my solution what specifically they expected to change as a result of investing in my product. That really defined my career because once I could get the buyer to define success I could be really focused with my benefits statements.

It wasn’t some laundry list of benefits statements. It was really specific to this buyer persona and it wowed them because it was specific to the result that mattered to them.

FQ: What’s the third insight?

The third insight is what I call the Perceived Barriers Insight. This is often described as the bad news insight because this is the reason that your buyer isn’t investing in solutions like yours. This is any barrier the buyer has to doing business with you and it may be that they’ve heard that the problem they’re trying to address is just unsolvable.

They may say, “I’d really love to measure all my marketing program activity, but frankly I know too many people who’ve bought marketing automation solutions and they still didn’t get to really measure what I need to measure so therefore I’m not going to buy it, or even look at them.” Or they could say, “I don’t believe that your product is the right product because I think you guys are too small or too big or because your products are too complicated or they are too simplistic or whatever.” This insight tells me exactly what I need to do in my messaging and my content to get this buyer to overcome their objections and consider my product.

Buyers make stuff up, they hear things online, they had a previous bad experience with your company or category of product and now they’ve got this barrier to doing business with you. Many times marketing content and messaging needs to address this barrier and marketing doesn’t usually do messaging like this. We’re usually focused on the positive, while the buyer is going “Yeah, yeah, yeah. That all sounds like noise to me because I have this concern and if you don’t address that concern then I have no need to call you.”

FQ: What does the fourth insight tell us?

Adele: So the fourth insight is the one that everybody is focused on and I call it the Buying Process. Some call it the Buyer’s Journey. I don’t care what you call it, but what I do care about is that you capture what happens as buyers evaluate the product/services/solution you’re marketing. People tend to look at the buying process as a generic thing. In fact, if your buyers are buying a lead management service, their buying process is different than if they are deciding where to send the salespeople for the President’s Club next year.

We have to look at the buyer’s journey in the context of the buyer’s decision and the best way to do this is to interview a recent evaluator of your product. Have them walk you through how they went through that decision. We have a methodology for doing this and we lead workshops to teach marketers to simply get buyers to tell the stories and ask probing, unscripted questions that get buyers to reveal real insights. You can’t use surveys to do this because the buyer’s first answer to any question is always the answer you already know. So what did you do first? Well, we went to the Internet. Well, that’s not news. Of course, you went to the vendor’s website.

But when you ask the buyer, what were you hoping to find on those website and when you got to those websites was there anything you recall seeing that was particularly helpful or unique? What was it? Then you ask follow-up questions based on the buyer’s answer. That’s where you get the insight. You’ll also find out which buyer persona was the one who decided to include or exclude you at each step in that journey.

The buyer did start with an entire universe of options and that universe eventually got narrowed down until they chose one and for me that’s the buying process. Every place where they narrowed down their options from 10 to five to three to one, that’s a critical step in the process. In each step, some criteria impacted that decision and one or more of your personas was the key decision-maker.

We want marketers to learn how to ask those questions so that they’ll know which buyer personas they need to target at each part of the journey. We’ll also know what we need to say to them as part of our content marketing strategy. We’ll know what questions they’re asking, what answers they’re looking for, and where they are going, so we can shape our message to these exact needs.

FQ: And what’s the last insight?

Adele: The fifth insight is Decision Criteria, which tells us what aspects and attributes of your product, service or company they’re evaluating and weighing to make a decision. This gets into the nuts and bolts of the content that we need to create so that sales can deliver these deals.

This really gets into what the buyers are looking for in a solution. A buyer may say, “I want a solution that’s easy to use and we chose you because you were easy to use.” I want to ask more about why ease-of-use was important and how they evaluated ease-of-use and how they weighed those options and for whom it was meant to be easy-to-use and how much training did they anticipate us providing or did they intend to provide it because it was easy-to-use. Now I’m going to get to something that’s deeper than the messages on my site that says our solutions are easy-to-use. People say to me all the time, “Messaging is really hard and we don’t know content to write,” and I’m going, “Just ask the buyer, they’ll tell you.”

FQ: So once you’ve mapped out these criteria, where do you go from here?

Adele: First, we teach marketers to record the interviews and have them transcribed and we then teach them, using a tool called the Insight Aggregator Tool, to build buyer personas based on that. On a basic level, it shows marketers how to take relevant quotes, classify them according to one of the five insights, and put them into this tool to create the buyer personas.

We usually recommend that marketers conduct at least six to eight interviews before they start doing this kind of aggregation. Now they can start to see where patterns are forming. If they see that all six to eight interviews have exactly the same answers to all the questions, then they’ve only got one persona. They may start to see there’s really a lot of variability and there’s three different patterns emerging. Then they want to go back and do additional interviews and really focus on the three different areas to create three different personas.

FQ:      That’s really great insight. Adele, thank you so much for sharing that. I think it’s going to be really eye-opening for a lot of marketers.

