Relationship Building : How to Expand Business Network

Relationship Building : How to Expand Business Network written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

photo credit: Pixabay

A relationship building activity in business is a far cry from building personal relationships. Yet, business relationships do have some similarities that clearly require good interpersonal skills and communication. When it is time to expand a business network, it takes a bit of planning and design to affect seamless relationship building activities. To learn how to build a relationship of this nature, there are several precursors to define. These include:

• Existing business visibility
• Business reputation and branding
• Type of target market
• Significance of the business as part of a community online and off

How to Build a Business Relationship

Networking is defined by a host of inclusives. These can be business and industry associates, a loyal clientele, links to community organizations and a well-structured plan of public relations. To learn how to build a relationship, a business must first study the “reflection in the mirror” of the business image. What does that reflection say about the business? Is it customer friendly or somewhat detached and indifferent? The importance of the steps to learn how to build a business relationship can be a catalyst to greater expansion of the business network. For example, the first step to build business relationships is “outreach.” This simply implies the method by which the business intends to draw together a close relationship with clients. Other steps of outreach to clients can include hosting onsite programs or online programs. It can also include special events.

The most important feature of outreach is “familiarity” with each client on an individual basis to learn their needs and their buying impulses. When the business is familiar with its clients, this is a free exchange in which clients also become familiar with the business. This leads to a reliable clientele of buyers.

Business Network Expansion Ideas

It may seem ironic that a business must rely equally on local as well as online communities to expand the business network. Putting a face to the business name is crucial to increase business reputation.

Consider the benefits of a networking event. In many industries, a networking event ensures greater real-time visibility than might be afforded through online contact alone. For example, ANTEC is a networking event attended by plastics engineers for over 70 years. It is attended by thousands of technicians, R&D scientists, professors and students and engineers, as well as tech support, sales, and marketing specialists, manufacturing managers and supervisors. This event provides exhibits, presentation of technical white papers and a host of program presenters linked to the plastics industry. Attending this international event expands the business network through exchanges of ideas and information between industry business leaders and other interested individuals. It takes nearly one year of planning that begins with publicity and registration at local levels of business. This shows the local business community the extension of each related business to the wider range of business potential.

How Corporate Responsibility is Related to the Community

Corporations have long been involved in external events and activities that show a deep sense of corporate social responsibility to the community. Many organizations are recipients of the benefits of corporate social responsibility to the community. For example, the Dow Jones facility located in South Brunswick, NJ shows its corporate responsibility to the community through its Family Center in Monmouth Junction, NJ. Another example is the corporate healthcare giant, Johnson & Johnson, each year this corporation sponsors an “Energy Coloring Contest” for children. However, Johnson & Johnson annual provides charitable donations worldwide to communities to promote women’s and children’s health with programs such as “Mom and Baby”, “TB Free World”, and “AIDS-Free Future.” This shows how deeply ingrained corporate social responsibility to the community has become.

On a more local level, small businesses regularly connect their businesses to networked associations like Chambers of Commerce where events like “Aligning Business Goals with a Healthy Workforce” and the “Invest in America Summit” held in Washington DC bring together leaders in businesses from local chamber members. The importance of local fundraising events by charities like Catholic Charities, Aleph Institute and Salvation Army and civic groups such as the International Lion’s Club, Rotary and Elks, all provide community outreach sponsored by local businesses and corporations.

Some Relationship Building Activities Businesses

There are seven relationship building activities businesses can do to build relationships and get involved with the community. These include:

1. Inviting community leaders from the government and educational sectors to work together to identify goals and values that link businesses with the community more closely. For example, the business and community leaders might plan an annual Founders Day festival sponsored by businesses and put your local movements on social media. The community leaders could provide historical exhibits and enactments for children and adults.

2. Business could also take part in goal planning for the environment within the community. This could include restoration of areas with soil erosion or deteriorating municipal structures.

3. Businesses should maintain awareness of upcoming plans for community events like recycling programs and be willing to assist with providing speakers and programs.

4. Businesses can increase their social responsibility to the community by encouraging “Open House” events that provide all business the opportunity to welcome the public.
5. It is also important to make connections for people to network with each other. For example, self-help programs, photography clubs, book clubs and even ballroom dance clubs are a great way for people to network socially.

6. Another activity that helps expand the business network is to sponsor local athletic teams for softball, soccer, basketball or football for adults and children. Many businesses also sponsor bowling leagues and providing team uniforms for their athletic teams. Sponsorship is always a way to increase publicity and public awareness of each business.

