How to Pick the Best Content Marketing Tools for your 2016 Content Marketing Strategy

To remain competitive, brands have become increasingly focused on creating a higher quantity of content, while still striving to maintain quality. Unfortunately, the quantity and quality struggle is real for so many B2B and B2C marketers alike.

Along with finding the right people and creating a sound content strategy, there is the matter of finding the right tools to integrate with your process and help you reach your goals. With the help of Alan Belniak (Principal Social Media Manager at The MathWorks), we reviewed 12 of today’s top content marketing tools to save you the legwork.

Below you’ll find key benefits for each tool as well as the “wow factor” that is unique to their solution. As an added bonus, we also asked experts from each of these companies to share their best content marketing tip to provide you with some additional information to add to your content arsenal.

#1 – Contently

Key Benefits: This complete content marketing platform track leads, uses a visual editorial calendar to align teams around content goals and integrates into other business systems.

Wow Factor: Contently offers both a tool, and a writer marketplace to help companies find quality writers to augment their existing staff.

#2 – Curata

Key Benefits: Combines insight (analyze pipeline impact), alignment (streamline content supply chain)  and simplicity (ease of adoption).

Wow Factor: Get up and running in less than an hour with limited/no IT support; addition of CMP to existing curation tool/product makes Curata a viable all-around player.

#3 – DivvyHQ

Key Benefits: Easy to use dashboard, workflow alerts and the ability to manage multiple calendars (by content type, persona, buyer profile, etc.).

Wow Factor: Unlike many tools, DivvyHQ offers a monthly option for users that aren’t ready to make a large investment at once.

#4 – Expion

Key Benefits: Content discovery engine, employee advocator, paid optimization module, asset library/storage and performance scoring.

Wow Factor: The employee advocator module creates an entirely new distribution model for branded content in a way that can be easily tracked and managed.

#5 – GatherContent

Key Benefits: Collect, organize and prepare for approval all in one place.

Wow Factor: The automated reviews, progress indicators and built-in templates help provide a good starting point for small businesses.

#6 – Kapost

Key Benefits: A built-in workflow to manage content production, content review and publishing.

Wow Factor: Eliminate the need for time consuming planning outside of the platform with an intuitive planning calendar and distribution mechanism.

#7 – NewsCred

Key Benefits: The ability to plan, create, publish and measure from the same tool; strategy, content creation, global asset management; social listening; audience insights.

Wow Factor: A social monitoring built in to track chatter about the very content you just created.

#8 – Oracle Content Marketing

Key Benefits: Supports custom workflows and uses custom rights/roles for publishing. Plus multiple tag support, real-time content scoring, multiple content formats supported, multiple ‘publish to’ locations, integration with email to dynamically produce emails, full support of metadata tags, easy connections to popular social networks, easy dashboarding of metrics and SEO advice

Wow Factor: Because it is an Oracle product, it integrates with their other products fairly seamlessly.

#9 – Scoop.it Content Director

Key Benefits: Easy content curation, autoscheduling for maximum reach and metrics on a per-post level.

Wow Factor: In addition to new creation/authoring platform, there is the ability to leverage powerful curation opportunities.

#10 – Scribe Content

Key Benefits: Yields preferred audience language when searching and discussing on social networks and aids in ID-ing guest posting opportunities.

Wow Factor: There is an SEO-optimization algorithm built in and includes suggested content cross-linking for increased usability and time spent on site.

#11 – Uberflip

Key Benefits: Integrates with top-end marketing automation software like MailChimp, HubSpot, Eloqua, Marketo and Pardot.

Wow Factor: Users can turn standard PDFs into active flipbooks that include embedded videos and other interactive content.

#12 – Zerys

Key Benefits: Different levels of service depending on company needs, built in SEO tools and task management for writers.

Wow Factor: There is a user forum and community support that  actually connects you to other, real users.

Are You Prepared to Implement Content Tools?

If you aren’t producing quality content, investing in a content marketing tool can be a waste of precious resources. Part of our role as a digital marketing agency is to help our clients determine which solutions will help them reach their marketing goals and business objectives. If you need help creating a customer focused content marketing strategy or want our help creating awesome content to make your content tools worth the investment, contact us today to see how we can support your efforts.

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Why Should You be Tracking Your Metrics?

