Category: content marketing

A Guide to Successful Content Marketing Career

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

What is Content Marketing

What is Content Marketing

The technique of creating or curating and distributing valuable content that is relevant to a specific type of customer audience so as to attract them is called content marketing. The basic premise of content marketing is to make some profit out of the prospective customer’s action.

The most important work of content marketing is to provide value to the target audience. It has been observed that content marketing costs almost 62 per cent less than traditional marketing but generates over three times the number of leads.

The act of content marketing is essentially the act of sharing information, entertainment, knowledge or advice in forms such as: emails, blogs, webinars, podcasts, infographics, videos, articles, quizzes, cartoons, social media content, etc.

Whereas inbound marketing focuses on specific buyers, content marketing is always directed towards a broad spectrum target audience.

Given below are a few details about the different types of content that are marketed with a view to turning the customer sentiment to a positive action. It is estimated that the worldwide content marketing revenue will be about $313.42 billion by the year 2019.

Content marketing is done for the reason that businesses hope to get the reader’s contact details whether they are reading your blog, filling out forms, or subscribing to your monthly newsletters.

They are awarding you the permission to contact them in the future if they provide you with their email address.

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Different Types of Content

In today’s digital marketing world, there are many using content to promote the product/service of your company. In fact, content marketing is seen more as a necessity today.

To make customers discern your product/service as the better one among millions of others’, it is important to provide value-driven and engaging content to the target audience.

1. Blogs

The first type of content that was marketed was the blogs. Now they have become very common. Publishing blogs are the act of disseminating valuable information over the Internet to the discerning audience for free.

Moreover, when you share content free of charge, there is an element of trust that builds up between you and the prospective buyer.

If you consistently share blogs on a single topic, you are acknowledged as an expert in that niche. This act keeps prospective customers returning to your blog pages and sooner or later some of them are likely to turn into buyers of your product/service.

In the meanwhile, it is also important to provide links to different parts of your content and the customer-to-be can bounce around for some time before making a buying decision. This happens quickly if the blogs are consistent and are of high quality.

It is also possible to lose readers if you fail to update information or do not post new blogs in a consistent manner.

2. Longform Content

This type of content is just what its name means – lengthy and free. It may range from 5000 to 15000 words. The content is made of a more than one chapter, each on a separate URL page.

This is observed as an ideal way to build readership and increase loyalty.  They are typically guides for a single topic. The readers do not have to go anywhere else as all the required information is available there itself.

The information is split into separate chapters. The best part is that the online marketer can promote each section of the long form content heavily.

If the content makes interesting reading, all you need to say is, “You can just subscribe so that we can keep you informed when our next chapter is published”.

3. eBooks

Whereas blogs are shorter to read, ebooks are more detailed and longer. They share more information to bring in more prospective customers. EBooks are lengthy and share a substantial amount of information on a single topic.

The thought of writing an eBook is overwhelming. However, once published, a good quality eBook is a great lead magnet. It is a good idea to get an eBook written by a good freelance writer.

Ebooks are usually 5 to 30 pages long. However, if an eBook does not offer the required solutions to a problem that has been highlighted, there is a good chance that readers are not likely to become convinced and subsequently will not get converted into customers.

4. Infographics

Infographics is a graphic representation of a lot of related information stacked vertically as one image. It is created in a way so as to make the information easily digestible.

Usually, a lot of information is packed into one infographic. It is more visually appealing than when the same information is represented using a bullet list or as charts.

Backlinks are usually embedded within the infographic image. Therefore any infographics image that gets shared and goes viral is a definite lead magnet.

The best infographics always have a simple design with plenty of white space. The title should in all respects describe what the infographic is all about.

5. White Papers

Content with all the information that it can gather about a specific topic including problems and their solutions is called a white paper. Publishing white papers is the best option when you want to become an industry expert in a specific niche.

White papers are typically lengthy, have a formal introduction and are organised into neat sections. If the length is more than a few pages, they should have a ‘Table of Contents’ to guide the reader into specific topics.

6. Videos

Videos are shorter and are made to latch with specific buyer personas. They are more engaging, fun and can be made in such a way that they share a great deal of information with the watcher. Viral videos sometimes get all the attention that a business needs.