Adele: I wish I had a nickel for every blog post about creating personas that says all you need to do is go to Linkedin, find some people, give them a name and a photo and a short bio. I’m like “Oh my gosh, who cares?” I’ve even gotten to be anti-names and photos, just because you’re going to waste all this discussion around a name and a photo. It’s these kinds of things that’s give marketing a bad name in the organization versus creating the image that they are the buyer experts.

Want to learn more about creating insanely accurate buyer personas from Adele? Register for FullQuota’s webinar, “5 Keys To Creating Buyer Personas,” lead by Adele Revella at 11 am ET on May 30.

The Content Marketing Institute recently shared an article about how without a content marketing strategy, making these things is “like building a house with no architectural plans,” the article says.

“Most content marketing programs have fuzzy goals, ill-defined audiences, and lack consideration of the audience’s pain points during the content creation process,” the article says.

Content marketing strategy and tactics are very important when developing any piece of content that is slated for the web. Aside from being a noisy marketplace, the Internet is unforgiving to boring, useless content. Remember that your readers and audience are looking for real value when investing the time to read, listen or watch your content.

Here are three suggestions from the institute that every marketing firm should consider before creating one more piece of content.

1. Define the goal of your content marketing: Sure, all marketers want more attention, awareness and sales but it’s important to be specific. Some strategies are meant to convert and nurture leads, while others aim to improve customer retention or up-sell. Do you want more revenue or happier customers? Knowing these things makes a difference in your content.
2. Construct a target persona: Making content for business executives will require a different approach than content for second-grade teachers or people who want to buy software. It’s critical that marketers research their target audience and gear all their efforts to them. Ask questions about their needs, cares, problems and desires and incorporate that information into the content.
3. Detail a mission statement: Marketers must be “laser-focused” on their mission. Build a statement that targets your persona, what you plan to deliver and the outcome.

Source: Content Marketing Institute, April 2013

That’s according to the Content Marketing Institute, which recently shared an article on its website about how to take advantage of the world’s largest online video sharing service.

Although marketing agencies around the globe work tirelessly to produce expensive movies about their products, services and brands, these groups often forget to spend just as much energy to promote this great work, the article says.

The institute analyzed 200,000 business videos and found that more than half of them had fewer than 1,000 total views on YouTube. This is a drastic ROI failure, the article says.

Using a content marketing strategy to score lots of followers and views on YouTube requires a different approach than other social networks, the article explains. Assigning tags and a description to the movie just isn’t enough. The Content Marketing Institute outlined four ways to better market your YouTube videos. Here’s a quick wrap-up of the article’s advice.

1. Make a lot and mix it up: The article suggests that the best marketers produce a lot of diverse content on YouTube. According to the institute’s research, the top 25 percent of brands made on average 181 videos. The bottom 25 percent made only about 30 videos. It’s also important to make videos with different lengths. For inbound and content marketers, it isn’t always cut and dry what the videos should be about. Some of the most effective videos are short, simple and educational. Video interviews, product walkthroughs and entertaining videos are a few ideas to begin with.
2. Marry your website with your YouTube channel: “Consistent branding and YouTube channel customization occur in 63 percent of the most effective business-oriented YouTube channels,” the article says. Just by putting up your video on YouTube doesn’t magically garner search ranking results. You have to give your videos smart titles and descriptions. Always think the target viewer and the words they use to find a video exactly like yours.
3. Treat YouTube like a social networking site: People are about 10 times more likely to engage with a video than just a regular blog post, the article says. Engagement draws increased views and sales. Ask for video responses. They work to drive sales. Some companies are afraid to allow comments or allow video responses. But by turning these functions off, businesses cut off communication and engagement. Start by leaving these functions on and assign someone to monitor comments and responses.
4. Pay for ads: “YouTube advertising can deliver 10 times the click-through rates when compared with traditional [Google] AdWords and video ad networks,” the Content Marketing Institute article says. Visual advertising online does exceptionally well. The downside is the time it takes to develop and create the ads. This upfront effort and investment is often overlooked once the value from the results comes in.

Source: Content Marketing Institute, March 2013

A great article on the HubSpot website discusses blogs and how to use them to nurture leads. While it’s a common practice to use content to make websites and companies found online, blog publishing is also very useful to those readers who aren’t first-time visitors. In essence, HubSpot says, don’t forget about moving your regular visitors down the pipeline.

“Not only can your blog help you bring in qualified visitors that you can convert into leads; it can also be a powerful lead nurturing tool,” the article says.

Here are three great ways for marketers to use blog publishing to nurture leads.