Why Should You be Tracking Your Metrics? written by Alex Boyer read more at Duct Tape Marketing

I’ve been asked all the time why I track metrics. My response is always the same: I ask them “Why don’t you track your metrics?” Their answer doesn’t surprise me. It’s always something like “It takes too much time,” or “Numbers are boring.” While I can sympathize with a dislike of math, I was never one to get excited for calculus class, tracking your metrics is the only way to check the health of your marketing strategy.

No scientist would execute an experiment without recording results. No championship baseball team (Congrats Royals!) would finish a game or season without reviewing their stats. So why would you work so hard on your marketing without reviewing your metrics?

Check-Up

For the most part, you know when you’re healthy. Every day you wake up, you feel fine, go to work and come home. Our bodies tell us when we’re unhealthy. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get regular check-ups. These checkups help you identify things you may not be feeling on a daily basis that may be hurting your health. If you’re healthy, these check-ups serve as an opportunity to reaffirm everything you’re doing to stay healthy. Besides, don’t you always get a bit excited when you get a good test result?

As a business owner, you may view your business the same way. You know your bottom line and when business is booming. You know when things slow down and business may be hard to come by. You can feel it.

Much like your check up with your doctor, checking your metrics can show you why your business is healthy, and may bring your attention to something that you may not be able to “feel.” And the best thing is that you don’t have to see a professional to diagnose the problem. You just have to know what you’re looking for.

What to Look For

Metrics may look like numbers, but really they tell a story. All you have to do is learn the language to understand the story your metrics tell.

Recently, I wrote a post outlining the top 4 content marketing metrics, what they mean and how to fix it. Once you have an idea of what each of those metrics mean, you can begin to read the story of your website. Be sure to look for any spikes in activity and compare that to any blog posts you’ve made live or any other marketing activity that coincides with the activity.

How often to look for it

I always check metrics weekly, but I’m in the business of digital marketing, and this doesn’t make sense for most business owners. I’d suggest at least recording your metrics once a month. This way you’ll have enough data to see trends over a longer period of time. Content marketing takes time to work correctly; these long-term trends will give you the best picture of your plans’ effectiveness.

What are you waiting for?

It doesn’t take a big time commitment to track your metrics, but it does take some time to learn what to look for. Take the time, learn all you can about metrics and it will help you save time and energy with your marketing efforts.

 

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How to Get Customer Feedback from Mobile Users

Customer feedback can help you understand what features to add, what features to get rid of, and where to direct your development efforts. Adding it into your marketing plan is a no-brainer.

But mobile app companies have a unique challenge. When it comes to communicating with customers, they’re at the hands of Apple and Google.

Because these two giants privatize your customers’ information, it’s impossible to get feedback in conventional ways. Unless your users create an account, you can’t email out a survey to a customer or email list, or search for your customers on social media. You have to be creative.

Thankfully, mobile app companies have found savvy ways to get feedback from their users.

In this post, I’ll explain how you can learn what customers really think of your app:

Ask for Reviews

The simplest way to get feedback is to ask for reviews within the app. On both iOS and Android, developers can program a request for a user to rate the app, and leave a review.

The key is to find the perfect time to ask. Many mobile apps ask for ratings and reviews immediately, but this can annoy customers as they’re not yet familiar enough with the app to really give a score. Additionally, mobile app ratings aren’t just important for potential customers– they also affect how easily the app can be found in the App Store or Google Play Store.

Clear, a to-do list app for iOS, has found a clever time to ask for reviews. After users have used the app for a few weeks, and checked items off their to-do list, Clear will ask for a review. At this moment, users are feeling happy about how productive they were, and are willing to share their positive feelings about the app.

Watch out: Once you have reviews, you need to read them and address your users’ issues. If you’re on the quest for positive reviews, it might be difficult to get the feedback you need to improve your app.

Use In-App Net Promoter Score (NPS) Surveys

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a way to measure general customer sentiment, but also allows customers to send individualized feedback. This process divides respondents into three groups: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors, based on how they answer the following question:

By measuring how many people would recommend your product, you’re able to learn your customer’s general sentiment.

NPS includes a follow-up question, as well, which asks users to explain their score. In the follow-up question, you’ll be able to get rich, individualized feedback that you can act upon.

The best part of NPS is that you can easily add it to your mobile app. The process is seamless for users– they don’t have to leave your app to give feedback. Wootric has mobile SDKs for Android and iOS, so you can add an NPS survey directly into your app and collect rich customer feedback immediately.