Videos can be distributed as part of content marketing or social media campaigns. Videos can be uploaded to YouTube and embed or coordinate them with the posts that you publish.

Videos should be made so as to offer value to the customer and should clearly include a ‘call to action’ for effective conversion.  The video can also attempt to send the viewer to website or a landing page.

7. Emails

Emails subscribers for a brand form the recipient group with who you share brand information, more content, both of these being important for nurturing leads. Eventually, some of these subscribers turn into your customers.

Instead of just sticking to blogs or infographics, adopting a diverse content marketing strategy is always the best and brings significant results in the longer term. Using different types of contents helps to increase traffic, generate more leads and drive up sales.

The Scope of Content Marketing

The Scope of Content Marketing

All the industry gurus have predicted that digital market is indeed going to be content driven. It is therefore likely that there is going to be a rise in the importance of marketing quality content. Publishing this kind of content will allow online businesses to reap greater ROI and stay ahead of the competition.

In short, content marketing is favoured by online businesses because it helps to segment the target audience and helps to turn valuable prospects into loyal customers by using customized content to act as lead magnets. Read on to find out the actual scope of content marketing and how it serves to enhance the profitability of online businesses.

1: Increased Revenues and More Sales

Content marketing reaps greater ROI than any other strategy. For small businesses sales volume is very important and content marketing seems to be the most effective ways to manage that.  However, it has to be used appropriately to render it productive.

Every business ultimately wants to improve its sales. Search engines are working on algorithms that strive to understand what a person wants when they type the search words.

If you are actively blogging and publishing quality content in your social media for all your services, it is possible to get unexpected visitors to become your loyal customers.

That content marketing has a far reach is an established fact. Content marketing meets the very purpose of marketing: acquaint your business to brand new individuals every single time.

Content marketing is seen as the most powerful medium to effectively attract these new individuals to become your customers.

2: Strong Relationships

Content marketing helps to gain trust from prospective customers when you provide solutions through your blogs, videos or white papers. This ultimately builds a fan base that is loyal to you and helps to build up your sales consistently.

3: Cheap and Effective

Content marketing is much cheaper compared to other forms of marketing (costs only 62 per cent approx.) and brings you higher returns. However, it requires that you remain patient for some time before the profits start rolling in.

Notwithstanding this, publishing high-quality content through different media helps to rope in prospects and later automatically convert them into customers. All of this at no extra cost.

4: Improve Brand Image

Any type of business can improve its brand image by sharing related quality content. According to statistics, for every dollar spent, content marketing creates three times the leads that can be otherwise obtained through paid online searches. Therefore, content marketing is worth every dollar that is spent.

5: Establish Personal Connection

Content marketing helps the business owner/organization to establish a personal connection with the prospects-to-be. Publishing high-quality content in a regular fashion can get the clients to place trust in you and this serves to increase the brand’s credibility. It is important to bear in mind that low-quality content, can, in the same manner, tear down your image in your prospect’s eyes.

6: Customer Engagement

Content marketing through the different media is a great way to keep your customers engaged. Talking one-on-one with every customer and giving a solution to their problems can greatly boost the image of your brand.  It also helps to retain the interest of the prospects as you lead them through the buying process.

Content marketing enables the band owners to see the mood of the buyers via the comments in the social media pages as well as the landing page activity.

This gives the marketer the much-required personalized view of the customers’ feelings and feedback. Good-quality content is always a marker for a superior quality company and helps youbeat the competitors.

7: Versatile

Content marketing is non-industry specific, meaning it works for products belonging to any industry. All it does is to help propel the brand in a forward direction. Content marketing helps to attract those customers that are genuinely interested in the product or service that is on offer.

Content marketing is effectively used even by non-profit organizations. This is because all that customers need is to address the issues that they have about the product/service. All that content marketing needs to succeed is a well-planned and neatly executed strategy.

8: Long-term Audience

If the content is of consistently high quality, there is something always beyond the problems and solutions that you can talk to your customers. The more of this kind of an interaction harbours long-term relationships with your customers turning them into a mighty big loyal fan base for years to come.

