Making Money On-line

Tuesday, 6 November 2018

5 Content Marketing Shortcuts That Cost You in the Long Run

You know what they call a shortcut that actually saves time? The route. That was the wisdom my dad gave me the first time we went hiking together. Sometimes when you look at the map, it looks like there’s a better path. But the route is the route for a reason. Chasing a shortcut feels like making progress — but it might not get you to the trail’s end. Marketers dig shortcuts. Or, as we call them, “hacks.” It makes sense: We’re usually overworked, understaffed, and expected to work wonders. A content marketing hack promises to cut a straight line through a tedious process, increasing efficiency and boosting results. While some hacks can absolutely aid success, there are several instances in which you’re better off sticking to the route. Here are five shortcuts that will actually cost you time, resources, or reputation.

#1 - Shady Linkbuilding

The Shortcut: Search algorithms consider how many backlinks your content has, right? So why not treat backlinking like another paid channel? There are plenty of entities that will help you out. Their tactics range from moderately shady (groups that exist only to share each other’s links) and incredibly shady (you pay them, they link you on tons of cloned spam sites). But backlinks only work in your favor if they’re from reputable sites — and if your content is really worth linking to in the first place. If shady sites are linking to your content, that will actually hurt your ranking. And if Google finds out you’re engaging in shady linkbuilding, they might choose to penalize you further. Search engines are fiercely protective against any attempt to game the system. via GIPHY The Route: Link building is possibly the only marketing function for which there isn’t a good paid alternative. It has to be organic, and you have to put in the work. The best way to get quality backlinks is to create amazing content. Make stuff people will want to link to. Include influencers who will throw you a link. Do some outreach to reputable sites who would find the content relevant. It’s a drawn-out and tedious process, but it’s better than risking Google’s wrath. Plus, even if you don’t earn hundreds of backlinks, you’ll still have quality content to bring people in.

#2 - Copy/Paste Repurposing

The Shortcut: As an agency, we’re bullish on repurposing content. It’s a good way to fill out your editorial calendar. It’s great for squeezing every drop of potential from an eBook, a blog post series, or an influencer submission. But proper repurposing takes a little time and effort. So why not just take some old stuff, paste it into a new blog, and call it good? Who’s going to remember that blog post from 2009, anyway? Short answer: Google. Duplicate content is another ranking factor that can move you down in the SERP. Thoughtless repurposing can get you in trouble with your audience, too: If they catch on that you’re repurposing without updating (those “Call Me Maybe” references are a dead giveaway), you’ll lose credibility. And if you’re just slapping a new image on an old blog post to fill out the content calendar, odds are you haven’t considered whether the content is still relevant to your audience. [bctt tweet="If you’re just slapping a new image on an old blog post to fill out the #content calendar, odds are you haven’t considered whether the content is still relevant to your audience. @NiteWrites" username="toprank"] The Route: As with all content marketing, repurposing should start with strategy. Make sure the content you want to repurpose is still resonating with your target audience. Update it so it’s superfresh and hyper-relevant. You could even add some influencer quotes (original or curated), or transform the content into another medium entirely. In short, repurposing is great for putting out content with less effort… but it still requires a little effort to truly rock it.

#3 - Uninspired Curation

The Shortcut: Curation is another way to fill out an editorial calendar with low-effort, high-return content. That means list posts, news roundups, lists of stats — anything that’s primarily bringing in third-party content. You can see uninspired curation posts everywhere. I won’t call anyone out specifically, but try a search for “[subject matter] stats” for one type. You’ll see dozens of articles all listing the same 20 statistics, most of which don’t cite their source (or they’ll cite another stats article as the source). Lazy curation can also look like a news roundup with nothing but headlines and hyperlinks. Or a “x best books” that’s just a list of titles. Or a quotes roundup with content everyone’s seen a dozen times. There are lots of ways to go quick, easy, and dull. The Route: What sets good curation apart from lazy curation is an intent to provide value. Lazy curation is all about filling blog space. The alternative is to understand your audience and actively seek out stuff they might have missed that would be useful to them. [bctt tweet="What sets good #curation apart from lazy curation is an intent to provide value. @NiteWrites #ContentMarketing" username="toprank"] Your curated content should also include your brand’s point of view. Anyone can compile a list of links. Stand out by bringing valuable editorial context that only you (and your brand) can provide. Read: Content Curation 101: 7 Best Practices, Helpful Tools & Great Examples

#4 - Single Drafting

The Shortcut: It takes work to make sure your content is the best it can be. And look, I know how it goes: Sometimes the deadlines are looming, the creation process was slow, and you just want to click “Publish” on that first draft. It may not be perfect, but it’s something, right? Maybe you can glance over it once before you publish. You do good work; who needs an editor? via GIPHY Based on some of the content I’ve read recently, publishing without editing is a new favorite content shortcut. But all those typos, awkward sentences, and trailing thoughts can hurt your credibility. The Route: We believe every piece of content needs at least two pairs of eyes on it. Everything gets an edit. Even this blog post by a senior content writer. Ideally, you should write, edit, and have someone else QA before you publish. It's as simple as that.