You can also prompt Promoters to review your app in the App Store, which will help your overall app ratings.

Watch out: NPS works best when you’re regimented about when you’re collecting data. You need to make sure you’re asking customers how they feel at the right times, whether the survey is triggered by events (user completes a task) or amount of time (user has had the app for 10 days).

Savvy Support Communities

You’re focused on mobile, but that doesn’t mean you should do everything from your app. A great way to collect customer feedback is to create off-app communities where users can voice their opinions, ask for help, and engage with your team.

Here are a few ways app companies can create communities:

• Offer support through social media (Twitter works well) and email
• Create a blog that encourages users to share their stories. Make sure to have a comments section.
• Create a web forum on your site to help users connect and share their experiences. UserVoice is a great product for gathering feedback and hearing from users.
• Make sure there are tons of avenues for customers to get in touch directly with your team.

Watch out: Communities are great, but the process for collecting feedback isn’t seamless, as users have to leave the app. This can affect the amount and quality of the feedback.

Use Beta Tests

Mobile app developers often use beta tests to learn how customers feel about their apps, especially before releasing full versions.

“Beta testing does not need to be on a big scale or have to be overly complex to be useful,” wrote Mike Fine, Director at Center Code, a beta test management company, on Quora. “In fact, a mobile developer can execute a small test among his or her users to great success as long as a strict beta process is followed and best practices are used.”

On your website, you can collect potential beta users with a web form requesting their email addresses. Then, you’ll have a good way to communicate with these users as they explore your app.

Watch out: Make sure your beta tests follow best practices and that you use a refined process when asking for feedback. Don’t email back and forth with beta testers– instead, come up with a survey to send them.

Act Upon Mobile Feedback

Once you’ve got feedback from your mobile users, you need to act upon it. Otherwise, your customers will feel like their voices don’t matter, and that you’re not interested in creating a better experience for them.

Track the Right Metrics

Mobile is taking over the world, and in order to be successful, you need to be tracking the right metrics. You should track:

• The percent of purchases made through mobile devices
• The amount of web visits from mobile
• Time on site on mobile vs. your website
• Number of daily installs, and their sources
• Measuring effectiveness of marketing initiatives

This post details more about must-have mobile metrics.

How to Mine Customer Feedback When You Have Tons of It

If you’re using automated feedback mechanisms, such as triggered requests for app reviews or NPS, then you might get inundated with customer feedback.

Focus on things that are easily quantifiable. For example, if you’re using NPS, you’ll easily be able to determine how many customers love your app, simply by seeing how many customers are Promoters.

If you’re not using NPS, you should search the feedback for common strains. Are many people complaining about bugs? Are people unhappy with how slow the app is?

How to Encourage Customers to Give Continuous Feedback

Sending out a survey once a year isn’t a great way to get feedback. It happens once, and you’ll spend the rest of the year wondering what customers are thinking.

In order to encourage customers to give continuous feedback, build feedback channels into the app experience. Come up with a schedule that’s triggered by a user’s actions.

For example, when they’ve been using the app for 10 days, ask for a review. After three months of active use, ask them to update their review.

Get Going

It’s challenging to get helpful feedback from mobile users, but with a little creativity and the right tools, it’s easily possible. Got any other ideas on how to get feedback from mobile app users? Let us know in the comments!

About the Author: Emma Siemasko is a freelance writer and content strategist who helps SaaS and mobile tech companies share their stories. She’s the founder of Stories by Emma, and you can connect with her on Twitter.

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Email Deliverability and the Holidays

It’s that time of year when retailers are gearing up for the holidays. Black Friday is less than a month away, and then the rush to the holidays is on at full blast. Deliverability is always a hot topic during this time of the year. The amount of support tickets and queries we get shoots up every holiday season. It’s like all of a sudden, everybody in the organization decided to study their deliverability metrics at the same time. 

The truth is that marketers, who are the most successful during the holidays, don’t just wake up on Nov 23rd and start thinking about Black Friday sales. We know for some retailers these few days can make or break a whole year of effort. No, the examples to learn from don’t start a week before, they start today. Senders who start their email ramp-up 3-4 weeks before the holiday season make complete sense, and it’s one of the best ways to see great results in November and December.