This type of interaction also helps you to get more insight into the customer’s wants, behaviours and their buying patterns.

Interaction with the audience also helps to clear confusion and brings in fewer complaints. Once the content appeals to your clients, they will not hesitate to share the content with their like-minded contacts and this increases the audience multifold. This, by far, is one of the most significant advantages of content marketing.

9: Preparedness and Success

Unlike as in traditional marketing, where many a time the marketing is done without any preparation, content marketing is best done on the basis of a well-thought-out strategy. Follow-up strategies such as nurturing with emails or marketing through social media can bring about rich rewards.

The gains in audiences by using such methods are steady and strong. Content marketing is a level playing field for all businesses. The ones that do this diligently emerge as the winners.

10: Improved Virality and Email Response Rates

Content marketing has the ability to increase email responses and also create viral forwards and shares of high-quality content. This ability can be taken advantage of by channelizing customized campaigns according to the needs of a specific audience. Interesting, entertaining and valuable content can go viral in no time and only content marketing can provide this.

11: Encourages Self-dependency

Content marketing has the singular ability to allow online businesses to become self-dependent and dependence on external factors get reduced over time. Lead generation is the most important function of any marketing activity.

With content marketing, the need to obtain leads from outside sources decreases as content marketing by itself generates all the leads that you would need.

12: Influence Decision Making

Content marketing can do enough and more to influence the purchase decisions of your prospective customers in favour of your product/service.

If you are able to convince your prospective buyers through your content who buying your product would be the best choice, you could get them to do what you exactly want them to do.

Statistics prove that over 91 per cent of online B2B marketers would prefer to use content marketing as a tool to influence buyers’ decisions.

A majority of the prospects prefer content to adverts and other forms of aggressive selling. Content marketing has a way of telling the audience that they care about them.

13: Reusable

The most powerful premise about content marketing is that it is reusable. Many elements of a content marketing campaign can be reused creatively with ease.

Videos, infographics, long-form content, etc., are extremely reusable in many other ways for different campaigns. That video content can be created by reusing written stuff in graphic form is an apt example.

Content marketing campaigns are restyled when the psyche of the customers change with the changing times, or with different sets of audiences.

This content marketing is powerful to drive traffic across different audience groups and different points in time. It is best to create content that is creative and integrating psychology into content marketing campaigns.

As a final note, it can be concluded that content marketing is flexible enough to align naturally with customer psychology so as to influence them to make buying decisions and consequently boost sales and revenue.

Skills that Are Required to Become a Successful Content Marketer

Skills Required to Become Content Marketer

‘Content marketers who are trained professionals and bearing good quality are hard to find’ – is a common woe of online business owners/organizations. Today, at least 32 per cent of marketers say this.

This number shows a three-fold increase than those who said it posed a challenge in the year 2014. The challenge is thus a growing one and is causing concern. Moreover, the organizations that want to hire seem to be at a loss and are not able to define the role clearly.

It has been observed that the content marketers that get noticed are the ones that have fine-tuned skill sets. In this context, listed below are some of the most important skills that you need to hone to become a successful content marketer.

1: Extensive Research

A good amount of research is required for every bit of content that you create.

  • It is a good idea to brainstorm, read from the Internet about specific topics, and use books.
  • Researching the target audience is an equally important task.
  • The content marketer should know their wants and distress points.
  • It is equally important to know the channels that the audience seek out; this helps in effective distribution.
  • Knowledge of the terminology and the key search phrases used by the audience help to find out what the audience is looking for and provide solutions to problems if any.
  • The content marketer should have an idea about the most trending content for a specific topic.
  • Audience concerns can be tackled by carefully reading the comments section and discussion threads extensively.
  • Finding out which type of content and what type of format make for the farthest audience reach and greatest engagement.

Content marketers who are successful will have done an immense amount of data prior to embarking on a content marketing campaign. The more the research, the more the data collected, the more the chances of success.

2: Leverage of Current Trends

Current trends give an idea of what is foremost on the minds of the audience in the present. Both industry trends as well as what is on the minds of the people have to be keenly observed and followed. This helps to keep the content marketer stay ahead of the pack in the market.

If you are the first content marketer to jump at new industry trends and incorporate them into your content, you have an advantage like no other in front of your target audience.

