Content Marketing Blog

7 reasons Why Content Marketing Is Growing And Ruling

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Digital Marketing in the modern industry is entirely fueled by quality content floated across channels and thus reaching an unpredictable section of readers (turned customers).  Beyond the hugely infamous trend of posting more content, quality has taken the lead and requires a strategic outlook at targeting the right areas. No matter what revenue scale your business has touched Content Marketing rules!

Here’s why Content is the king!

Massive Reduction in Bounce Rate

The rate at which readers immediately leave the website after visiting any one page is a scary number for most digital marketing experts. After several rounds of doing this and doing that, it is the high quality content that resolved the complexity. Engaging content compels the reader to stay longer and explore more insights.

Hugely improved search engine rankings

Google, Bing, Yahoo and many other search engines across geographies and languages have confirmed dropping the rankings for websites with poor content. As a major shift from the hugely criticized trend when more content meant more visibility, quality rules today and drives higher rankings for potential websites. Relevant, corrective and informative are the key parameters to go in complete sync with search engine algorithms.

Better, much better Domain value

High quality content will steadily add more value to the relevance and trust factor of your website. This increased domain authority has a direct impact on the search rankings. Better the domain value, sooner you appear on user’s query. Thus, crisp content plus a domain that hints the service of your organization is amore than smart move.

More relevant visitors

A thousand random visitors at your site versus a few hundred readers who understand what you sell! The latter is more relevant, will take less time to enquire and thus convert into a customer. Website content wasting no time and hitting the right chords will capture reader’s interest and keep him engaged for long. Also, relevant traffic makes it easier for the CRM users to filter out potential leads.

Enhanced brand reputation

Reading has a lasting impact and productive reading could build a respectable brand impression amongst thousands of readers. While a new customer could be expected out of excellent brand reputation, existing customers tend to stay committed for long and become loyal. Just the appropriate use of words and information could land you amongst the most relevant customers.

Referral Visitors

Guest posting on different portals provides direct access to the pre built readers base. It’s like advertising through a stall in a trade fair that has an extensive foot-fall, way more than your individual store. Digitally, it has a better reach and is more profitable. Articles and blogs liked at such public portals will earn you more visitors referred by the current readers of the portal. However, to the point and engaging content is the bet here as well.

Last and not least, it is mobile friendly

A blog can be instantly accessed on a phone but a banner may not necessarily appear on every search and screen. This is why written content has a mass appeal. Add to it many apps that allow users to bookmark blogs for later reading.

What you have earned?

Beyond visitors, rankings and points, a business depends upon the ROI generated out of any new strategy. Falling on the same lines, smartly executed Content Marketing could generate more leads that are easier to capture as long time customers. Small and Medium scale businesses have reported a shocking fall in sales by 60% when they stopped blogging.

The best part of writing useful content – multiple targets aimed and achieved!

Stay tuned and learn more!

 

 

How Shall I Spend My Funding Raised From ICOs? A Quick Glance

How Shall I Spend My Funding Raised From ICOs? A Quick Glance

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Initial Coin Offerings raised billions of dollars for start-ups in 2017, more instantly than what IPOs do for big enterprises. These are pretty interesting times and we are witnessing some terrific trends like the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) that provide big boost to cryptocurrency startups as well as established enterprises. Though somewhat unregulated and controversial, ICO has given a much need fillip to countless businesses all over the globe and continues to do so. Quite interestingly, the funds raised by ICO are used across industry verticals and for company wide operations. Keep reading if you want to know more.

Budget and use of funds across industries:

Here’s how you should be distributing its budget across verticals –

Marketing (upto 30% share)

A product post the development stage is one of the most important aspects of any business. Gone are those days when industries used to build anything thinking the customers would come anyhow! This is the age of cut throat competition and you have to shout on the top of your voice, race ahead of your competitors and improvise in order to seek the attention of the customer.