First, let’s set the rules of the road for most receiving ISP’s. In an ideal world, they would like to see you send exactly the same amount of traffic every single day, with the exact same engagement rates on every send. Consistency is one of the most tried and true methods to great inbox placement. That gets tossed out the window when it comes to the holidays.

We see senders who have sent once a week all year long, suddenly decide to send 3, 4, 5 or more messages in a day. The predictable thing usually happens. We start to see throttling on the ISP side as they slow messages down. An executive doesn’t get an email right away, and they start asking questions. What’s wrong with our email? Fix It!

The prepared marketer has started the holiday push already. They have begun gradually increasing the frequency and the relevance of the offers and messaging. A 5% to 10% increase in traffic every couple of days (while closely managing engagement and deliverability metrics along the way), can get you to a point where sending that second or third message on Black Friday won’t be the end of the world. You’ve established a consistency with the ISP’s, and they don’t see a big jump that puts list origin into question. In other words, you can feel confident doing the things you need to get done through email without getting shut out the biggest day of the year.

There are some important technical points to be aware of for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. ISP’s see substantially more traffic on these days than any other time of the year. They do and will see technical issues, backlogs, and have to sometimes throttle traffic. This is the reality of systems, sometimes all the planning in the world underestimates these factors. We see and hear of more deferrals in this short period of time, than the rest of the year combined. Senders who are deferred are just about always ones who have ramped up suddenly, and in big volumes.

Don’t get caught planning for Black Friday on Thanksgiving Day. Start ramping now to have the needed consistency to be more aggressive on those most important of shopping days!

Want more help for the holidays?

You came to the right place. 

Download Turning 2014's Holiday Trends into 2015 Revenue and see how you can learn from what consumers did last year to help you have the happiest of holidays this year. 

 

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Navigating the Realm of Paid Advertising: Tips for Finding the Right Channels For Your Business

As the year winds down, most companies are putting the finishing touches on budgets and strategies for 2016. As a digital marketing agency, consulting with clients on matters like this is a huge part of our business. When the fiscal year winds down for most companies, we always see an influx in companies looking for consultation on where to spend their remaining marketing dollars.

“We’ve got X budget, which paid channel should we invest in?”

The answer is – there is no perfect answer. It depends heavily on the target audience and what goal you’re looking to achieve: impressions, clicks, downloads, online sales, etc. To help you determine which paid channels will work best for you business; we’ve created a snapshot of some of the options that are available today.

LinkedIn Sponsored Posts

Ideal for goals like: promoting e-books, whitepapers, demos, webinars or events, growing LinkedIn followers, or getting your name in front of key decision makers in your industry.

LinkedIn sponsored posts are a form of native social advertising that delivers a customized advertisement in your audience’s newsfeeds that closely resembles normal posts from coworkers, peers and businesses they follow.

Advertising on LinkedIn provides businesses the unique opportunity to hyper-target their audience – down to their job title, job function, degrees or company. The most successful campaigns we’ve seen offer the audience something useful and tangible: like an e-book or a whitepaper.

It’s important to note that these campaigns are really geared for short 1-2 month flights, as target audiences can start to experience ad exhaustion, becoming “blind” to your sponsored posts.

Facebook Sponsored Posts

Ideal for goals like: driving online sales for products or services, promoting sales and events, growing your Facebook following or promoting your local business.

Like LinkedIn sponsored posts, these advertisements closely resemble native posts from friends and family. In today’s social environment, consumers tend to shy away from overtly advertorial elements of a website. Facebook’s sponsored posts gives advertisers the ability to penetrate the highest consumed real estate on their social platform.

Facebook offers the ability to target your audience towards certain hobbies, lifestyles and interests based on users’ “likes”. This makes it ideal for advertising products like clothing, shoes, electronics and smartphone apps. With the rapid rise in video sharing on Facebook, there is also a unique opportunity to stand out from the crowd of sponsored posts with a captivating, humorous or clever video.

Sponsorships & Banner Ads

Ideal for goals like: growing brand awareness or driving traffic to your website.

The advertising industry has published some entertaining statistics surrounding the effectiveness of banner advertisements in the past few years.

• You are 475x more likely to survive a plane crash than click on a banner ad.
• You are 279x more likely to climb Mount Everest than click on a banner ad.

Our eyes are trained to avoid the very center top of websites – because we know that’s where banner ads are. The blinking, the moving – we don’t even see them anymore. We also see that quality of website traffic referred from banner ads tends to be low, usually leaving the site after 1-3 seconds.

