Content Marketing

Writing to Personas: The Human Side of SEO

September 6, 2016 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

In the beginning, search engines were merely a shell of what they resemble today. Previous algorithms placed a heavy focus on keywords within content and other on-page factors (Meta tags, titles, and descriptions). With such a simple ranking process, people began to abuse the system with “black hat SEO techniques” such as keyword stuffing and cloaking.. As the quality of search results began to diminish, the algorithms were updated (and continue to be). Many previous SEO methods are now penalized, and the primary focus has shifted to improving the user’s experience by better understanding the searcher’s intent.

1. The UX: A Top SEO Ranking Factor

Search engines such as Google and Bing, are a business, just like yours. Their goal is to provide customers (those using search) with the best experience possible by giving them the most satisfying search results. In order to deem what would be “most satisfying,” search engines attempt to match relevancy to the searcher’s intent by evaluating other user’s experience and their personal experience (if applicable). If search engines see that a site has a high bounce rate (when a user views only one page and then leaves the site), or if the time on site and pages per session are relatively low, they will take that as a bad sign and reorder their rankings based upon performance. Other websites that users consistently bounce to and stay on will be seen as providing a better user experience for a specific search term/topic and will improve in the rankings.

So when creating content for your site, know that yes, you should still focus on keywords within the copy and other on-page factors (meta tags, titles, and descriptions), but you also need to place yourself in the user’s shoes. By offering your business’ message in a clear, concise manner that matches the searchers intent, more than likely the user will stay longer, explore more of your site, and possibly perform an action you deem a conversion (contact submission, phone call, direct sale, etc).

2. Developing Personas

Before developing content, most people create an outline and plan that contains main focal points, what the desired actions of the readers are, and when and how the message will be disseminated. Shouldn’t your target audience be taken into consideration during this planning process as well? Businesses need to develop personas that encompass different segments of their target audience’s interests, roles, and concerns. This way they can determine which topics are most relevant, and how to shape their message to be most effective.

3. Speaking to Your Target Audience

To ensure your users will have a satisfying experience, your message must speak to their interests and concerns, all while using their specific terminology. For example, for a B2B company, content around a similar topic would change drastically dependent upon which audience they are writing to. If the message is crafted towards business owners, the content will heavily focus on financial benefits such as ROI. Whereas if the message is directed towards marketing managers, the content should focus more on the process of specific services, and areas of improvement.

The same is true for a B2C business, except instead of focusing on a hierarchy of positions within a business, they target specific traits within a demographic. Their message should speak to a specific audience based upon factors such as geographic location, age, employment, education, etc.

Regardless of the industry you’re in, you need to make sure your content speaks to the message your audience wants to hear. Writing for a persona as compared to blindlessly writing, could be the difference between just a page visit, and a page that leads to a conversion. Also, to guarantee you’ve provided your users with all the information necessary, encourage questions and comments for further discussion/elaboration via comments or email. This way they’ll never need to travel to a competitor’s site to discover answers to the questions you failed to address.

Conclusion:

Writing strictly for search engines is a thing of the past. In order for your site to truly perform well, you must put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. Before you create content, develop the personas of your business’ audience. Map out their interests, roles, and possible questions. Then, develop content intended to enhance their user experience.

For more information regarding about SEO and Content Marketing, please leave a comment below or contact DaBrian Marketing today!

By: David McDowell

How to Become a Content Marketing Psycho with Psychology

June 13, 2016 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

You may be thinking, “What in the world does psychology have to do with content marketing?” Don’t worry, you are not alone.

Our popular culture portrays psychology as therapy rather than research, as medical prescriptions rather than behavior analysis, and as a series of terrifying mental disorders rather than organizational performance improvement. This post corrects these common misconceptions and shows the ways in which social psychology is most useful for content marketing.

What Is Content? The King, That’s What

Let’s define content within digital marketing. Content refers to any text, photography, video, audio, or otherwise interactive material in your brand’s advertising campaigns and website. The content is anything that the consumers come to view, read, hear, or click.

