content

Content Marketing Is Like Being a Parent

February 20, 2017 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Content - A General Word for General Stuff

Quite literally: your content is any text (also known as “copy”), imagery, video, or other material that engages consumers. In other words: content is everywhere and on everything. When you engage in any digital marketing – digital branding, paid online advertising, social media marketing, search engine optimization, or web design – you will be creating and using content.

But, that’s just it! Once you create and use your digital content, the job’s not done. The biggest mistake that you can make is believing that your content doesn’t need to grow up.

Congrats! You’re a Proud New Parent

When you create content for your new website or digital campaigns, you basically become a parent to that content. Just like any good mom or dad, you’ll want to give your new baby constant attention. After you actually create and implement content onto web pages, email campaigns, or social media posts, measure your content’s performance.

Identify the areas of growth that you want to see and that define your business’ success. Keep track of how those areas change with your new content being used. If there is any room for improvement or progress, make necessary changes. Increase your business’ generation of leads by always enticing your target audience to click or call.

Your Content’s First Steps

It’s the moment that every parent loves, the most: your baby starts to learn how to walk! In the same way, your digital content needs to learn how to navigate your target audience to where they need to go. Continuously guide your content marketing to include new facts, consider new members of your audience, and feature new copy or visual material.

A recent article from Think with Google stresses the importance of every second in a consumer’s search for your products or services. Your content must always be relevant to what paying customers want at the moment that they search. Keep one eye on the path, ahead, by understanding trends in consumers’ behavior. Keep the other eye on your content to make sure that it’s walking in the right direction – profits.

But, don’t worry if your content falls down a few times. Creating effective and relevant copy, videos, and designs requires time and lots of practice.

Treasure Each Micro-Moment with Your Content

As your content starts to mature, you’ll also notice that the world keeps on changing, too. Technology always advances and consumers’ behavior keeps adapting to it. Your content must do the same.

Consumers searching on mobile devices are often moving around their local areas. Whatever they’re trying to find, they most likely need it, NOW. They want informative, helpful content that solves their problems at that very location. How can your digital content do that if it’s still a baby?

Another article from Think with Google reports that approximately 61% of people on smartphones will probably buy from websites that adjust their content to specific locations (data from Wave 3 & Google/Ipsos). If your content isn’t changing to meet consumers’ spontaneous and local needs, your content is unsuccessful. Protect your content from failure by creating new material that reaches and informs your audience at the right moments.

Before You Know It, They’re All Grown Up

That’s right. Sooner or later: your digital content is going to be a great success:

Your ad copy will inform searchers and emotionally attract your audience.
Your imagery will show consumers what they need in that very moment.
Your videos will answer any question that a potential customer has.

Create and implement effective content throughout your digital marketing campaigns. Measure the results with insightful analytics. Continue to optimize and refine your content to generate the leads and sales that you need. Always adapt your content to reach the right audience at the right time and place.

Your Content Will Always Be Your Baby

Just like parenthood – content marketing is a process that is never truly finished. But, it’s all worth it when your content raises your company’s revenue.

Need help raising your digital content, the right way? Just leave a comment and you’ll hear from us. Or,contact us to chat about your current digital marketing plans.

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!

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!

Social Media Survey: The Results Are In

May 7, 2014 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Why So Optical?

The ever-changing realm of social media develops new processes, norms, and expectations on a seemingly daily basis. So much so, in fact, that the only way to keep tabs on how the industry is changing is to get the information straight from the source behind the changes: the platforms themselves and the marketers who use them.

That’s why our friends at Software Advice, a social CRM research company, have released the preliminary results of their Social Media Content Optimization Survey – a survey of organizations’ content optimization processes on social media – specifically, what tactics are most effective.

According to the results – and not surprisingly to us – using photos and visuals in social media posts is the number one way to optimize engagement – with nearly 85% of respondents labeling visual content as “very important” or “important”. Social media marketing is all about grabbing attention (and ideally maintaining it) so as social media continues to integrate more closely with our brands’ visibility, the content we share needs to reflect that visibility in more than black and white.

