Content marketing is an everyday effort that we know benefits the audience, but also delivers many benefits to the business itself, like deeper audience engagement than traditional outbound marketing ever offered and also as an internal culture influencer. A business that gives and helps, as content marketers do, must have a keen understanding of their audience and that alone is a culture shaper.
Content marketers think differently than marketers of old and as a result are getting far better results. What does their marketing-think look like? Here are a few inspirational examples.
How To Tell The World About Your New Service or Feature?
Blast it out there – there are tons of channels. Announce it on your homepage, use lots of explanation points. Create ads and let your audience know. Send eblasts. Mention at every f2f meeting. Woo hoo.
That’ll get you some traction, but there’s definitely a better way. Better as in less effort, more results.
Give, Give, Give With Your Content Marketing
What will help your audience? What about a free presentation offering useful tips of some kind. Provide examples to support your tips and one of those examples could be your announcement. Now you have an announcement that your audience will share. And you have an announcement about your new product or service that is in an envelope that is interesting to a far wider audience.
In the examples above, we see marketing brilliance in action as Hubspot, the marketing automation platform, uses their own new service announcement as an example in a presentation that has the potential for an extraordinarily broad audience.
Anyone who has ever thought to ask a survey question or needs survey information will find this SlideShare infinitely consumable and sharable. Oh, and useful. As of today, it’s closing in on nearly 12,000 views. Think your new service announcement is gonna get that much play? Well, it can. And this is just one thing that Hubspot did to share their news, and as a seasoned content marketer yourself, it is probably clear that the roi here was pretty darn smile-worthy.
How To Announce a Newly Redesigned Website
Hey, have you heard? CrudCo has a new website, go check it out. What? You don’t care?
Right. You don’t care. I don’t care. No one cares except the team who built the darn thing – and even they won’t care soon enough.
And it is hard to face this, but no one cares about your site or mine either. So when you launch your newly redesigned site, you better find something better to tell the world than we have a new site design.
Here, watch this swinging jewel, see it go left, see it go right, left, right… Listen to my voice… you are a user of
So, did you have anything great to report as a site user?
Were there new features that were exciting?
Were there new features or info that you were eager to share?
Did the new strategy for how content is presented cause you to find a lot of value very quickly?
If you have No’s to these questions, revisit that redesign before you announce anything – and look at your site like your user. Forget internal politics, use stats to support your decisions and power over anyone standing in your way to a smarter site
But if you had some Yes’s, then woowee, congrats. Now, let’s think like content marketers together shall we? You know how popular quizzes are these days? Long live Buzzfeed. Can you use the quiz format to thrill people and drive wider audiences to your site? Can that quiz be adapted for sites that get far more traffic than yours, like Slideshare, Twitter, Quora, AmEx Open Forum? And for their results, they will come back to your site.
Hey, look what a useful site!
Yes, and it was recently redesigned too.
Zzzzzzz.
Or what about hosting a killer piece of research? Heck, partner with your competitor. Yeah, that’s right, get your competitor to help you show your new site to the world.
Ideas like these are not afterthoughts, you need to start these as you budget for your site revamp.
How To Turn Your Audience’s News Into Your Opportunity
If your audience is politically progressive, Jewish females, 20-60, and your site relaunch or new service launch coincides with a release of a great cookbook with Jewish food recipes by a TV cooking star then you might consider some info about that book, it’s author and related info. This is the week that her name and book title will trend in search.
Be agile, abandon your longer term content strategy for your homepage in favor of a short-term gamble. What’s the worst that can happen? Loads of progressive, Jewish females learn about your site? Next week go back to your thoughtful game plan, but, newsjack today.
How To Know When To Pay, When Not To Pay
70% of internet users want to learn about products through content rather than through traditional advertising. Good thing you’re a content marketer, right?
Forbes reported that 20% of its 2013 revenue came from its BrandVoice, a native advertising platform. (Boy, that stat has sparked an empassioned discussion with our media company client.)
So, get to it, content creator. What content can you create that would be useful to someone else’s carefully nurtured audience, one that is also a good fit to be your audience? And of course it will link to more great content on your just so happened to be newly designed site.
In that scenario you are paying for their attention, but you can roll it out so they pay you. Open up a native advertising opportunity that will deliver wider audiences to your just so happened to be newly designed site. It doesn’t need to be a permanent revenue tactic if that doesn’t fit your content strategy. But you may get a big bang in site exposure for your buck by trying this tactic at the right time. You will need to have a healthy site to grab native advertising opportunities though.
How to Build Your Content Marketing Audience By Borrowing Someone Else’s
You are an expert and you are tapped into the best SMEs in your niche. Get them on your blog quick. Put them in your magazine. Feature them in your digital extra. And all of those together won’t add up to the traffic on AmEx Open Forum. Or Quora, with their 70,000 referring domains.
Want to be the expert? Yes blog. Yes thought leadership. But don’t forget about Quora, SlideShare, Reddit, BuzzFeed and AmEx Open Forum and all those other sites who get a few more visitors than yours does.
How To Put Your Thought Leadership And Opinions To Work For You
Share them – in the comments on 100 or so blogs in the week of your relaunch. When done well, it is generous… and brilliant. If it is done wrong, it is dumbbbbbb.
As you know, a good comment contributes to the conversation that the blog started. And with advance planning you can also have great content to share in way that is not self-serving, rather it benefits everyone. Comments link back to your site and planting timely, relevant content there can be a welcome addition to a comments discussion.
Review Your Conversion Plan One More Time
Oh, no… I didn’t hear that, covering ears and singing madly. Sounded like, ‘I don’t have a conversion plan.’
You’ve got the cart before the horse – go straight to jail, don’t collect $200. and – new rule here – give up a hotel. That’s right, just give it to the bank or the person to your left, it’s gone. That’s how mad I am at the team who built your site.
Your conversion plan is way more important than your website color theme. It’s more important than that carousel on the homepage. Have you ever seen the stats on those dumb things?
You should have gotten to the conversion planning about 25% into the website redesign process. This is a big part of the content strategy implementation for your site.
Highly simplified, you need to define the breadcrumbs from entry level to your desired action for each of your audience segments. And if they come from Pinterest, your breadcrumbs need to be more visual. If they come from LinkedIn your breadcrumbs better feed their interest in their career. You can see it gets layered quickly, but attending to this will lead to more conversions, like from site visitor to member or subscriber. From stranger to engaged. Or from audience member to buyer. Ch Ching. That is what a website is all about.
A website is not just an online portal to your community alone. It is a 24-7 marketing conversion machine that also happens to be the online portal to your niche community.
A recurring theme in this article is that good content marketing can take time to plan and roll out. But with creative consideration you may find the right way to accomplish your marketing goals with the right content at the right time in the right place.
Knowing about the tools for content marketing is like having a secret weapon, except that they are no secret to top-performing marketers. Get the ebook of the Epic List of Content Marketing Tools.