In the digital marketplace your brand’s content must be flexible in order to adapt to different media and devices. Both your mobile site and your desktop site must display your products in an entertaining and attractive format.

Your brand’s content must also engage consumers, immediately. Consumers want to view your products, now. They want to watch your video, now. They want your web page to load, now. Don’t make them wait – capture their attention at the very second that they are available to you! Offer the information for which consumers are searching. Create content that appears when consumers search for your brand’s industry, topics, or services.

After consumers view, read, or click on your content, what do you want them to do? Whatever task you want them to complete, you must make it obvious through a Call-to-Action. Direct consumers’ behavior by actually giving them something to do: subscribe, fill in the information, click the button, or leave a comment.

To create effective content for your brand’s digital marketing, study and understand human behavior.

Social Psychology - Real People, Real Interactions with Your Brand

Most people believe that psychology is all about Freud, psychotherapy, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (an amazing film that’s currently available on Google Play). But, that assumption is wrong.

Psychology focuses on the research of human behavior and cognition. Social psychology, specifically, is the study of individuals in social interactions to better understand society.

A recent peer-reviewed article by Acar & Puntoni (2016) discusses the power of individuals in digital marketing: consumers are active agents in their digital viewing and purchasing decisions. It is important to remember that, in digital marketing, consumers are responsible for their actions rather than brands.

For this reason much of social psychological research focuses on the contexts of behavior. Applicable questions are: “What conditions need to be present for consumers to purchase your product?” and “In what kind of situation is a purchase, subscription, or click probable?”

The answers to these questions depend upon the distinct context in which consumers interact with your brand. The order of your brand’s content – the actual words, images, videos, and designs – matter to consumers’ perceptions of, and overall interactions with, your brand (Ducarroz, Yang, & Greenleaf, 2016).

Psychology & Content Marketing - Not That Crazy, After All

When you think about these aspects of social psychological research, it is clear that they apply to your brand’s digital marketing content. Use social psychology to study and direct the behavior of consumers:

Be flexible with your content to fit any kind of interaction or digital interface.
Focus on a consumer’s immediate environment and available choices to foster engagement.
Use the needs of consumers rather than the needs of your brand to encourage purchases.

Do you have any questions or comments? Leave them in the section, below! We would love to hear from you. Contact us to start a conversation about your brand’s content marketing!

Why Paid Content Marketing Should Be on Your Radar

January 21, 2015 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Content marketing is at the top of every marketer’s mind. How to plan it, how to execute it, and—most importantly—how to dive in and pull with the most value from it. The problem is, since content marketing is becoming such a blanket term that encompasses social media, email, video, and everything else, it can be difficult to dial in to the combination of tactics that generates maximum ROI.

A big issue we’re seeing in the space isn’t around content development processes, best practices, or even how to go about measuring content marketing’s effectiveness. For a lot of businesses, the problem lies in getting the right message in front of the right people. We know that operating different areas of the content marketing machine in isolation is a recipe for disaster, so we’ll have to tackle this hurdle at the source—building awareness around the content being produced.

Paid content distribution (sometimes called “content syndication”) is the practice of paying to distribute content to users via a third-party site. If you’ve ever read a blog post and seen a “Sponsored from around the web” section near the bottom of the page, that’s one way that content syndication works. As with anything digital, platforms vary in both price and functionality. Let’s start by covering why you may want to consider incorporating paid placements into your content strategy.

Benefits of Paid Content Syndication

Gain Exposure – Generally, the value of paid content syndication comes from the quality of the message itself; not how much you spend or how enticing your ad copy is. This value is perceived as more genuine and, thus, more likely to drive business results.

Streamlined Process – In order to get started syndicating content, you often don’t need anything more than a budget and a URL. If you already blog as part of your content mix, it’s just a matter of selecting a choice few to get started.