#5 - Shallow Influencer Marketing

The Shortcut: We all know influencer marketing – working with industry experts and thought leaders to add value and credibility to your content – is a great way to increase amplification, connect with new audiences, and build valuable relationships. The quick and easy way to do influencer marketing is use a tool to find influencers, pay them for content, then go your separate ways. Like the other shortcuts on this list, it’s quick, and it works – for a while. Until the budget runs out, or your audience gets jaded, or your influencer gets on someone else’s payroll. The Route: Shallow influencer marketing is similar to a celebrity endorsement. There’s no relationship-building, no follow-up, no mutual excitement for the content you’re creating. Of course, some influencers want financial compensation, and that’s fine. But if you want truly effective influencer content, something has to be in it for them beyond the money. We strive to cultivate relationships with people who are not only influential, but smart, fascinating, and doing cool stuff we want to share with our audience. Over time we have developed a community of influencers who we love working with, and who love working with us. Read: Beyond the Hype Cycle: It's Time to Redefine Influencer Marketing

The True Danger of a Shortcut

All of the above shortcuts seem like they can save time or effort with just a little trade-off in quality. But those little compromises add up, and can actually hurt you in the long run. The real danger, however, is that chasing these shortcuts keeps you from optimizing, improving, and perfecting. [bctt tweet="Constantly chasing #contentmarketing shortcuts keeps you from optimizing, improving, and perfecting. - @NiteWrites" username="toprank"] Definitely keep an eye out for ways you can genuinely increase efficiency. Move faster and get better results over time. But remember that there’s no shortcut for doing it right and doing it well. There’s only the route. There are no shortcuts in content marketing. But there are ways to increase productivity and efficiency in a strategic way. Check out these posts to find more inspiration:

Of if you need help planning your route? Check out our content marketing services.

The post 5 Content Marketing Shortcuts That Cost You in the Long Run appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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Monday, 5 November 2018

How To Develop A Social Media Policy For Your Business

For any small business, a social media policy should clearly outline how all employees should conduct themselves online – such as the type of content they can post, how they should interact with people online, and how they should respond to any negative crisis event. Here are several key guidelines on how to develop a social media policy for your business.

Encourage Employee Participation

First and foremost, social media policy should encourage, not discourage, online activity. If you think about most corporate policies, they describe what you can't do, not what you can do (e.g. you can’t take more than X days of vacation each year). So you have to take a different approach with social media. You should clearly encourage employees to engage online and to practice common sense while doing so.

Establish Basic Guidelines for Social Media Use

You should establish certain “rules of the road” for social media use. For example, if employees are posting content via their own social media accounts, they should make clear what their relationship to the company. For example, say that your company has just released a fantastic new product, and your employees want to talk about it via social media. They should clearly point out that they are employees of the company, and what their role is. This prevents any awkward situations, where it appears that a company is “hyping” its own products using stealth social media accounts.

Focus on Common Sense Principles

It’s tempting to try to create a massive, 30-page document outlining every possible situation on social media and how employees should act. But guess what? That’s self-defeating for two key reasons. One, nobody is going to read a boring 30-page document. Two, social media is constantly evolving. As soon as you think you’ve covered everything possible, a new social media use case will appear.

So, focus more on common sense principles – and keep it brief. For example, popular retailer Adidas has a simple, two-page document. It focuses on common sense principles. For example, you have to be careful about non-disclosure agreements and confidentiality agreements on social media – if you have a super-secret product about to launch, you don’t want your employees posting Instagram photos of it!

Include Guidelines on Dealing with Crises

Sooner or later, your company will have to deal with a social media crisis. And you will want your employees to know how to deal with it. For example, some companies designate a single person to be the point of contact for any social media crisis. Others tell their employees to respond immediately to any crisis. Adidas, for example, tells its employees that they have to be “the first to respond to a mistake.” The goal, of course, is to contain any fire so that it doesn’t become a conflagration.

With these basic guidelines, it’s possible to create a flexible and effective social media policy. Remember – your goal is not to list every possible contingency, it’s to provide a framework for action. You should empower employees to share their enthusiasm and energy, not make them jump through a lot of hoops to get the word out about your company.

*This post originally appeared on socialmedia hq.

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B2B Influencer Marketing Interview: Rani Mani, Adobe

The post B2B Influencer Marketing Interview: Rani Mani, Adobe appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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Saturday, 3 November 2018

Weekend Favs November 3

Weekend Favs November 3 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

ChangeTower – Monitor and receive alerts for changes to any website.
Snap Camera – Use Snapchat lenses from your desktop camera.
FollowFriday.io – Discover interesting people in just about any field for you to follow on Twitter.

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

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Friday, 2 November 2018

The Battle For Customers

“We tend to fight the next war in the same way we fought the last one. We are prisoners of our own experience.”