Study the tips on building relationships and the activities that promote better business relationships between clients, vendors and business networks. With a little effort, expenditure of time and dedicated funding, businesses find they enjoy a greatly expanded business network for the long-term.

Sally Smith is a marketing manager with years of experience in marketing communication and strategic planning. The rise of the age of social media led her interest to center around digital marketing. At the present, she works for Real Estate Academy Australia, a company which offers real estate training courses in Queensland.

from Blog – Duct Tape Marketing http://ift.tt/22A1Czy
via IFTTT

Key Email Deliverability Insights Into the Big 4 ISPs

Oftentimes, marketers will glance at their overall deliverability and assume that there are no issues because their overall metrics are above problematic thresholds. Looking at deliverability metrics in this manner is better than not looking at them at all, but this method can miss the mark in showing the whole truth about an email program’s deliverability.

Generally, ISPs look at most of the same fundamental factors when determining whether to send an email to the inbox, to the spam folder, or to block it completely. Each ISP will react differently to hitting thresholds of key deliverability factors. So, while Gmail may think that you deserve to be in the inbox, Hotmail may think you’re best suited for the spam folder. This is why it’s so important to monitor deliverability metrics by ISP.

I took a look at metrics across the big 4 ISPs (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL) for the month of April 2016, and this totaled over half a billion emails in volume. This data included spam folder placement rates, read rates, and deleted rates. Utilizing panel data, as opposed to seed data, means that these metrics are pretty darn accurate. These emails are not being sent to dead email addresses—they are being sent to real active members of marketers’ email lists, and Deliverability Plus is able to see how these users react to marketing messages.

So, what did the data show?  First let’s take a look at some big picture conclusions.

• Spam folder placement varied widely across ISPs, with Hotmail being the most aggressive and AOL the least:

 

• Yahoo audiences tend to be the least engaged, with by far the lowest read rate, while the other ISPs yielded pretty similar results:

• On the other hand, Gmail users seem to be the most intolerant of emails that they don’t wish to read, with a whopping 39.31% average deleted without reading rate:

Each of these insights helps us to draw some conclusions about the individual filtering methods of these ISPs:

• AOL, with its middle-of-the-road deleted rates and read rates, does not tend to send messages that fall around these engagement averages to the spam folder. We know that AOL is extremely sensitive to spam complaints, though, and this is one of the primary metrics that they are using in their filtering systems. Thus, when AOL deliverability issues are seen, paying close attention to spam complaints is key.
• Gmail users tend to receive a lot of messages, which could make them delete-happy, and thus, this may be a key metric that Gmail looks at when making the decision to send more than 25% of marketing messages received to the spam folder. Paying close attention to engagement metrics at Gmail will be a key piece to deliverability success.
• Hotmail users are not overly likely to read OR to delete an email as compared to the other ISPs, and yet Hotmail sent 34.74% of marketing messages to the spam folder in April, far exceeding any other ISP. This may mean that marketers will want to choose more aggressive engagement-based segmentation methods for their Hotmail audience, since it appears that Hotmail has lower thresholds for what may be considered spam folder-worthy.
• Yahoo users are least likely to read messages, so in order to avoid being among the 26.49% of marketing messages sent to the spam folder at Yahoo, paying close attention to the relevancy of content is key.

It’s important to remember that there are many unique factors that different ISPs take into account when determining a sender’s worthiness for inbox placement. Download the Email Deliverability: Guide for Modern Marketers today and you'll learn how to achieve email deliverability that really delivers.

from Oracle Blogs | Oracle Marketing Cloud http://ift.tt/1XkisDj
via IFTTT

Influencer Marketing Is (not) Dead: How to Breathe New Life into Your Program

What’s a marketer to do? We heard that influencer marketing was the next big thing. We heard about companies getting amazing results with it. But it seems you can’t go anywhere online recently without seeing headlines like this:

And this:

Note the social shares on those two articles: 242,000 for the first one and nearly 50,000 for the second one. If influencer marketing is burning down, that’s a lot of people standing by with marshmallows to roast.

But don’t panic. These two articles, and many more like them, refer to a specific kind of influencer marketing. Generally speaking: the bad kind. Specifically, the practice of writing massive checks to teenagers with a lot of followers on Instagram or Vine in exchange for product promotion. That particular economy, which converted cash to “influence” or “awareness,” was pretty much doomed from the start. You’re in trouble any time you convert real money to something fundamentally unmeasurable.