Customization – In order to make sure the right people see your content, solutions are available that allow you to control targeting settings, whether by location, age, or interests. This ensures you’re not wasting your budget on uninterested users.

Easy Measurement – Nearly every content syndication solution has built-in analytics that are no-nonsense and allow for simple CSV exports. For the more advanced marketer, custom URL tagging is supported as well.

Now for the Drawbacks

You’re probably thinking that you’re completely sold on paid content marketing. We’d advise taking a quick cautionary step before you head down that path, though. Some drawbacks of taking your content marketing to this level include:

It’s not a silver bullet – Paying for this kind of visibility isn’t the end-all be-all content marketing tactic. That means it may work in conjunction with more proactive outreach, or it may not work at all. In other words, your mileage may vary.

Potentially high costs – Our research shows that this type of approach warrants a more substantial monetary investment (Between $300 and $500/month at the low end). For small or medium-sized businesses, this may be problematic when it comes time to divvy up the annual marketing budget.

The time investment – Put simply, if your content doesn’t provide value in some way, it won’t be worthwhile to pay for its distribution. As your budget dwindles, it won’t take long to determine whether the content you’re pouring money into is sub-par.

So is paid content syndication right for your business? Unfortunately, it depends. As noncommittal of a response as that is, the decision to invest in this type of marketing should not be made without answering some fundamental questions:

How much do you currently invest in your content marketing program?
Has your content been well-received by your audience in the past?
Are you looking to build a wider audience or interact with existing ones?
Do you have well-defined policies and procedures around your brand’s messaging?
How have you measured the value of content marketing up until now?

Whether you’d like to get your brand name out there, showcase your expertise, or generate more buzz around your message, paid content syndication can be a great way to start building those relationships. So long as you’ve got something meaningful to say and a way to measure success, it’ll be well within your reach.

Have additional questions before pulling the trigger on paid content syndication? Ask yours in the comments!

Putting the Biggest Content Marketing Questions to Rest

December 3, 2014 by Dabrian Marketing Group 1 Comment

Content marketing is going full-on beast mode.

And business owners are starting to pick up on it. More small businesses are allocating resources to it, and more B2B content campaigns are in the queue than ever before. With this trend, two big problems arise. The first is for the stragglers out there, who have to justify the expense to a greater degree than the argument that it’s “what everyone else is doing.” The second is for the folks who have already begun investing time and resources into content, but encounter the issue of showing its business value.

This week, we’re taking some of the biggest questions in the content marketing space and resolving them, once and for all. *drags out soap box*

How do we even know what to write about?

What this boils down to: Resources

Creating content that’s actually valuable requires more than a good idea. Why? Because those ideas don’t come out of thin air. They take people; knowledgeable, creative, driven individuals. When making the case for content to your higher-ups, the conversation will quickly turn to dollars and cents and personnel and budgets.

The fact of the matter is, content marketing is an investment that impacts all aspects of a business. Sales managers can supply service/product information to prospects, blog posts can reinforce a smaller team’s subject matter expertise, and case studies can act as proof that a company’s product or service helped a client overcome a major challenge.

As it stands, an investment in content marketing covers far more areas than the final document, video, or blog post. It’s really an investment in your entire brand, arguably your most valuable marketing resource.

How would we determine our return on investment?

What this boils down to: Value

We knew this was coming. With all the talk of business value, monetary value is the next logical step. Sure, pieces content explaining the features and benefits of a service are an important touchpoint on the path to a sale. The other types of content, the stuff that reinforce your brand’s story? Tying them to monetary value can be a little more enigmatic.

In conversations to get content marketing off the ground, you’ve got to have a mutual understanding of something: content marketing ROI exists, but it doesn’t happen overnight. In our experience, this type of objection to adopting content doesn’t come from someone who’s leery about the investment; it comes from someone who doesn’t understand how content can have value at all.