Product Development (upto 35% share)

This one takes the big chunk out of the funds generated through ICO. This essentially makes sense as you need to devote your time, energy and budget for the development of a spectacular product that takes steam out of your competitors. No wonder the product development stage takes the lion’s share of the money raised in this way.

Team building activities (10%)

You need to have a team and that too should be comprised of the best available talent. So team building activities (10 % share) too require some part of the funds.

Staffing (10%)

The staff needs to be kept contended so as to retain them and keep them from running away from your company. Hence companies devote a part of the funds (10%) for retaining staff and other staff related purposes.

Legal purposes (5%)

Legal purposes (5%) such as company registration and other paperwork tend to consume a small percentage of your funds. But ensure that you are doing it the right way lest you want to find yourself on the wrong side of the law.

Misc. purposes (10%)

A closer look at the figures reveals the following:

Marketing of products, both online and offline, remains as important as ever. Only that our focus has by and large shifted from offline to online, but the former remains an important area of concern.

Team building too takes a lot of pain: As seen from the figures presented above, building a team that consists of the best minds in the industry and retaining the team members is no easy task. You need to invest in your resources and give them incentives to stay.

Brand Management

Brand Management in 2018: Grow in the competitive sphere

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As per Pam Moore, 5 to 7 brand impressions are required to attest a lasting impact in user’s mind. As one of the oldest marketing practices, branding has outreached everything else and cemented its influence across devices. While 2017 introduced us to the interference of emerging technologies in marketing, 2018 will witness large scale adoption of techniques and experiments.

Here’s more

Build an email list and send a weekly email newsletter

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways of marketing and building a brand. Its efficacy was never in doubt and the message is delivered straight into the inbox of the intended recipient. If you happen to choose the mail subject well, the recipient is bound to open the same and voila, the biggest hurdle in conveying your message across is crossed.                                                                                                                                                                                            Owlmetrics owner Deep Patel is of the opinion, “It’s a list that you can market future ventures to, which is exactly how I announced my newest startup. I am able to put myself in front of an active audience every week, driving awareness to content I published, which helps strengthen my personal brand.”

Personal branding campaign on Facebook

Facebook, the biggest social network, is an amazing goldmine for marketers/ brand owners owing to its sheer size. It is in fact, a great way to put your brand across who’s who of business. You can easily project your brand competing larger businesses with whom you wish to do business in the near future.

“Facebook presents you with the ability to put yourself in front of the exact audience you want to attract. I suggest that everyone starts a public page in order to have a personal brand on the platform that is separate from your personal profile,” says Dean Steadman, CEO of Dignity Bio Labs.

Post informative, long-form content on LinkedIn

LinkedIn – the employment oriented social platform, isn’t only for searching new jobs. It can prove to be a wonderful platform for building your brand awareness. Create well researched, long form posts about your area of expertise and post them regularly on LinkedIn. The users would come to know about your knowledge about the topic in question and would like to follow you for more.

Make it a point to engage with your readers and respond to their comments promptly. Immanuel Debeer of Flight Hacks says, “Rather than just repurpose content, commit to writing some long-form content exclusively for your LinkedIn profile. By turning comments into conversations, you engage with your audience and establish yourself as an authority.”

Twitter chat participation

Interesting conversations are happening on Twitter at any given point of time. Besides that, there are set schedules for Twitter chats on specific topics. Why not participate in such chats and conversations and pitch in with your valuable comments! If you have something unique to offer, people would love to follow you, thereby giving a big boost to your brand image.

“Twitter chats were immensely popular years ago and have started to become popular one again, which I attribute to the recent increased interest in the new 280-character limit. The easiest way to find relevant Twitter chats to participate in is by following the most influential people in your industry,” says David Baddeley, director of Finance.co.uk.

 

 

Influencer Marketing

What Exactly is Influencer Marketing? – Get your basics right

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Ever wondered how much power an individual with a huge social media following on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat or any other such platform, wields? Known as influencers, such social enthusiasts are already helping brands (major and minor) in cementing an unbeatable stature in the market.