However, it is also important to observe other hashtags that appear in social channel posts to get to know the current pulse of your audience.

With your creativity, you can correlate your content with the trends that appear and place this in front of your audience.  This also helps you to reach out to millions of new customers.

3: Promotion and More Promotion

It may not be enough for the content marketer to promote new content in the social media and then depend on organic traffic for the rest of it to happen. To maximize the reach, it is essential that you promote new content through every available channel. Some of the activities to boost promotion of new content could be:

  • Upload videos on YouTube
  • Distribute podcasts (audio and video) on iTunes
  • Post content to more than one website, say 2 websites
  • Promote content on social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn
  • Send email notifications to your clients and ask your connections to share the content

Diligent promotion of new content definitely brings out better results.

4: Dig the Data

As a keen content marketer, you should not be satisfied with just creating good quality content. You should know how to read and analyse the data to make sure that goals are being met. It is not an easy task to dig into the data and analyse and assimilate it.

However, it may be easier to identify the metrics that are just required for your business and get on with analysing and understanding these. Determination of too many metrics can leave you overwhelmed and confused.

With a clear understanding of how to read the data and accompanying metrics of a content marketing campaign, you can ultimately figure as to what topics you can keep and rehash into new content and what subjects you can throw away.

5:  Superior Strategy

According to statistics, it has been observed that only about a third of content marketers are organized enough have a well-documented marketing strategy that they wish to implement. According to industry figures, it is seen that those organizations with such strategies have 36% more chance of success than others. It pays to have a clear-cut, written-out strategy that helps to deploy your content effectively (using an editorial calendar).

6: Good Quality Writing

To win over a good audience, it is important to write well. However, it is not as easy as it sounds. A majority of content marketers always seem to prefer quantity over quality. Good quality writing not only means having no errors or typos but long-form content that is complete in all respects and full of value.

7: Good Design

Good design is as important as good content. It pays to know some basic designing knowledge as it can help you to quickly turn over compelling content by just editing a few images and adding good text. It is a good idea to learn to use Pixlr or Canva to create professional images.

8: Good Story

More than half of the existing content marketers say that their main priority is to tell compelling stories to their audience. However, it is seen that over two-thirds of them have still not been able to produce engaging content for their audience.

The best content marketers are those that are able to get their audience to have an emotional connect with their content. This further helps to cement the audience with the brand.

9: Versatility Speaks up for Itself

Organizing diverse content is the key to successful content marketing. Most successful content marketers rely on more than one form of content: whereas some of them would want to listen to podcasts, others would want to watch videos and some other would want to curl up and read.

Producing different content such as case studies, white papers and infographics in addition to all of the others would ultimately place you in front of the large audience that you have always wanted.

10: Collaboration is Necessary

The content marketers who succeed are those that ask for help. Seeking assistance from others is seen as a much-needed skill in this area. Partnering with an influencer from your industry is a part of the recipe for success. If you have not partnered yet, just sound your new ideas to the influencers in your industry.

The set of points mentioned above is not exhaustive. Nevertheless, if you pay some attention to these points there is a good chance that you will stand apart from your competitors and well on your way to success with your online business.

Job Opportunities in Content Marketing

Job Opportunities in Content Marketing

Many industry gurus are unanimous in their thinking: they believe in Seth Godin’s words that content marketing is the only kind of marketing that is left.

Shift From Traditional to Content Marketing

Content marketing is less aggressive and more subtle in its approach than traditional marketing. This has resulted in the fact that the consumer now pays less attention to traditional advertising methods and marketing.

Moreover, content marketing is aimed at providing immense value to the prospective customer with no expectation of anything in return. All this has spurred an interest in content marketing.

Another interesting statistic is that over 88 per cent of companies are now involved in content marketing. Consequently, they are keeping aside bigger budgets to invest in staffing, strategy and technology. Another research figure indicates that over three-quarters of respondents are increasing their content marketing investments this year.

Though more than 70 per cent of the companies are gearing to produce more content in this coming year, the entire exercise is thought of to be a tough one because traditional marketers are simply not good at writing, editing, or proofreading good content. Therefore companies are finding it hard to create top class content.