This is where your strategic approach and key performance indicators (KPIs) come into play. If your focus is leads, your strategy can contain KPIs like conversions and subscriber retention. And if it’s brand awareness you seek, take a look at consumption metrics like social media shares and website session duration. So long as you align your KPIs to what you hope to achieve overall, justifying content should be no problem.

Isn’t this just part of the SEO and social media we’re already doing?

What this boils down to: Education

Now this can be a tough one depending on who the folks in the room are. On one hand, yes, social media and SEO heavily depend upon valuable, interesting, and edutaining content. But are they one in the same?

Yes and no. Allow me to explain.

Because SEO, social media, Pay per Click, and others all need content to exist and be effective, they’re definitely associated with content marketing. On a different level, though, content marketing is an entire way of approaching how your brand interacts with customers. In that way, it’s distinctly different from the tactic of SEO or the channel of social media.

So back to the question at hand. Is content marketing a part of SEO and social? Yes, but to be successful, we have to think about it as more than that. Rather than ask:

“How should we do SEO better?”
“What do we post on Facebook this month?”

Take a second look at your marketing tactics through a content marketing lens:

“Are we providing valuable content based on what our target audience is searching?”
“Is the content being posted to Facebook relevant to the right users?”

That’s quite a difference, isn’t it? On one hand, thinking about digital marketing in this context more closely associates your tactics as means of achieving your business goals. On the other, it allows your team to understand how individual areas work together as you speed down that path. And at the end of the day, your content is going to be what holds it all together.

Still left with burning content marketing questions? Let ‘em fly in the comments!

A Guide to Marketing Yourself Using Content

September 11, 2013 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

This week, we’re taking time to explore a topic that’s a little different. You. Yes, you. Not your business, not your marketing campaigns, but you on an individual level. If you think about it, the time and effort invested in marketing yourself plays just as crucial a role as marketing your business. This is especially true when it comes to goal achievement. If you work for a large corporation, growth is always welcomed, and if you’re employed by a local start-up, brand establishment is the name of the game. Both of these can benefit from the individual efforts of employees, but the question is, “what’s going to be your approach?” Well feast your eyes on the steps you’ll need to get started!

Step 1: Realize That LinkedIn is Your Friend

Your position as a thought leader is highly influenced by the people your message reaches. That should be a given. You wouldn’t want to spend your time and effort crafting content that embodies both your work and your personality, only to have it sit in perpetual stagnancy. The best remedy here is social networking, particularly using LinkedIn, self-proclaimed as the “World’s Largest Professional Network.”

LinkedIn contains distinct advantages over other popular platforms like Facebook or Twitter, including:

An environment for professionals to connect. This works to filter out audiences that may ignore your message
Groups that allow you to hone in on audiences within your industry, your geographic location, or your level of experience
An environment that’s becoming a big part of recruiting and talent acquisition processes

By taking advantage of this powerful networking tool, you’ll be able to easily contribute to the industry-wide conversation, connect with influential people in the space, and explore opportunities to progress in your field.

Step 2: Seek out Media to Showcase Your Insight

While LinkedIn is a very powerful tool for getting your name out there and having discourse with others in your industry, the platform can sometimes lack recency and structure from the standpoint of interesting and innovative content creation. In other words, LinkedIn may offer a place to discuss your thoughts on a particular topic, but you’ll need a way to more formally (and regularly) share your ideas. In this regard, a great place to start is by using the resources already at your disposal.

Get together with colleagues and propose a company blog or YouTube channel if they don’t already exist. If they do, you’ve got a few options. You can develop a regular blog series that appears alongside your company’s posts or set up a YouTube playlist that features content that incorporates your unique personality. If you’re comfortable exploring digital roads-less-traveled, there are a host of less-traditional content outlets at your disposal, including SlideShare, infographics, screencast tutorials, or microcontent sites like Vine and Instagram).

No matter the avenue you choose to carry your message, keep one thing in mind—whether you try to or not, you are always representing your employer when interacting online. Your individualized content marketing endeavors should be approved by the higher-ups, portray your company in a positive light, and offer relevant information to your intended audience (Basically, upload those cat videos on your own time).