While banner ads have been given the hypothetical cold shoulder by some marketers, they still remain a heavily used advertising platform for larger companies looking to maintain visibility on industry websites and drive traffic to company websites. Utilizing enhanced targeting with programmatic ad buying for these display programs typically yields better results – but this requires a hefty investment.

Native Advertising

Ideal for goals like: building brand awareness, communicating information or amplifying content reach.

Native advertising is a newer player in the digital advertising realm. Unlike traditional display network advertisements, your content is served to a network of publishing websites with the same look and feel of the native content. Native advertising content usually appears with a “Sponsored by _” or “Promoted by _” disclaimer for readers.

Native advertising offers extensive targeting capabilities and reach, and is most effective when run on a continual basis month over month. 

Paid Search

Ideal for goals like: driving traffic to high priority website pages, capturing searchers that are actively looking for a product or service and driving sales or online conversions.

The benefit to advertising with paid search is that your target audience is actively searching for your product or service; you’re paying to be a top result, increasing the probability that they’ll purchase from you and not your competitor.

Remarketing

Ideal for goals like: driving online sales or conversions and higher engagement with your brand.

Remarketing (aka retargeting) advertisements target those that have visited your website, or a specific page on your website but did not convert. These campaigns generally involve a smaller, but more qualified online audience that is much more likely to convert. Think of remarketing as a “warm call” instead of a “cold call”.

In our experience, remarketing campaigns are a no brainer – they’re a cost effective way of driving conversions and achieving higher engagement with your brand.

Which Tactic(s) Will Work Best For You?

Choosing the most effective paid channel relies heavily on your campaign’s goals and target audience.

Paid advertising campaigns are most effective when utilized as part of an integrated online marketing campaign. As the digital marketing evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, once said,

“Never let your ads write checks that your website can’t cash.”

Ensuring that your paid advertising initiative is supported by a strategic online strategy is the key to paid advertising success. Interested in learning what an integrated online marketing strategy looks like? Contact TopRank Marketing for a consultation.

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5 Marketing Lessons Inspired by an Olympic Gold Medal Runner

Marketing is often said to be a marathon, not a sprint. But in honor of Lord Sebastian Coe’s keynote address at Modern Marketing Experience Europe 2015, I would like to split the difference between those two distances.

Lord Coe won four Olympic running medals and broke a dozen world records in middle-distance track events—including three in the space of 41 days. He became the only athlete to take gold at 1500 metres in two successive Olympic Games.

1. Planning and Preparation are Keys to Victory

Whether you are creating a short campaign, or even one that goes out into the middle distance, be prepared. Take advantage of the expertise of other members of your team to make sure you have all the information needed before starting. Pilot or test campaigns can limber up your marketing skills and make sure you know what challenges you will face.

2. Expect to Win at the Start

No world-class runner starts a race expecting to finish in second place. First is the goal. When you step into the starting blocks of your campaign, have very clear goals in mind. The gold medal equivalents of marketing goals for a successful campaign are SMART goals (Specific-Measurable-Achievable-Relevant-Time-bound). Understanding what you wish to achieve is necessary to achieve it.

3. Run Your Race

Marketers are easily distracted by the daily crisis, but runners know how to focus on what they need to do. Don’t worry about competitors. Don’t worry about your preparation. Once the campaign or activity is launched, continue on to reach your goals. Runners know to run the race that they prepared for. That doesn’t mean you can’t make adjustments along the way, but they need to be strategic rather than reactionary.

4. Continue Through the Finish

Every runner is told not to slow done when the finish line is in sight, but to continue and run through the finish. The same is true for marketers. When the end is in sight and you have nearly reached your goals, that is not the time to lay back and coast. Everything needs to continue on pace until the end.

5. Examine Your Performance

Runners review their performance after every race, so they know how to improve next time. Well, unless you win a gold medal or set a world record. If your marketing is meeting your goals every time and winning awards, you are probably doing something right. But it also means you should increase your goals and strive for more. Even those at the top of their field can improve, and need to improve, because those chasing you get closer and closer every day.

If you want to keep your marketing running ahead of the competition, register for Modern Marketing Experience Europe, which takes place in London from 17-19 November 2015. Lord Sebastian Coe will inspire your marketing efforts too.

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