Why We Should Follow Suit

The effective implementation of visual content into your social media strategy can prove beneficial to more than just how many “likes” you’re receiving. More importantly, visual content gives your brand a personality capable of building meaningful relationships that go beyond the electronic equivalent of an awkward hug – the Tweet “favorite.”

How Platforms Are Responding

Recently, Twitter’s transition to making images in line with text so that users no longer have to click a separate link to view an image has streamlined the user experience. More notably, it’s brought visual content to the forefront of Twitter campaigns.

Facebook has traditionally been the industry precedent for visual content, and continued without exception with the integration of larger images on link posts. If you share a URL on Facebook, a preview of the article with an image now over twice as large as in early 2013 will appear – which has been increasing engagement across the board.

We all know that the casual social media user is resistant to change. One could’ve thought the Mayan Apocalypse was more than a rumor when Facebook made its 2013 layout and chat functionality change. So, when a platform decides that change is worth the blowback, marketers best revise their strategy accordingly. The computer age and the visual movement are now one in the same.

Has visual content enhanced your social media experience? Send us a tweet or share your story below!

SEO Tips to Increase Visibility and Stop Content Jackers

June 26, 2013 by Daniel Laws Leave a Comment

Most of the time when we talk to prospective clients about SEO, the first things they think of are keywords, descriptions, and page titles. Now, just about every marketing person on the planet thinks they’re an SEO expert. Yeah right, just like everyone that can code HTML is a web developer too. The point is that SEO goes well beyond descriptions and titles; in fact, SEO includes a number of factors that impact rankings and these factors are always changing.

With that said, I’m going to cover a few “off-page SEO” tips to increase organic search visibility and stop people for stealing your content without giving you credit for it.

Use Rich Snippets for SEO

Rich snippets are a type of structured data that allow webmasters to

mark up content in ways that provide information to the search engines. Depending on the scenario, the websites that leverage rich snippets see better results or enhanced results in the search engines. An example of enhanced results could be reviews or ratings in the results. In general, this can lead to better click-through rates. Schema.org provides several types of examples of data that can benefit from structured markup which includes people, products, reviews, businesses, events, and more. Google has a tool called “Structured Data Testing Tool” to preview or get help with markups. In my opinion, you should read more details on schema.org to understanding it better before implementing.

Improve your Load-Time

You want to minimize web server response times to limit slow page loads. Remember that response time is going to vary from page load to page load. If possible, I would recommend a good dedicated server and an onsite webmaster to proactively improve server response times. Whenever possible, I would also recommend optimizing images, but not at the risk of poor-quality or low resolution visuals. There are a number of solutions to help with this, from Smush.it™ to some of Adobe’s Products. As you’re programming your website, you should consider opportunities to combine/compact CSS, optimize the order of CSS, move items to the head of the document, etc. This will all help to improve load time, SEO, and the user experience. Load-time is a factor that’s associated with search rankings, and Google Analytics offers a direct link to their PageSpeed Insights to test your site’s pages.

Have a URL Strategy

When you redesign a website, it’s usually due to updated branding or to support new business related functionality on the site. The linking structure, internal site links, and link building are usually on the minds of the webmaster or SEO person, but it’s important that you carry over as much link equity as possible by using redirects, a custom 404 page, and canonical links. Canonical links help to communicate to the search engines which page should be credited as the original. You should also use absolute links (“https://dabrianmarketing.com/blog.html”) instead of relative links (“/blog.html”) in the programming to limit scraping or “jacking” of your content. Remember that this content should be consistent with your updated branding and still support your business’s needs.

Conclusion

In the development phrase of your redesign or continued SEO, you should consider the impact that technical items will have on your brand’s reach and visibility. Furthermore, it’s important to categorize your business and products / services with rich snippets. I would recommend that you update your XML sitemap and submit to search engines as well as directories to reinforce ownership. You can even take it a step further with a good copyright and terms of use policy.

Take a look at the off-page SEO, improve your URL strategy, try rich snippets and try the PageSpeed insight tool to limit the number of issues that might be adversely impacting organic search traffic.