But it’s not fair to say that influencer marketing is dead, or in trouble, or collapsing because bad influencer marketing isn’t working out. That’s like declaring “Movies are dead!” because Gods of Egypt flopped at the box office. Influencer marketing works when it’s done well. At TopRank Marketing, we have achieved amazing results for our clients with the practice.

The only thing better than learning from your mistakes is learning from other people’s mistakes. So let’s take a moment to mourn the passing of bad influencer marketing—and then let’s perform an autopsy to see how we can avoid their fate. Here are four ways to make sure your influencer marketing stays alive and well:

#1 – Build Relationships

In a way, the Instagram and Snapchat “influencers” are just billboards. You stand here and hold this beverage/face wash/protein powder, we give you $500. You deliver the commodity of X number of eyeballs for the money. If a rival beverage/face wash/protein powder company comes along and offers you $550, you move on.

Good influencer marketing is more than advertising using someone’s social media presence as the billboard. It’s about cultivating an ongoing relationship that continually generates value for everyone involved. Influencer relationships should be built with care, personal attention, and respect. Yes, sometimes you may pay an influencer for their involvement, but that transaction takes place in the larger context of the relationship.

#2 – Produce Something of Value

Bad influencer marketing can be, at its worst, just a celebrity endorsement with a different kind of celebrity. The celebrity gets paid, and the audience gets… what? The vicarious thrill of seeing that they drink the same brand of face wash as that guy on Vine?

Good influencer marketing goes beyond endorsement to create something of value for the audience as well as the influencer and the brand. That’s why it works. For example, our Content Marketing World eBook series from last year rounded up advice from dozens of highly-skilled marketers. The eBooks promoted the event, and they highlighted our influencers, but they were also useful and entertaining for the audience. It’s an unbeatable combination.

#3 – Recruit More than Brandividuals

One big problem with bad influencer marketing is it focuses entirely on “brandividuals.” According to our CEO Lee Odden, a brandividual is someone who is in the business of being popular. They have a huge social media presence, sure. But they may not be able to call that audience to action. A true influencer, by contrast, may be less popular by the numbers, but is credible, authoritative, and able to affect change.

You definitely can use brandividuals to help attract a crowd, and to lure in the true influencers—but a campaign that’s all brandividuals may generate more buzz than results.

#4 – Make It Measurable

Step 1: Have influencer post about our combination face wash/protein powder on Snapchat. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit. It’s not the most sustainable business model, right? But for a lot of bad influencer marketing, that’s a pretty accurate assessment. These campaigns trade entirely on “awareness” or, god forbid, “brand lift.” Without any way to track ROI from the influencer activity, it was only a matter of time before the C-suite decided to spend their budget elsewhere.

Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t measure the ROI of influencer marketing. It’s not only possible; it’s crucial. Start by having a specific goal for your campaign—an action that you want your audience to take as a direct result of experiencing the content. Then make sure you can track that action and attribute it to the influencer. Give them trackable URLs to share. Give them their own landing page to send traffic to. Either way you go about it, you should be able to demonstrate exactly what your influencer brought to the campaign.

If you’re a teenager with a huge Snapchat following, the death of bad influencer marketing is bad news. If you’re a marketer looking to partner with influencers to create cool stuff and expand your reach, there’s no need to mourn. Take these four lessons to heart, go forth, and be awesome.

Need help with your influencer marketing, we can help!

 

---

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2016. | Influencer Marketing Is (not) Dead: How to Breathe New Life into Your Program | http://ift.tt/faSbAI

The post Influencer Marketing Is (not) Dead: How to Breathe New Life into Your Program appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

from Online Marketing Blog – TopRank® http://ift.tt/1UiTEo1
via IFTTT

Forrester Research Names Oracle Marketing Cloud a Leader

As digital marketers grapple with the 3800+ vendors that serve the marketing technology landscape, many are demanding a focus on integration to help them deliver more consistent customer experiences. That’s according to Forrester Research’s newest Enterprise Marketing Software Suite (EMSS) Wave, a market assessment that looks at vendors who compete in the “marketing cloud” landscape. This year, we’re proud to share that Oracle Marketing Cloud was a leader in their assessment.