Seems interesting? Then read on.

Influencers are the crop of new age social media users who, over a period of time, have developed huge following across various platforms. Their word is nearly the gospel of truth and their followers would vouch for the same. What if they endorse a particular product or service! Would their followers blindly follow them? Would they rush to the nearest stores to purchase the same? Well ‘yes’!

Why influencer marketing is here to stay?

Here are some of the reasons why influencer marketing is going to stay here for a long period of time:

It wields immense power

What is better than consumer to consumer word of mouth marketing? And when the source of the communication is none other than a real world celebrity (well, almost) the word spreads faster than fire. McKinsey, a world renowned management consulting company, has recently pointed out two interesting points in this regard:

  • Consumer to consumer word of mouth leads to twice more sales when compared with paid advertising
  • The customers acquired through this method are 37% more likely to be retained

It is social

Given that the whole world has acknowledged the power of social media, it is imperative that your brand goes social too. The who’s who of global brands has registered their presence across platforms and is always looking for ways to tap into the same.  Today’s customer doesn’t rely on traditional advertisement methods to purchase a product. He or she wants to know about the experiences of others and take a decision in this regard only then.

These days, customers do not want the brands to tell them what to get. Instead, they want information on top of entertainment. In this context, influencers form the crucial missing piece of puzzle, connecting brands with a huge potential customer base.

Paid ads are saturating customers

Customers are exposed to advertisements day in and day out, to the point of saturating them. As per research firm Yankelovich, an average American watches nearly 5000 advertisements a day. That is a huge number and it is quite likely that everyone’s message gets drowned in the sea of ads. Another important stat worth noticing is that only 14% of respondents of a study conducted by Infolinks, a digital advertising platform, could remember the last ad that they saw.

In this context, would it be prudent to launch yet another ad campaign with no surety of whether your message would reach the target audience? Instead, influencers provide a much better return on investment (ROI).

Lead Generation

Struggling with Lead Generation in SEO? Here’s a quick help

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Search Engine Optimization, if done right could convert your website into a lead generation mine. And why not, the initial purpose of having SEO norms in place was to divert valuable traffic to deserving websites. SEO, along with high quality content has leading the pack when marketing strategies are curated, no matter what the scale and context of the business is.

SEO provides a big boost to your website’s search engine performance for the keywords of your choice. Subsequently, content searchers using the same keyword flock to your site and thus boosting the overall organic traffic. Not to miss, if they seek what they were looking for, they’ll make a purchase or seek services from you.

SEO Leads – Some important statistics

  • As per Imforza.com 70% of visitors ignore search ads
  • AdBlocker usage rose by as much as 30% in the year 2017
  • Around one-fifth of mobile searches lead to purchase within 24 hours
  • Around four-fifths of mobile searches result in offline purchase

Here are some tips to help you achieve your targets:

Create an SEO Strategy

There are some important tasks that you need to perform as a part of building a sound SEO Strategy, which include

  • Develop a deep understanding about your audience
  • Define whether you want your visitors to sign-up for email, free trial or downloads a lead magnet such as a broucher
  • What keywords you are going to target. Make sure you strike a balance between competition and search volumes vis-à-vis the keywords you choose.

Audit your existing content for SEO purpose

Search engine ranking factors keep on getting updated. Webmasters may know about any such update only when their websites experience wild fluctuations (positive or negative) in web traffic and by then it is probably too late. In this context, you need to keep performing audit of your existing content to stay relevant for search engine spiders. You may not like to stay behind your competitors.

Make sure that search engine spiders are crawling your site

  • Fix any broken link
  • There ought not be any redirect chains
  • Fix duplicate or missing page titles
  • Optimize your content for local SEO

Optimize your content (new as well as existing) for SEO

  • Optimize the web page title by keeping its length short and including the target keyword early
  • Use search snippets / meta description wisely to include maximum possible information
  • Keyword usage: Make sure you use long tail keywords to target exact searches and if needed, rewrite your content

There’s a lot that can be done to improve SEO for your website. Place your cards right and capture high quality leads while ballooning your client base with each passing day.