This is where the requirement for good content and marketing such content arises. This has resulted in a surge in the hiring of content marketers. Statistics have it that more than 43 per cent of organizations now employ people to specifically produce content.

Content Marketers – Skills Set

The basic skills that a content marketing job requires are good grammar and average writing skills. Other skills include being able to tell stories, research skills that are required for analysis, and also the capability to work in high-pressure situations.

Other than writing skills, content marketers have to be masters of search engine optimization and they should be able to edit content efficiently and quickly. A certain amount of ‘tech-savviness’ is preferred.

Basic design skills are a plus so that they can create images in a flash. This is what a major portion of content is made up of. Technical skills are required and they should be able to work with content management systems such as WordPress. Candidates with all of these and who can produce animation and video would be more favoured.

Career Advancement In the Content Marketing Field

These days, there are thrice as many jobs for content marketers as there are for traditional product marketing jobs. This in itself is evidence that there is a lot of opportunity for a career in content marketing.

In a majority of digital marketing companies, there are entry-level positions that are open. However, they are also on the lookout for higher-level officers to create and manage a content marketing strategy.

Over half of the digital marketing companies (about 51 per cent) have a higher-level executive to manage their content marketing department. Last year, this figure was less at 42 per cent. There were over 19000 job openings in content marketing in the fall of 2016.

As the content marketing department reaches maturity there is more demand for senior-level executives such as Chief Content Officer, VP (Content Marketing) and Director of Content.

For those on the lookout for senior positions, it is better to look at smaller companies (less than $10 million turnover) and very large corporations (more than $1 billion turnover).

The industries that have content marketing openings are commonly Marketing & Advertising, Computer Software, Information Technology, Internet and Non-Profit Organizations.

The basic jobs that require less effort in the field of content marketing include social media posting and curating content, short blogs, etc. Infographics, slideshares, etc., require a reasonable amount of effort.

These content marketing activities that require a large amount of effort are presentations and long-form blogs, eBooks, thought leadership articles, white papers, etc.

Content Marketing Team and Its Participants – Jobs that you can look for

Content strategists are required to work out the pre-production details such as editorial strategy, style guidelines, etc. You can either get a consultant to train you or hire a strategist for the purpose.

Writers form the creative force in the team and are good at English grammar and storytelling skills. Skilled writers have to be paid more. You can hire writers for the purpose or even tap into an employee’s writing skill.

Whereas some of them will be tech-savvy enough to change content into HTML and do the SEO, others will just be good with their words.

Editors are hired to edit the writers’ works. Developmental editors who create end-to-end content and make it happen and copy editors to check grammar errors and typos. Some editors are talented enough to do both the jobs.

Coordinators keep track of every detail and are organized and creative. They are equally concerned about relationships and the quality of work. They can even look after the freelance workers starting from vetting them to making sure they do their work.

Salaries for jobsadvertised in the content marketing departments were in the range of $40K (30% of job openings) to $120K(5% of job openings).

AI and Content Marketing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the buzzword of today. The world has made a number of strides in AI with automatic driverless cars and speaking assistants at home. Traditionally, computers function according to algorithms that are coded as programs and these tell the machine what to do.

AI and Content Marketing

However, AI differs in that the computer creates and executes its own algorithms. This includes determination of new paths and taking suitable decisions while traversing along these paths.

Just like in other sectors, AI can help marketers in making sense out of enormous amounts of data with a view to delivering the best customer experiences. AI is likely to change the landscape of the content marketing sector as well. Read on to find out the role of AI in the changing content marketing scenario.

1: Streamlining

AI is already being used to streamline processes when there an overload of content.

2: Content Generation

With AI it is possible to generate content automatically. At first, it is likely to be simpler stories such as stock updates and reports on sports. It is interesting to note that companies such as AP, FOX, and Yahoo have been using AI generated written content for quite some time now.

3: Auto Chatbots for User Interaction

Chatbots carry on chat conversations with human users. These use AI as the basis and carry on conversations, answer user queries, etc., in real time. Some chatbots carry on conversations with users even when the app is not open yet (UBER). On the whole, chatbots do away with the need for users filling up forms. The queries are answered right away in real time.