The need for simplicity in the digital marketing landscape is urgent. According to research Forrester shared in the assessment, more than 40% of marketers say their technology environments are too complex, and that separate teams often purchase redundant capabilities. To help combat the need, Forrester defines an Enterprise Marketing Software Suite (EMSS) as “an integrated portfolio of marketing technology products that provide analytics, automation, and orchestration of insight-driven customer interactions to support inbound and outbound marketing.”

As Oracle Marketing Cloud just celebrated its second birthday this year, our performance in this evaluation reflects where a lot of innovation work has been focused. By creating an integrated portfolio of best-of-breed components, we’ve been to help marketers connect data, build comprehensive profiles, and orchestrate experiences across marketing channels. In doing so, we can not only deliver marketing simplicity to teams, but we also empower them to be more customer-centric in the interactions they tailor for their customers.

Forrester emphasized the data-driven characteristics of our acquisition portfolio and the fact we made a strategic decision to have best-of-breed experience for both B2C and B2B marketers.

The Oracle Marketing Cloud addresses B2C marketers with Oracle Responsys and B2B marketers with Oracle Eloqua. It supports audience management for both with a comprehensive data aggregation strategy based on acquisitions of BlueKai, Datalogix, and AddThis….Oracle effectively addresses multiple B2C and B2B use cases with native functionality and an impressive partner network.

Despite the topic of the report, it’s important to remember that marketers still manage heterogeneous technology environments. While we’ve invested in areas of digital marketing we believe every marketer should have as part of an integrated experience, we remain committed to an open platform strategy that helps them connect all their third-party applications they need to power their customer experience. This is most evidenced through the Oracle AppCloud.

Finally, I’d encourage marketers to think about as their marketing technology becomes more connected is how to configure their organizations to support the shift to Enterprise Marketing Software Suites. Recently, we released the CMO’s Guide to Building a Modern Marketing Organization, which I recommend as a starting point.

We’re honored to be recognized as a leader in this report, and we look forward to creating more connected experiences for our marketing customers.

 

 

 

 

from Oracle Blogs | Oracle Marketing Cloud http://ift.tt/283uOmy
via IFTTT

How to Create a Winning A/B Testing Strategy

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, your A/B testing just doesn’t seem to work. You run test after test and nothing seems to improve your conversion rate in a meaningful way.

Or, worse, your new pages actually decrease your conversion rate.

In your search for A/B testing success, you’ve read countless case studies and incorporated their findings into your variants…and still, nothing.

Maybe you’ve had a few token successes, but those either didn’t reach statistical significance or simply didn’t improve your conversion rate enough to make a real difference to your company.

What are you doing wrong?

The good news is, you’re not the only one with this problem. If you’ve tried A/B testing, you’ve almost certainly had that moment when you look at your results and think, why isn’t this working?

It’s a frustrating situation, but the fact of the matter is that the majority of A/B tests don’t improve conversion rates. If you’re looking for a big win with every test, you’re guaranteed to be disappointed.

Instead, the key to successful A/B testing is strategy.

Strategize Your Way to Success

Recently, we improved a client’s conversion rate by 22%.

Seeing results like that, your first impulse might be to say, “Wow, that’s an awesome case study! What did you do to get those kinds of results?”

The answer to that question is actually fairly simple: we got rid of the testimonials.

Exciting, right? The moral of the story is, testimonials kill conversion rates!

Except…that’s not really the moral of the story.

In fact, testimonials often improve conversion rates. To be honest, when we started working with this client, I never would have guessed that their testimonials were hurting their conversion rate.

So, if we thought this client’s testimonials were helping their conversion rate, why did we decide to test a page without testimonials?

Well, we didn’t pull this idea out of thin air. As you can see below, we tested a lot of other hypotheses first.

Although not every test improved the client’s conversion rate, every test taught us something about our audience and what they were looking for in a landing page.

Building an Effective Testing Strategy

The secret to successful A/B testing is creating a great testing strategy—one that teaches you something with every test. This takes planning and documentation, but it saves time and significantly increases the effectiveness of your tests.

Essentially, an effective A/B testing strategy has 4 parts:

1. Buyer Persona

Before you even build your landing page, you should create a detailed buyer persona.

Basically, your buyer persona is your testing blueprint. It gives you the information you need to come up with testing hypotheses and a framework for understanding your results.

At a minimum, you should know the following about your audience:

• How old are they?
• Are they mostly male or female? Or evenly split across both?
• What are their responsibilities?
• What is their budget?
• What are their goals?
• Why are they interested in your product or service?
• What is their pain point?
• How does your product or offer fix their problem?