1. Use your sales team: People in the sales department talk to leads every day. This means the sales force knows what people need and want. Talk to your sales team. Get blog suggestions from them. To have a fully integrated sales and marketing approach, marketers need to leverage the frontline sales information in marketing. Blog publishing is perfect for those navigating the hidden sales cycle to connect with thought leadership content that can help them find the answer to what they are looking for. Wouldn’t you rather be the source of this information?
2. Connect your blog with your website by adding links: It could seem almost like a no-brainer to promote your products and services pages in blog content. The key to selecting relevant internal links to your important products and services pages is critical. Make sure it happens in every post, and that the links are relevant. Want the reader and potential prospect to engage deeper in the hidden sales cycle with your brand? Smart interlinking accomplishes this very well.
3. Don’t waste the space around the blog posts: Use the top banner and sidebar to nurture leads. Marketers should sit down with their Google Analytics account and pore through the analytics, including the In-Page Analytics section of their dashboard. There is a plethora of data there. In the In-Page Analytics section, go to your blog to discover the elements that are most clicked on. Sometimes it will surprise you, and more often than not most clicks are to one of the primary navigation links or buttons. Make them count. Keep people on your website and engaged. Driving them to a tour or features page and also resource pages is a perfect way to keep them going.

Source: HubSpot, April 2013

TechCrunch recently shared an article outlining details about the new development. According to the article, the featured launched on the English version of the LinkedIn site last month. The social networking site will likely integrate mentions into other parts of the site, “beyond status updates and homepage comments,” the article says.

Mentions are a great way to encourage engagement on social networking sites. For the most part, the general population has grown accustomed to mentioning their friends in status updates and posts on Facebook and Twitter. It is a quick way to spur further engagement. The addition of this feature on LinkedIn takes this ability to a largely B2B networking space, which is great for marketers and salespeople.

So far, it doesn’t appear to be available to brands, and may likely not be any time soon. Nicky Kriel, a social media coach, put a nice list together of pros and cons  for this feature. For example, Kriel suggests one con about tagging is the potential for people to spam tag random people in their updates. Regardless, mentions are a good idea for social media management strategies because they allow users to start conversations and continue them in real time.

Like the mentions on Facebook and Twitter, users will be notified when they get tagged.

“On LinkedIn, you simply type in the name of the LinkedIn connection or company within the status update field,” the TechCrunch article explains. “You’ll see a drop-down menu with matches, and once you post, that user or company will see your status update appear in their notifications list.”

Unlike mentions on Twitter and Facebook, users on LinkedIn will be able to tag people they are not following or friends with. The article says that members will be able to tag people who have participated in the comments section of the same post.

Source: TechCrunch, April 2013

A recent blog post on the HubSpot website discussed how RetweetLab.com allows marketers to “analyze and improve [their] own Twitter presence.” The post suggests using hashtags, timing tweets, asking for retweets, asking questions and limiting the length for posts.

It might seem a little silly to some social media marketing amateurs when you tell them it is important to evaluate the best time of the day to schedule a tweet for. After all, most people are well over the “what the heck is a tweet?” stage.

But how many marketing departments fully understand the business analytic side to Twitter? Not many, honestly. Marketers can use tools in the social media management space to really make a better impact with these kinds of tools. It takes some effort to analyze the data, but with a tool like RetweetLab.com it makes it a cinch!

Here are details from HubSpot about how this website can improve your Twitter experience and lead to more retweets.

1. Use hashtags: The tool shows how hashtags get more retweets. A graph of social media expert @DanZarrella’s account details the effects of tweets that do and don’t use the pound sign. Zarrella, who wrote the HubSpot article, says it’s a good idea to experiment and find what works for your company.
2. Time your tweets: There is no magic time of day to post because it depends on the industry. The example from HubSpot’s Twitter account shows that early in the morning and late in the evening ranked as the most common times for HubSpot’s posts to be retweeted. Starbucks showed that early in the morning was best, which makes sense because so many people have morning coffee.
3. Ask questions: Use the tool to analyze the impact that questions in your posts have on the number of retweets. The article shows how the tweets from @Mashable that were worded as questions were retweeted more than the tweets that were not.
4. Ask people for retweets: RetweetLab.com can also allow marketers to study the impact of asking for retweets. The article suggests that asking for a retweet is “a type of Twitter call-to-action.” Again, several popular accounts found substantial evidence that this action increases the number of retweets.
5. Shorten your tweets: Research from RetweetLab.com suggests that the shorter the post, the better.

Source: HubSpot, April 2013

That’s according to a blog post on the Unbounce website, which published a checklist of things that marketers can do to optimize content on their business blogs.

The interesting part about the huge checklist is that several of these suggestions don’t take that much time to implement. Marketers should consider making these quick alterations, especially optimizing the structure and the internal links. Granted, this effort will be easier for a medium-sized website with 500 to 1,000 pages than a larger website with 2,000 to 50,000 pages.

Here is a wrap-up of the four most important ways that Unbounce says marketers can optimize content.

1. Optimize the home page structure: The article suggests that every “successful blog homepage structure” should include five things: easy navigation to pages on products/services and other key aspects of your business, content grouping, a search box, subscription options and post previews. It’s important for people to find their way around your site or they will leave. Encourage readers to stick around by letting them skim content, browse for more content and find pages they need.
2. Optimize the blog for search: It’s simply irresponsible not to research and use keywords to attract your target audience. Include content with specific words that potential customers are searching for. Make sure you use these words in every post and always in context. The article suggests writing for a specific persona.
3. Optimize all CTAs: CTAs are “essential for your business blog’s conversion path,” the article says. It’s critical to spend time A/B testing colors, designs, copy and placement and optimizing these buttons. “There are a million ways you can test the effectiveness of your CTAs’ performance,” Unbounce says. Always make sure the CTAs link to relevant copy.
4. Optimize for social media: Every marketer wants users to share their content on Facebook and Twitter, but how do you make it easy for users? To amplify your reach, the article says to “include social subscription options” and “showcase social proof” that people like your stuff. Social proof can include a live feed of Twitter posts about your company or subject matter.