4: Automated Newsfeed Algorithms

Applications such as Twitter and Facebook customize the users’ newsfeeds in such a manner that they get to see only what they are interested in. This intelligence is displayed on the basis of algorithms analysis of hundreds of different variables.

They also manage social media ads in such a way that a user gets to see only what he/she likes to see or may be interested in.

AI helps the apps to get to know as to what the users find interesting. The marketers can then create content along these lines that will keep their customers engaged. Similarly, marketers can create Facebook ads that their prospective clients would favour.

5: Predictive Intelligence

This means personalized content according to one’s individual tastes to appeal to individual users. Another area where this helps is in lead scoring: this is a points-based system to determine the location of prospective buyers’ position in their buying journey.

This helps to quickly convert those who ready to buy depending on their past behaviours. This technique is predicted to prove useful for low-lead as well as high-lead volumes.

As far as content marketing is concerned, it will help to serve a specific piece of content to a specific client depending on their behaviour and search history.

6: Content Creation

Content creation via curation as done by humans now can be effectively done by AI in the coming years. Curation refers to the process of consistently finding high-quality content, reprocessing it and serving it in the most valuable fashion to the seeker.

The task is not an easy one because of the time involved in sifting through relevant material to be curated from.

Curated content helps a client to become aware of certain products and services so that they end up buying the same. AI helps in creating relevant content for this purpose at every single stage of the buying cycle.

7: Enhanced Customer Experience

This could mean that users will get interactive help instead of having to fill out forms. The AI systems will be able to help them with their query immediately and even direct them to resources that they would require in the future.

An apt example is of a concierge robot used in the Hilton Hotels Connie that works with customers answering their queries. AI ultimately works to provide the highest degree of personalization.

At the end of it all, AI enables marketers to take care of customers’ needs in real time. This is done by analysing data generated when algorithms work. Consequently, users feel at ease and make a quick buying decision.

In the content marketing sector, AI will change how the marketing channels work and what new skill sets are required for survival in the future.

AI may be able to write basic content and perform more cognitive tasks that were originally performed by humans.In the light of this knowledge, content marketers have to adapt suitably.

Final Thoughts

Final Thoughts

Growth in the content marketing sector has been phenomenal in the last few years and the number of job openings in the sector is increasing by the day. It looks like it is not taking a backseat anytime now.

 

SEO Content Writer Vs Normal Content Writer

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Over the years, content writing has emerged as one of the most lucrative and promising careers in the field of digital media. One of the most important aspects which make content writing such a lucrative option for the people is the fact that the payout is pretty good and the career growth can be very promising as well.

Content writing is one of the most crucial aspects of any form of business. Any venture requires content for marketing and letting people know about it. Content writing is thus a profession which is quite stable and a good career option for people who are creative.

Diversity in content writing makes it yet another extremely lucrative option. The two most prominent types of content writers rooted in the industry are SEO content writers and normal content writers.

There are a few factors which differentiate a conventional content writer from that of an SEO content writer. It is time to take a look at such factors.

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1. An insight into the differences

Regular content writing is entirely different from that of SEO content writing. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which is mainly associated with the promotion of web pages on the Google Search Index. The content which is orchestrated by SEO has a set of factors which tend to differentiate it from that of average content.

Among all the factors, keywords are the most crucial ones. The keywords are extremely important because they play a dominant role in optimizing the content for search engines rankings. Keyword density is yet another factor that SEO contents must oblige.

The leading search engines have their own set of protocols which tend to differentiate from one another. It is the reason as to why contents need to be optimized carefully while following each set of guidelines independently.

Ordinary content writers, on the other hand, do not need to take heed of such factors. Standard content, in general, can be of many types. They can be categorized into blogs, informative articles, web articles, web content, infographics, creative content, press releases and much more.

While conventional content writing ensures diversity, unlike its counterpart it does not involve a complex structure which is meant for search engine optimization.