Sam Wilson, Lieutenant General US Army

He spoke those words a few years before the Vietnam War plummeted to its nadir (from America’s perspective). The conflict was gradually slipping out of control of the US government and a thought was emerging amongst a circle of military leaders, troubling and difficult for many to accept, that the US involvement had been predicated on a miscalculation about how wars should be fought. From the start, the war was different in the predominant mode of operations (guerrilla warfare) of the US enemy and in that respect, it had not followed the familiar patterns of the previous two significant conflicts (WWII and the Korean War). Leaders like General Wilson began voicing concerns that the US was up to its neck with the wrong strategy and that they couldn’t win if they maintained their current course. We know what happened after that. That message was smothered and so too were US hopes of victory.

While this article begins with a focus on war, the rest of it is not about that subject or geopolitics. It is about history, though—the history of business and how it tends to view customers.

Taking a longer view is a noble endeavor

The second sentence in General Wilson’s quote came to mind when I recently read, Successful companies more likely to say marketing function “owns the customer” [stats] from Econsultancy, an agency I subscribe to and whose research I admire. This article calls for a reorientation of marketing’s mission so that it can begin focusing on working with a company’s existing customers in a similar way that it focuses today on buyers and prospects. In other words, cover the complete lifecycle of a customer, providing them with the guidance they need to make the best decisions at each step of their journey. That strategy is so virtuous that it’s hard to debate and as a person who spends a lot of time thinking about how the customer’s experience could be improved, it made me want to stand up and applaud.

Taking a step back

A reorientation is indeed necessary for two reasons: 1) because we know marketing struggles to prove to sales (primarily its historical master) that the work it performs makes a difference in whether a customer decides to purchase and, 2) because effort spent working with loyal customers has a larger impact on profit over time than does the effort involved in securing new customers. Focusing on existing customers will be a departure for marketing, however, and will involve: an entirely new way of thinking about revenue, designing new processes that haven’t even yet been considered, cross-organizational conversations to drive decisions that produce mutually agreeable outcomes, and in convincing the entire company that marketing should take a lead role in influencing customer growth.

Prisoners of our own experience

And this is where General Wilson strides back on to the scene. Another perspective on the above-mentioned article would be to consider the idea from a wider lens, past just sales or marketing “owning the customer”. Setting aside the internal turf war that will eventually erupt because of that assertion, there is one perspective that isn’t considered in that scenario. When you think about it more expansively, the question of ownership has always been about money. Who has the relationship with the customer decision-makers? That’s why it has historically rested on sales to carry that responsibility. But what about in the new world of cloud where the customer experience is increasingly seen as the linchpin to renewals and growth? Is it marketing? A case can be made that they are better prepared for that than sales but how will marketing get the full picture of the existing customer without an intimate partnership with those organizations that work most closely with those customers? That would be customer success, customer support, and education.

Much of what’s being written about marketing’s new need to focus on existing customers, unfortunately, repeats the refrain (owning the customer) from an old hymn book and it sounds discordant in the world of cloud businesses. While I don’t disagree with the underlying research in the article, I do believe obsessing about who owns the customer is a waste of corporate energy that should be diverted towards more substantial concerns like organizational alignment around the customer experience. Wanting to be seen as the organization that owns the customer perpetuates a questionable strategy that has historically failed at addressing customer need and sees a company’s organizations pitted more against each other than in being cooperative.

Who owns the customer?

No one really “owns” the customer in subscription companies. It’s actually more accurate to say that the customer owns the customer because, although many companies seem to have difficulty coming to terms with this truism, the customer is in control. McKinsey implied as much in this piece, called Organizing for the Future, in which they framed the need to redesign our corporations in response to digitization, which is ultimately driven by consumer and customer preferences.

Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora, attempted to speak to this too in his book, Subscribed. Where he depicted a modern corporation operating in the manner shown below, one in which the customer forms the nucleus and all processes flow around them. That new model contrasts sharply with the conventional (and increasingly risky in the digital age) hierarchical model that sees the product as the source of a company’s work and its reason for being.

So instead of saying any particular organization owns the customer, it might be wiser and more digitally efficient and accurate to ask “since the customer owns their own experience with products and services, how can we all work together to make sure they get optimal value from those things?”

I’ve been calling for a convergence of customer success and marketing going back at least five years and if I co-opt the main message of that research I called out earlier, it looks like we might be approaching an opportunity for it to come true. If marketing and customer success can collaborate and build integrated and automated processes, they can drive the kind of digital transformation that would see the customer benefit in the end (and naturally, therefore, the company would too). Customers will receive the targeted guidance they need in near real-time and it will be based on a full picture of their preferences and on their rate of adoption against the business goals they’ve articulated for the solutions in which they invested. It’s worth mentioning that our recently announced CX Unity holds great promise for moving the industry down that road.

Let’s break with the past

It has been said that the most difficult aspect of digital transformation is the "cultural". I see language as a key element of the cultural component. It can hinder or accelerate depending on how it’s used. For companies to be truly customer-centric in today’s economy, lots of things need to happen. But, first and foremost is the need for organizations, and the people who work within, to reimagine how they focus their effort around the customer. They need to understand that collaborating cross-organizationally is the only pathway to success.

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