To get at this information, it’s often a good idea to talk to your sales team or even interview some of your current customers. It’s a bit of extra upfront effort, but it can cut a lot of time off of your testing learning curve.

In the case of this client, we knew a lot about their audience. In general, we were targeting middle-aged men and women with money to invest. They knew they needed to be smart with their money, but they also knew they needed someone to help them through the process.

2. Define Your Goals

To test effectively, you need to understand what you’re really trying to accomplish with your test.

After all, if you don’t understand what you are trying to achieve with your test, it will be very difficult to create variants that produce meaningful results.

Consider the following:

• What is your overall goal? (if you answered, “To increase sales,” give yourself a gold star).
• What does your ideal customer look like?
• How does a visitor become a customer? (what steps are involved?)
• How will your test help you to achieve your overall goal? (increase form submissions? purchases? email signups? phone calls?).
• Are you trying to increase conversion volume or conversion quality?

If you want your page to be successful, you need to understand what your company needs to succeed and be able to track the metrics that matter most. Otherwise, you’ll never know if your test was a success!

For this particular client, the overall goal was—of course—sales, but we were testing this page to try and drive more qualified leads for their sales team. Since the client had a lot of different options, our page also needed to identify which option the leads were interested in.

3. Create Your Hypotheses

Based on your understanding of your audience (ie, your buyer persona) and your business objectives, it’s time to start coming up with testing hypotheses.

The primary goal here is to identify the points of friction between what your buyer persona wants and what your business wants and come up with ways to reduce that friction.

Here are some potential reasons why your audience might not be converting:

• The offer is wrong. Your audience is looking for something specific and you aren’t giving it to them.
• The next step is unclear. Your call-to-action may be hard to find, ambiguous or uninteresting.
• You have a copy-offer mismatch. If your audience is looking for a simple solution and ends up on a complex page, that will create friction and confusion. On the other hand, if your offer is complicated and you don’t address an important point, that can create unnecessary doubt.
• You aren’t evoking the right emotion. A funeral services page filled with images of laughing people at a party probably doesn’t match the audience’s emotion. If you don’t stir the right emotion in your audience, they won’t feel like you are a good fit for their need.
• Your content is confusing. Poorly written, hard-to-read content or awkwardly designed pages can make your page too difficult to bother with.
• Your page doesn’t seem trustworthy. People are very wary of marketing, so over the top claims, poor design, lack of social signals or trust seals can seriously damage your conversion rate.
• You have the wrong traffic. Even the most effective site won’t convert uninterested traffic. This isn’t exactly a CRO problem, but improving your traffic quality will dramatically improve the effectiveness of your A/B tests.

Understanding your potential friction points can help you set up an effective testing strategy. By testing variations that address your friction points in different ways, you can figure out exactly what works for your audience.

4. Document and Learn

The last step is to actually run your tests, document your results and then use what you learned to create new hypotheses and tests.

Your documentation can be as simple or as complex as you want, but it is critical to document what you were testing and what your results taught you.

Here is a simple example of how you might document a CTA test series:

If you don’t document and learn, you might as well not use A/B testing. However, if you are documenting your results, you can greatly improve your conversion rate.

For example, while working with this client, we progressively discovered that our audience responded best when they felt like they were in the driver’s seat. The less we sold ourselves, the more effective our page was.

Ultimately, this led us to use a simple CTA that invited our audience to identify what they were looking for before we asked for any personal information.

In addition, we discovered that our users wanted a simple and straightforward experience. So, we spoke to that in our headline and body copy.

But, we didn’t see our best results until we applied all that knowledge to our overall page design.

In an effort to create as focused of an experience as possible, we got rid of the testimonials and created a streamlined landing page that focused on how we could help our potential clients succeed.

As a result, the new page outperformed every previous variant. But, at this point, that was hardly a surprise.

We knew our audience and we knew what they were looking for in a page. And, as we discovered increasingly better ways to meet their needs…our conversion rate improved.

Conclusion

Most successful landing page A/B tests aren’t lucky one offs—they are the result of a great, methodical testing strategy.

It might take a few tests to yield the kind of results you’re looking for, but with the right testing strategy in place, you’ll get there eventually.

You’ve heard my two cents, now I want to hear yours. What sort of results have you seen with your testing efforts. Has a strategic approach helped you improve your conversion rate?