Source: Unbounce

But all that’s changing.

TechCrunch recently published an SEO article that says keyword targeting on social networks could “loosen Google’s stranglehold on ads.” Twitter now allows businesses to target ads to users who posted using certain keywords, the article says.

Here’s how it works: Tweet about a favorite dish and get an ad with a nearby restaurant that sells the dish. Talk about how you need to go to the doctor and information about a local physician’s office pops up.

Twitter isn’t alone. Facebook is jumping on the bandwagon as well with its new search type-ahead ads and Graph Search. So far, these features can’t target ads by keywords, but the article suggests that isn’t far behind.

“Twitter and Facebook are now aggressively trying to drill down the funnel into demand fulfillment, and they have the data they need to succeed,” the article says. “They might not have traditional web search engine queries, but they have plenty of internal searches and a near infinite amount of chatter.”

Although marketers love to pick on Google, the company holds a vast amount of search market share — at least 67 percent, as of February 2013 — which still gives it bragging rights. Regardless, the company’s paid channels have suffered in recent years, giving other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook room to elbow their way into the market.

Here’s the big question: how can SEO marketers take advantage of this? They must get ahead of the industry shift by paying much attention to Promoted Tweets and Facebook advertising. Many online marketing agencies have also found success with remarketing platforms and banner advertising.

TechCrunch says the social networks — especially Facebook — are trying to challenge Yelp for helping online users find businesses. Facebook’s new Pages design lets mobile users see company information immediately when they search for the business. Facebook Exchange is a “real-time bid, cookie-retargeted ads based on what websites you’ve visited,” the article says.

Still, where are marketers supposed to invest their ad budgets? TechCrunch suggests companies are spending more of their search and retargeting budgets with the social networks. It’s a good idea to experiment with these new options, rather than devoting the entire budget to Google.

Source: TechCrunch, April 2013

In the last few years, there has been a huge shift in how Facebook and mobile impact marketers and consumers. If they want to get found online, brands must at least have a presence on Facebook. Fortunately, these changes are great for this kind of thing.

HubSpot recently highlighted several details about the new changes in a blog post on its website. According to the post, “the design and layout improvements” make it easy to contact the brand, which is great for generating leads. If marketers optimize Facebook pages in the right way, these sites could show up high in search results.

So what, exactly, are the changes?

Consumers will see a simplified layout with links to “check in, call the business or click for more information,” such as “sending a message, copying the page’s link, or reporting the page — right below the page’s cover photo and thumbnail,” according to the article. The most useful information is now at the top of the page and the new design now features a map and a way to calculate the distance from a mobile user’s location.

For administrators of the page, the changes enable better management. Basically, admins don’t have to do anything to optimize the page except keep their profiles current.

The HubSpot blog post suggests that these changes are big news for marketers because they help users get information about local businesses, rather than interact with web content on the page. It makes sense because people using a phone to access a business page are more interested in going to that business than reading about it.

“It’s critical for local business marketers to make sure the information on their Facebook Page is accurate and up to date,” the post says. “It also wouldn’t hurt to start collecting positive reviews/recommendations and star ratings, either.”

Source: HubSpot, April 2013

That’s according to a recent article on the Search Engine Watch website, which highlights several of the reasons for what it calls a “digital marketing perfect storm.”

In essence, two things happened since 2011 that created this overwhelming need for quality content creation:

1. Google’s algorithm allotted significantly more weight to quality content.
2. Social networks became a place where people flocked to consume content.

What does it mean for marketers? It means their brands must become publishers and give customers valuable content that helps them. If brands “expect to generate real results — links, shares and community engagement — they’d better have a good answer to the question, ‘how am I adding genuine value?’” the article says.

This isn’t easy.

For publishing brands to act as educators, entertainers and tribe leaders, they need to continuously produce remarkable content. People haven’t necessarily become pickier about what they consider good content. To the contrary, sometimes articles, videos and infographics that brands consider uninteresting are actually quite remarkable to the target demographic.

Here’s the key: While it’s important for marketers to have a perfect understanding of their target persona, they must also publish consistently if they are to build a good reputation and hook the right reader. Content creation is art and science. It requires careful consideration of core analytics such as traffic, social reach and the number of new prospects and sales they create. This is what helps drive future content creation efforts.

The article suggests that ideation also drives future content creation efforts. To become a great publisher with lots of traffic and sales, “ideation must become culturally embedded in your organization and receive the proper attention it requires in the content creation process,” according to the article.

“Trying to produce great content without brainstorming is like trying to grow crops without water,” the Search Engine Watch article offers. “You’ve got to nourish your ideas or they won’t grow and produce fruit.”