Step 3: Maintain and Measure!

When your personal digital marketing gets off the ground, there are a few important maintenance items to consider. First off, don’t embark on any content-driven marketing medium if you can’t maintain it. You’ll have to be strategic about allocating your time to satisfy your existing work responsibilities and your chosen “side project.” This point can be summed up very succinctly: “Any digital asset, if left to languish, will leave you worse off than if you hadn’t created it in the first place.”

In addition, consider your process for demonstrating the value of your efforts. If you’re approached by your supervisor and she wants to see the “results” of your self-marketing campaign, what will you do? Incorporating a measurement plan that shows your time is paying off with tangible goals, key performance indicators, and metrics will be invaluable. Not only will you be able to quell your boss’s wariness, but you’ll also begin laying appropriate procedural groundwork, should your content become company policy down the line.

What form of content best suits you? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments!

Snap That: The Rise of Microcontent Marketing

July 24, 2013 by Dabrian Marketing Group 1 Comment

What is Microcontent?

In April of 2012, the filtered photo sharing behemoth Instagram was sold for $1 billion, and recently, Snapchat, the “self-destructing” photo messaging smartphone app, saw its market value soar to over $800 million. Twitter’s Vine, another popular smartphone app for sharing looping 6-second videos, has garnered over 13 million users since it hit the mainstream (and that was on iOS devices alone). These booming platforms enable users to share the tiniest blips of their lives with their friends and the world by promoting the creation of microcontent.

With microcontent platforms, users can say a lot with only a little, effortlessly sharing a small piece of their everyday lives, flexing their creative muscles to tell a story, or otherwise dictating a profound, personal message. The social media environment has always been inherently fast-paced, and as long as the figures above persist, it’s safe to say that this genre of user-generated content will only continue to proliferate.

Why does Microcontent Matter for Marketing?

A key for successful content marketing has always been crafting a message that not only delivers relevant and valuable information, but also resonates with its audience, affecting them in a personal and meaningful way. Years ago, this was achieved through brand loyalty campaigns and the repetitive broadcast marketing of TV and Radio. In today’s social-driven world, however, these tactics have become next to archaic.

For brands both big and small, the goal is now participation, interaction with customers, and striving to create a one-on-one dialogue with their audiences. The days of catchy jingles and cute product mascots are drawing to a close; with social media, consumers are more empowered than ever. A single disingenuous claim or deceptive marketing tactic will spread like wildfire, placing companies at the mercy of their fan base and sometimes into predicaments from which recovery can seem impossible.

The Marketing “Wave of the Future”?

Keeping up with trends and the new, exciting ways in which your business can market and communicate with customers is a step in the right direction no matter your industry or area of expertise. Without some effort on your part to learn about and develop strategies around new forms of content, you’ll soon become as obsolete as that stack of old roadmaps you keep in your glove compartment. And don’t forget, your analytics data will eventually show how your snail’s pace has caught up with you.

On the other hand, there’s also your audience itself to consider. Now more than ever, consumers are getting privy to the ways ads find their way into their everyday lives. New forms of communication like microcontent signify a call to action for marketers to come up with innovative ways to reach prospective audiences without overwhelming them, wasting their time, or blatantly throwing out one sales pitch after another. In this day and age, the best way to market a product or service is to just be awesome. By telling a gripping story, humanizing your company, or turning something familiar on its head, people will start talking. And that’s what social media is all about, communication and forming connections.

I urge you to think about the ways your business may benefit from the next Instagram or Vine. Will it provide a means for you to connect with customers on a level you never thought possible? Will it allow you to speak volumes by showing the difference your product has made in people’s lives? Or will it simply get people engaging with you because they feel like they finally can?

To find answers to these questions, start by doing some research, figuring out what works best for your business, and above all, embracing the technology and becoming part of the conversation. Microcontent may seem small, but its marketing value has limitless potential.