About the Author: Jacob Baadsgaard is the CEO and fearless leader of Disruptive Advertising, an online marketing agency dedicated to using PPC advertising and website optimization to drive sales. His face is as big as his heart and he loves to help businesses achieve their online potential. Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

from The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/1sMjY3G
via IFTTT

9 Reasons Marketers Need a Data Management Platform

Big data. Bigger data. Data this and data that. As you are reading this terabytes of data are literally being generated by people all over the world. As to what the marketers of the world will do with all this data is the issue at hand. The key is to use the right data. And to do data right you need a data management platform (DMP).

No matter how hard marketers try to embrace organic channels and word of mouth, paid advertising continues to drive results. And the largest part of digital display ads is the data-driven, automated ads called programmatic. According to Ad Age, “Programmatic ad buying is growing not only because it makes ad transactions more efficient but because it can make them more effective, as long as the right data is applied.” 

Before I get to the 9 reasons marketers need a DMP let's review the 3 different types of data that is out there and available to marketers.

First party data. Data contained in systems that a company already manages, like a website, social media, CRM, retail point of sale, call center, and mail. First party data typically has both known (identity) and unknown (anonymous) data contained in the systems and is stored either on premises or via partners. First party data usually has the most exclusivity, but can be limited in reach.

Second party data. Data that is brokered between two organizations, for instance, brands (like say a car manufacturer and a retailer) that might want to share list data for enhanced targeting or co-op opportunities. Second party data is generally not public data.

Third party data. Data that is anonymous with the most amount of reach, least amount of exclusivity, and is purchased through a marketplace (and bid on) based on its reach and cost parameters. Third party data is generally used for programmatic advertising purposes. 

9 Reasons Marketers Need a Data Management Platform

A data management platform provides marketers with centralized control of all of their audience and campaign data. It helps them manage and analyze this data to craft, target, and optimize campaigns that reach more of the right people and drive improved ROI. 

Here's 9 reasons why you need one. 

1. You want to manage multiple online campaigns across different devices.
2. You need to connect all of your data—known or anonymous, online or offline, deterministic or probabilistic, user level or household—to a single individual.
3. You want to maximize your data assets.
4. You want to maximize segmentation and scale campaigns.
5. You need to prevent data leakage with partners.
6. You need to prepare for programmatic future.
7. You want to optimize campaigns to improve response rates, conversion, and brand recognition.
8. You want to control advertising costs and improve overall ROI. 
9. You want to AND need to hold your marketing and advertising accountable. 

You remember accountability, right? It's where someone or in this case something takes responsibility for something. 

The data management platform (DMP) and data-driven marketing are here to enable accountability. The more you know about your customers and prospects, the more precisely you can target and market. Sounds simple. And obvious. But add one more piece to this. With all the data available to marketers, if you approach this with an eye towards generating revenue, you can actually cut marketing costs by reducing waste and dramatically improving your ROI. 

Download the Guide to Advertising Accountability and learn how a DMP can hold your marketing and advertising accountable. 

from Oracle Blogs | Oracle Marketing Cloud http://ift.tt/1UegY6G
via IFTTT

7 Content Marketing Lessons Brands Can Learn from Journalists

Before making my debut in the content marketing world, I was a journalist living out her days at coffee shops, city council meetings, ribbon cuttings and community gatherings. The daily grind was grueling at times, but it was also exciting. The prospect of breaking news always kept me on my toes and every day I worked to give my readers the latest and greatest news and information. And of course, I aimed to deliver that news and information before the competition.

Now as a content marketer, I find that while my job title has changed, the essence of what I do hasn’t. Like journalism, content marketing is all about providing your audience with quality content that informs, engages and develops your brand as a trusted go-to resource.

Journalist or content marketer, I’m still faced with the same challenge every day: actually delivering that quality and engaging content in the face of stiff competition—something all brands and marketers can relate to.

The fact is, B2B and B2C brands alike are creating more content than ever before—and they don’t plan on stopping. In fact, for B2B specifically, 76% of marketers said they planned to produce more content this year than in 2015, according to B2B Content Marketing’s 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends—North America report. And 60% of those marketers find it challenging to create engaging content on a regular basis.

But all isn’t lost. I believe that looking at content and content strategy like a journalist can give brands and marketers a new perspective—and maybe an edge over their competitors. Below are a few lessons that brands can learn from journalists to do just that.

7 Content Marketing Lessons

#1 – Know Your Audience

Journalists understand that in order to create content that gets read and gets shared, they need to understand who their audience is and what they care about.