Source: Search Engine Watch, April 2013

Together with SEO, these strategies are geared to drive one outcome: Get found online. At times, this means getting found by a target buyer. At other times, it means getting found by an influencer that could connect you with target buyers. Either way, it’s critical that marketers keep preaching the SEO gospel as inbound marketing techniques become increasingly popular.

A recent article on the Search Engine Journal website highlights the relationship between SEO and inbound marketing. In essence, the article says, it’s important to charge at least one individual in the company with stewardship of online and search performance.

SEO marketers should adopt a “the buck stops here” attitude to make sure “designers, content creators, social media managers, PR representatives and the like are working together on a search-engine-friendly strategy that encompasses all of their efforts,” the journal says. All SEO marketers need to contribute to the larger inbound marketing efforts.

Here are a few ways the article suggests SEO strategies can improve inbound marketing efforts.

1. Keywords: SEO marketers can help inbound marketers analyze data, trends, traffic and links. With “keyword-rich linkworthy content,” websites become much easier to find online.
2. Relationships: The article explains that the SEO team can work with the “dev team to keep the site fast, crawlable, error-free and trackable.” They can also build relationships between industry influencers and company experts as well as between marketing and PR professionals inside the company.
3. Education: It’s critical that SEO marketers “evangelize” SEO by constantly teaching company leaders about new trends. Be a “staunch advocate for SEO best practices in every meeting,” the article says.

To get found online, it’s especially important to consider the changing nature of search. The journal outlines how people aren’t using Google to make single searches anymore. Rather, they’re making a “series of searches over a period of time that could be anywhere from several minutes to several days, before arriving at a decision that might result in a conversion,” according to the Search Engine Journal article.

What does this mean for content marketers? The article suggests it means SEO efforts require a marketing-team-wide strategy.

“In order to really start some next-level, better-than-ever organic search marketing, SEOs need to be cognizant of the fact that organic search is just part of a larger experience,” the article says. “To ignore inbound marketing in favor of tunnel-vision focus on SEO means fewer opportunities to engage with customers.”

Source: Search Engine Journal, April 2013

Was this funny for the brand followers? Hilarious. Funny for the companies? Not so much.

All too often, companies get dinged with social media hiccups. Social media is such a real-time channel that moves so quickly, protecting accounts and monitoring conversations takes serious consideration and vigilance. A hijacked account can happen so fast that serious damage is done before companies reclaim control. Fortunately, most social media management applications can easily monitor and protect your accounts.

The Harvard Business Review recently shared an article about protecting social media accounts from foul play. “Banning social media altogether is no longer a realistic option,” the article rightly suggests. “Common sense, a little training and the right technology go a long way.”

Here are the three suggestions that the HBR article offers to keep social media accounts safe from hackers, jokers or anyone other than authorized users.

1. Passwords: Unfortunately, “password” and “123456” are still among the most common passwords, despite warnings that these are far from safe. “Few people realize that an effective password is often the only thing standing between you and a cyber-attack,” the article says. Use a password generating tool such as LastPass or try to use “the first letter of each word of a common phrase or song lyric,” HBR suggests.
2. Consolidate accounts: It’s a good idea to keep only one official account for the company. It’s common for employees to create lots of unofficial accounts without management approval. Delete these. The article suggests using a social media management system that allows access to all networks with one interface. These systems often have extra security such as a firewall, which is also helpful.
3. Limit who can post: With thousands — or even millions — of followers, it’s a really bad idea to give an intern or a low-level employee authorization to post. Some social media management software tools are built to give employees permission to write messages, which are then approved by upper management.

Source: Harvard Business Review, March 2013

Heck, it’s a challenge for marketing agencies that have been riding the wagon for years. Functioning as a publishing company — a good publishing company, that is — is just really, really difficult.

The Content Marketing Institute recently published an article about the definition of quality content and how agencies can work to build a better content creation process.

For starters, Brad Shorr, director of content and social media for Straight North, a Chicago marketing agency, explains in the article that quality content is “user-oriented and engaging”, “has a business purpose” and is “easy to find and share.”

That last one — making it easy to find — is critical.

“More customers will see the great content you’ve written on behalf of your client if they are able to run across it on Google or on one of their social networks,” he says in the article. Marketers can do this by performing social media and search engine optimization.

The number of blogs and websites that don’t make social sharing of content easy is surprising. While they might have social buttons on the page, they are small archaic and embedded deep within the page. Marketing agencies must make the sharing buttons stand out. Consider making them active so that you can see how many times they’ve been clicked.

For a better content creation process, Shorr suggests that marketers give content teams everything they need such as titles, keywords and an outline. It’s an especially great idea to interview managers, sales reps and client customers. This way, writers can offer their audience context and perspective.

“This step accomplishes two things,” Shorr says in the Content Marketing Institute article. “First, you are able to write with great confidence; second, you have a strong position from which to rebut negative feedback, such as, ‘My brother-in-law tried your product and didn’t like it.’”