Creative Content Marketing

Content Marketing – What we learnt in 2017

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From the days when advertisers had complete control over the type of content we could access to the end user controlling the content flow, the times have changed a lot. The year 2017 was a phenomenal one with respect to content marketing trends. The advertisers no longer rule the roost and the customer is truly the king. Here are some interesting things we learnt about content marketing this year and how that would make an impact on the coming year.

Advertisers no longer control the industry

Tables have turned and the advertisers no longer have control over what type of content or even the ads we see. Blocking an irritating ad is just a flick of finger away. Customers do not want trashy content that is saturated with oddly placed keywords; they want engaging, informative and good quality content that is worth paying heed to.

Users want that the content that they are going to access:

  • Should provide great value – content should benefit the reader in one way or the other.
  • Must be based on verifiable facts – nobody wants to read shallow words that are world apart from real life.
  • Needs to be optimized, current and newsworthy
  • Must be accessible on a mobile device – mobile is the way forward; is your content accessible on smartphones and tablets?
  • Should be personalized and well researched

Evergreen content is must for building trust

Evergreen content is the holy grail of content marketing. If anyone had any doubts regarding the efficacy of lasting content, the same should have evaporated in smoke this year. It is essential for building trust and readership in the long run. Evergreen content is like magnet for readers, they continue keep coming for it even after years of publishing. Today’s internet users prefer content that doesn’t get old and reward such publishers with loyalty.

What type of content is classified as evergreen?

  • Such content that answers burning questions.
  • Long form posts that are rich in statistics and evidence
  • Readers love case studies
  • Visually appealing Infographics have tremendous power
  • How to guides that provide step by step information regarding solving a problem
  • The popularity of Podcasts has soared to unimaginable heights

 Use as many Infographics as you can

Infographics are a rage these days and pack a heavier punch than text alone can. Some powerful messages can be conveyed with the help of the same thanks to rich graphics involved. Research has shown that customer engagement can be increased by several times thanks to use of infographics.  These are three times more likely to be shared on social media than text. This essentially means these ought to be in the arsenal of every content marketer

Here is why you need to use more infographics in your content marketing efforts:

  • These improve website’s SEO by several notches
  • Infographics are likely to get tons of social shares
  • These are great for increasing brand awareness
  • Connecting with your target audience becomes immensely easy with infographics

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality is catching up fast

With new technological advances being witnessed with each passing day, it is quite important for a content marketer to remain updated with the same. The rise of augmented reality and virtual reality is worth mentioning here. The efficacy of the same was proven much beyond doubt with the tremendous popularity of Pokemon Go that milked these technologies like no one else and tasted enormous success. Any content marketer looking forward to stay ahead of competition ought to make good use of the same.

In fact, companies are investing a lot to make most of the trends. For instance, specialized VR and AR equipment is making way into the market that helps content publishers to create cutting edge content. It is highly likely that there will be a deluge of such content in the coming year.

Rise and rise of influencer

Influencer marketing became a thing in the year 2017. Anyone having a big social media following across platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram among others is considered to be an influencer and can impact buying decisions of his or her followers. In this way, influencers are quite too valuable to ignore for brands. In fact, the latter are doling out rewards for the former. This has, in fact, triggered a race among social media users to get recognized as one.

Such influencers are paid handsome sums for posting social media posts that act as advertisement for their followers, without looking too preachy. We are going to witness this trend to continue in the coming year and several new influencers rising to the top of the table, grabbing a piece of the pie.

Given by the above lines some pretty interesting trends were noticed in the year 2017. It is expected that content publishers are going to build up upon the same in the year 2018 and chalk out new success stories.