For brands, knowing and understanding your audience will allow you to build the foundation of your content marketing strategy. To get that knowledge, here are a few tactics to use:

• Perform keyword research: Keyword research not only uncovers the search volume behind your most important keywords, but it can also offer insights into keyword opportunities and search intent. In addition, perform your own searches for various keywords and look through the results to see who’s ranking at the top.
• Conduct a competitive analysis. Research your top three to five competitors through their website, social media pages, news articles and search results. How does your brand stack up?
• Dig into data and analytics: Get familiar with your website’s analytics to gain insights about the users you’ve already managed to attract to your site. Look at the most popular pages, the pages with the highest bounce rate, and the pages with the best and worst conversion rates.

#2 – Strive to Be the Best Answer

Journalists are dedicated to being the best answer for their audience. They want to get the scoop. They want to be the go-to resource. And they want to do everything better than the competition.

For brands, being the best answer means providing relevant, quality content wherever and whenever their audience is searching for it. Use the research you’ve done to identify where those content opportunities lie. In addition, don’t be afraid to engage your existing audience. Use social media to pose questions or send out a current customer survey to get feedback and insight. The more you know, the better you’ll be at providing the right information.

For example, TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden often reaches out to his Twitter audience to gather insights on various marketing topics using polls.

#3 – Write for the Reader

Every piece of content a journalist turns out is aimed at enticing the reader. Content is organized to help readers easily flow through the article and photos are often used to add a visual element to the story. Long-form pieces are often broken down into sections with headers, which is more pleasing to the eye and helps with scanability. In addition, content is written in a way that tells a story—not in a way to please search engines.

For brands, the bottom line here is to create content that’s a good experience for your audience to read. SEO is important, but usability and user experience is more important. Read 7 Ways to Optimize Your Web Content for Humans & Search Engines for more tips.

#4 – Mind the “5Ws and H”

Who, What, Where, When, Why and How—the 5 Ws and the H. These are the foundation of every article a journalist will ever write. And they can certainly be applied to your content marketing strategy.

As you map out your strategy, ask the following questions for each piece you plan to create:

• Who is my audience?
• What does my audience want to know?
• Where am I going to publish and disseminate?
• When am I going to publish and disseminate?
• Why am I writing this? (Drive traffic? Increase brand awareness?)
• How will I measure results?

#5 – Follow the Story

In my early journalism days, I thought I needed to cover everything. But then reality sank in. If I covered every piece of news, I was spread far too thin and I wasn’t giving my audience enough of the news they really wanted to read. Most of all, I wasn’t showing my audience value.

Brands should use their audience knowledge, keyword research, and their website data to hone in on their content strengths and opportunities. Choose a handful of topical areas to get started with—and create as much content around that topic as possible. This will allow you to begin showcasing yourself as an expert in specific areas and eventually you’ll be able to expand that to new areas.

#6 – Add Perspective

The best news articles have a face and provide perspective. Journalists use people close to the story and expert sources to give their articles credibility and depth. Brands can do the same with their content by working with influencers. Influencers not only lend expertise and authority to content, but they can also help that content reach a larger audience.

Don’t just reach out to your influencers in times of need. Engage with them on their social platforms. Share their content. Shoot them an email to check in. Just as a journalist works hard to build a network of credible sources, brands should remember that building a relationship with influencers is an ongoing journey and there needs to be value for everyone.

Mayo Clinic has a cool and interesting way of using influencers through its story hub Sharing Mayo Clinic. The hub features stories from patients, families, friends and Mayo Clinic staff about the treatments they’ve had at the famed hospital. The stories often feature photos, videos and personal messages to tell the stories.

# 7 – Make Accuracy a Priority

One of the first lessons you learn in journalism school is that accuracy is a non-negotiable. I once received a failing grade for the misspelling a source’s name. (I’ll always remember your name Fred Woods.) It was certainly embarrassing, but really it was a careless mistake.

Make sure that you have a solid QA process for every piece of content you create. Little things that get missed can have an impact on your credibility and the effectiveness of your content.

What other professions have helped inspire your content marketing strategy? Tell us in the comments section below.

---

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2016. | 7 Content Marketing Lessons Brands Can Learn from Journalists | http://ift.tt/faSbAI

The post 7 Content Marketing Lessons Brands Can Learn from Journalists appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

from Online Marketing Blog – TopRank® http://ift.tt/1TJsMye
via IFTTT