Interviewing subject matter experts is one of the best ways to make engaging content. Getting an industry thought leader’s perspective on the subject you are writing about is critical to making the content fully engaged.

Source: Content Marketing Institute, April 2013

Gartner’s official blog recently published a fantastic article about its annual social marketing survey. In the post, Jake Sorofman, research director at the company, outlined his thoughts about why “content creation and curation” are the most important functions to marketing firms as well as the most likely to be outsourced.

He says marketing organizations likely turn to other groups to handle content marketing efforts because it’s highly demanding to produce remarkable content with such speed and accuracy. Firms just aren’t used to being publishing companies yet.

This is why Sorofman says content creation is becoming a bigger deal to agencies than perhaps even Big Data.

“Without compelling, insightful, inspiring content, social engagement simply fails to happen,” he explains. “While Big Data may be the intelligence behind microtargeting, the precision of your aim doesn’t matter if the customer experience falls short.”

In this new age of the social web, content marketing has shifted, Sorofman explains. These days, content has to be more conversational, quick to the point, visual and human. Content has to support the brand’s view while remaining neutral.

“You don’t have to create all of your own content,” he adds. “Leverage happens when you organize and annotate third-party content that helps tell your story or sell your point of view.”

Creating remarkable content for “boring” industries is doable but more challenging. The truth is that consistency and writing to a specific audience on a blog really make a difference. SEO aside, blogging pulls in the opportunity to connect socially fast and in real time to your audience, and the influencers that influence your audience.

Source: Gartner, April 2013

Although it seems counterintuitive to create content for an audience that is already overwhelmed with messaging, blog publishing has become a critical — and effective — part of this new effort. How does this work? According to industry experts, by creating targeted, persona-based content, marketers can build trust with buyers by answering their questions and solving their problems.

Here’s the problem: this effort is a bit complicated to get right. To be successful, blog publishing and content marketing require total cooperation from several departments and individuals.

A recent article on the Search Engine Watch website highlights the cooperative nature of blog publishing. Using the Indian parable of the “blind men and the elephant,” the article explains how projects will fail if different people involved can’t catch the vision of the entire effort.

“Each individual feels a different part of the elephant, but is limited to only one part, such as the ears, the tail, or the tusk,” the article explains. “They then compare thoughts about their experience, only to learn that they are in complete disagreement as to what, exactly, the elephant is all about.”

Often, when marketers attempt blog publishing, the keywords become like the elephant. Service partners, clients, experts and third-party groups can’t agree on the words to describe the overall nature of the project.

“In larger enterprises, this usually means that copywriters and creative design teams must align with user-experience analysts and web development teams in order to produce a piece of content that will be approved of by the legal team,” the Search Engine Watch article notes. “Naturally, arguments abound when defining the actual terms, phrases and content design that will be used to communicate the essence of the big-branded pachyderm’s messaging. All too often, the original concept that was created to fill some form of search marketing gap gets completely lost along the way.”

Fixing this elephant in the room is all about early collaboration, the article suggests. Agencies need to work together to achieve “unencumbered communication” where stakeholders can bring the project to fruition. Introducing more people to a content effort can be annoying for creative teams. But legal concerns can be significantly reduced while improving quality.

Source: Search Engine Watch, April 2013

So what does make money? A website design that is clear and concise and displays content that is important to the prospect in an attractive way.

Whether marketing agencies are putting together a new redesign or just adding a new web page, it’s important to take a step back to think of the ways to convert visitors into a strong lead. Not just a marginal lead, but a strong one. Your landing pages need to speak the visual language of your target persona to connect and convert.

The Silverpop blog recently published an article about website design that attracts the right kind of visitors — the people who will actually spend money and engage with the site.

“Your business can have millions of website visitors per day, but you won’t generate leads if your marketing and sales content do not match your customers’ needs,” the article explains. “Prospective customers visiting your website must be presented with a solution compatible and consistent with their company’s objectives.”

The blog offers several website design tips to attract leads to your landing pages. Here is a quick wrap-up of the advice.

1. Design the site to push industry-specific content to specific groups: If visitors from different industries visit the page, for example, send them to targeted articles or videos that showcase your benefits. Do this by building “dynamic content rules,” the Silverpop article says.
2. Design landing pages to offer segmented solutions: If a visitor clicks on one or several pages about a particular issue, use software to trigger a phone call offering a solution to that issue. The article suggests using Visitor Insight.
3. Cater to different kinds of visitors: The blog suggests segmenting pages to lure customers of all kinds and shapes by building “easy-to-navigate paths of content on your site that describes how your business works with each type of customer.”
4. Use analytics to lead customers down the sales pipeline: If software detects that a visitor is researching a product but hasn’t reached out to buy that product, send them “richer content” that will bait them further toward that purchase. Content such as a webinar or whitepaper are great for this kind of thing.

Source: Silverpop Blog, April 2013

“It’s hard to believe how perfect this house is for me,” the buyer admits as he walks around the kitchen. “Can you really see where ‘Die Hard’ was filmed from here?”

There is still a lesson here for sales and marketing teams: With the proliferation of online oversharing, there is no need to go into a sales call cold. Using social media management tools, sales teams can learn much about their prospects before they ever chat with them. Other tools allow marketing teams to collect data and have it readily available on a dashboard.

In a recent article, HubSpot shares social media management tools on four social networks. These are tools you can use to learn more about your prospects before you get together.

1. LinkedIn: The article lists three tools on this social network to improve sales. The first tool, called “In Common With,” is available for people you’re already connected with. This allows you to see the groups and skills you share with the other person. The “How You’re Connected” tool is great for prospects that you’re not connected with yet. This tool also allows you to request an introduction by mutual connections. Finally, the “Skills & Expertise” tool is what it sounds like. “At the very least, this is a great way to get a lead to open up, particularly for those with a more consultative sales approach,” HubSpot says.
2. Twitter: HubSpot showcases two tools on this network — the “lists” feature and hashtag monitoring. For lists, salespeople can “monitor their leads and track topics they’re currently interested in.” By monitoring hashtags — you can use a variety of tools to do this, HubSpot suggests HootSuite — salespeople can keep track of trends, key phrases and problems that prospects may be facing.
3. HubSpot Social Media Interactions: HubSpot’s tool lets companies monitor everything happening in social networks. Using the “engaged contacts,” salespeople can learn more about prospects by watching what posts they comment on and interact with.
4. Quora: Salespeople can find lots of information for prospects listed on this service. Look at their profile to figure out what they know and what problems they have. “Dig through the questions your lead has asked and see how people have answered them, so you’re providing new ideas and advice when you suggest a solution during your conversations,” HubSpot suggests.

Source: HubSpot, February 2013

So how do agencies make remarkable content on a consistent basis? Marketing Land recently published a great article about how to tell if content is valuable or not.

“Effective content marketing gets people to know, like and trust your business,” the article explains. It also “lowers the cost of understanding.”

In other words, “a content marketing approach that clearly educates often produces the breakout winner,” the article continues.

It’s also highly important for agencies to consider why they’re even attempting to educate an audience. Will this content make their lives better? How? Once you know the answers to these questions, marketers are more likely to get customers who will share their content with others.

Marketing Land published a list of five characteristics of a content marketing plan that educates an audience and offers true value to readers. Here’s a quick summary of those characteristics.

1. Be empathetic: Walk a mile in your readers’ shoes. Or, put another way, consider the problems and challenges that they’re facing and try to help them solve those issues. Choose a content marketing strategy that truly considers the viewpoint of the target audience. The key here, of course, is to know the audience perfectly. Talk to them. Ask them what they need.
2. Be curious: People Google everything. Even if they’re afraid to ask a question to people, they’ll ask a search engine. Feed their curiosity by creating content about things people are really searching for. Use research, of course.
3. Be observant: Never turn a blind eye to trends going on in your industry and in the world. Create content that people are talking about right now. You can monitor social networks, other websites and news agencies to observe what’s happening. It’s also important to talk to people and use data to observe patterns.
4. Be caring: People can tell when content is genuinely helpful, or if it’s attempting to manipulate them into something. Content marketers who care about their audience are more likely to gain their trust and grow their audience.
5. Package the content: Finally, the Marketing Land article notes that “great content marketers shift perspective and lower the barrier to understanding by taking the same dry facts everyone can find and presenting them in a way that’s not just clear and simple, it’s downright better.”

Source: Marketing Land, March 2013

This ability to seemingly create something from nothing isn’t a surprise to editors, journalists and authors who have been transforming “boring” topics into exciting content for centuries. But marketers? They’re new at this. They don’t quite know how to do it yet.

Marketers first embarking on content publishing efforts can get overwhelmed trying to come up with topics for blog posts and other online content. After all, they’re used to only dealing with boring marketing printed materials such as handouts or trade show pamphlets. Online publishing is a different ball game. Marketers have seconds — not minutes — to capture the attention of prospects.

Fortunately, Copyblogger recently published an article about how to avoid boring content. By asking the right kinds of questions, the article explains, marketers can spice up their content publishing with compelling material.

“There are no boring topics, only boring content creators,” the article says.

So how do questions take away the boring factor? By asking a series of questions using the five W’s — who, what, when, where and why — and then thinking about paradoxes and contradictions, content creators can broaden their subject matter.

For example, in the Copyblogger article, a marketer needs to write about coffee cups. The writer ponders the invention of the coffee cup, then coffee cup sales, then novelty mugs and then profitable cups from China. Next, the writer asks questions that someone would type into Google, but not necessarily ask out loud to a friend such as: “How fast can you accelerate without spilling your coffee mug?”

“If they’re spending their time looking for answers, why not spend yours providing them with them on your own site?” the author asks.

The process works to boost content publishing efforts and attract more readers.

Once, a post on BuzzFeed.com called “18 Microwave Snacks You Can Cook In A Mug” scored “more than 250,000 views, 42,000 Facebook likes, 1,000 tweets, and 980 email shares,” the Copyblogger article reports. A blog on The Huffington Post called “Why You’re Not Married” — which asks a question that millions of people ask themselves all the time — was even more popular. It was “emailed more than 18,000 times, shared on Facebook more than 65,000 times, tweeted over 3,000 times, and liked on Facebook over 253,000 times,” according to the article.

Source: Copyblogger

Gator Crossing, the HostGator company blog, recently posted an article about the importance of using experimentation in website design. Just because a website looks pretty doesn’t mean it’s going to make the company money, the article says.

“You can boost on-site engagement and overall site profits significantly with just a few tweaks,” it notes.

The key is using A/B testing and data-based decisions to make the right decisions. Why? Because marketers can find out how well their changes perform by doing simple analysis. If data analysis seems too complicated for a marketer, it’s important for that company to hire a website design and development team that specializes in conversion optimization.

Here are five steps on how to do it, according to the Gator Crossing article.

1. Understand how your site is performing: Use Google Analytics to measure web data, including traffic, bounce rate and top pages.
2. Make different versions of your page to measure. You can test one variable at a time or compare several at once. “While you can test smaller site features (for example, your site’s body text font), begin by testing the variables that are likely to have the biggest possible effect on your overall conversion rate,” the article notes.
3. Build experimental pages with URLs for each page, one for the original page URL and another for “the URL of a live test page featuring your experimental headline wording,” according to the article.
4. Load this info into the program. Use Google Analytics’ “Content Experiments” tool for this. It’s free and easy.
5. Launch the test and generate data. Wait for a statistically significant winner to make changes for your site.

Source: Gator Crossing, April 2013

These agencies are pumping lots of time and money into programs that include “editorial-based content creation” to their list of services, resulting in confusion about the industry.

That’s according to a recent article from the Content Marketing Institute, which outlines what it calls “the fight for content.” There is good help out there, the Institute says, but it’s hard to “tell the partners from the posers.”

Fortunately, there is help. Here are four great ways that the Institute suggests using to tell the difference between the good agencies and the bad ones.

1. The agency markets itself: If a company forgets to perform the same service for its own company that it plans to do for others, it’s probably not a great company. The truth is if you are going to hire anyone to provide a service to you, they had better be good at it. Why would you consider them? Marketing teams don’t always have the in-house expertise to accomplish everything and in every channel, so it often makes sense to outsource and look to experts to help. Content marketing is no exception to this rule.
2. The agency isn’t just an SEO firm: A lot of companies built their business on tricking search engines into directing traffic to websites. That’s not how it works anymore. Only great content deserves to get found on Google. Lots of SEO agencies are out of a job so they’re likely to jump aboard the content marketing bandwagon without actually having experience. The core of any awesome content marketing strategy is the plan. Partnering with an agency that has experience putting together solid strategic marketing plans is important to content marketing success.
3. The agency views strategy and planning as key: Executing a content marketing plan isn’t easy. It requires planning, resourcing and stability. The planning often involves regular reviews of trends in your industry and niche. Resourcing requires making sure the writers and editors can scale up or down quickly based on demand. Stability is the quality control mechanisms in place.
4. The agency doesn’t see the business as just a campaign: “A campaign is not content marketing,” the Institute says. “A campaign can be the result of a content marketing approach, but in and of itself, it is not content marketing.” Run away from anyone that talks to you about content marketing as a campaign. It is not a one-time exercise; it is a long-term approach to marketing and brand success. To build a thought leadership hub online can take time.

Source: Content Marketing Institute, April 2013

A recent post on the Content Marketing Experience website by marketing consultant J-P De Clerck offers advice about implementing a content marketing strategy to help you reach your goals.

The post summarizes an eBook called “The CMI Content Marketing Framework” by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose. The eBook discusses the basic elements of a content marketing strategy, while the article contains links to six other frameworks (outlines, if you will) for developing content marketing plans.

The additional frameworks linked to in the article were created by content marketing strategists Dave Chaffey, Dan Bosomworth, Brian Clark, Lee Odden, Michael Brito, Warren Fauvel and Heidi Cohen.

In breaking down the elements of the CMI Content Marketing Framework, the article lists seven “building blocks in the content marketing strategy and content marketing management process.” They include the “plan, audience, story, channels, process, conversations and measurement.”

When companies decide to develop a full-fledged content marketing effort, the first questions they often ask the marketing team are about the type, rhythm and resourcing of content.

If the marketers can answer these questions — as well as questions about the specific goals of the strategy — with the same gusto that they give any other important business initiative, the content program is much more likely to succeed. The key here is to put the proper content marketing strategy in place that meshes with the company’s business goals.

In the Content Marketing Experience article, De Clerck says that implementing content marketing strategies in stages is the norm because it’s pretty tough to do everything necessary all at once for a successful program. That includes acquiring the skills to make the program work, creating management processes and connecting content marketing efforts with social media. It’s also important to search for ways to define metrics and measure success.

“Always adapt and fine-tune depending on your needs and those of your target audiences,” the article recommends. “Creating content is easy; using it in a strategic and optimized way a bit less.”

Source: Content Marketing Experience, April 2013