To summarize the differences, the following points can help

  • Conventional content writing is more diverse than that of SEO content writing
  • SEO content writing can have a complex structure associated with it. At the same time, it can also involve a series of complicated instructions and rules that need to be followed for optimum results.
  • Conventional content writing does not require keyword optimization in every case, but SEO content writing needs for keyword optimization for better search engine visibility.
  • SEO content writing isn’t mainly categorized into subparts, but conventional content writing can be categorized into blog writing, article writing, creative writing and much more.

Thus one can say that conventional content writers have greater diversity at their disposal when compared to SEO content writers. However, it would fair to envision the fact that it takes more effort to incubate SEO content owing to its set of guidelines and complexity in general. Thus the quotient of difficulty can be a tinge more for SEO content writers.

2. The importance of SEO content writing

SEO content writing is among the core fundamentals of “Search Engine Optimization.” It is associated with ensuring a better ranking. As SEO content is the fundamental form of information available to the public, it works as the forerunner of the entire business promotional campaign.

SEO content writing helps to promote the service associated with the designated keyword. These keywords can be derived from the niche of the business or its typology. Either way, the SEO content enhances search engine visibility to a considerable extent.

The Google (the largest search engine in the world) algorithm is always on the lookout for keyword phrases across dedicated sections of the content. With proper formatting, the SEO content can help grab the attention of Google algorithms and bring forth the desired results.

The content is also an essential part of marketing any venture. It needs to be of the highest quality and thoroughly optimized for the search engine algorithms.

SEO content in general needs to be of the first order since engaging SEO content ought to yield the best of results. However, if the content is not appealing, then all probable SEO benefits are lost, and the entire effort might go into vain.

As a part of an effective content marketing strategy, SEO content has a pivotal role to play. It promotes search engine rankings, provides for efficient and prudent backlinks, enhances audience engagement and helps to support social media campaigning.

This type of content ensures social validation which is among the most critical credentials sought after by the Google algorithm.

3. Job opportunities for SEO content writer

Search Engine Optimization has transcended into an absolute must for any aspiring or upcoming business venture. Be it a simple blogger, or any MNC entrepreneur, everybody wants to make their online presence known to the world. It makes SEO as the right tool to make this happen.

It has brought forth the digital media industry onto the threshold of a revolution. The SEO industry has independently shown exponential growth in the previous decade and has been following the same pattern ever since.

The revenue collected overall is in millions of dollars, and the number of associates has been steadily on the rise.

There are enormous prospects for SEO content writers as both freelancers and full-time workers in this industry. The median salary can stretch from anywhere between 25,000$ annually to as much as 225,000$ for the professional full-time content specialists.

The freelancing wing of this industry, in general, is extremely lucrative. There are millions of freelancers across the world with some of them making as much as ten times of what they made during the hours of their regular day jobs.

A Final Thought

With the current trend on board, it is highly possible that this industry will flourish even more in the coming years. The exponential growth pattern isn’t bound to show any signs of slowing down within the coming years.

It brings forth the inception of brighter prospects for SEO content writers who aspire to a steady career with long-term growth and dependability.

Content Marketing Checklist to Follow in 2018

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Content marketing strategy is the foundation of success in digital marketing. It aligns all your content campaigns and content pieces in one direction. It ties in all your efforts for maximum effect.

It is different from content plan which only details the content topics, timelines and actions to be taken. Content marketing strategy on the other hand, answers broader questions of how you will achieve your marketing goals through content marketing.

An effective content marketing strategy must answer fundamental questions before directing and content creation actions. Without answering these clearly, your content marketing strategy will fall flat and simply fail.

But once you have done this groundwork, you can easily come up with content that is valued by your audience and brings in leads and customers regularly.

So here is the checklist of questions to make sure you are on the right track for your content marketing strategy.

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1. Do I have a Clear Objective?

Answering the ‘why’ before setting out to do content marketing (or anything really) is important. ‘What’ and ‘how’ you build your content depends on your purpose of content marketing. Your reason could be to get leads, attract traffic or simply build a brand authority online. Whatever the goal, it must be SMART.

  • S – Specific – clearly defined and narrow enough
  • M- Measurable – quantified if possible
  • A- Achievable- has to be realistic
  • R – Relevant – relevant to your business and overall marketing strategy
  • T – Timely – have a timeline

An example could be “Getting 50,000 unique visitors to our site by this quarter end.”

Once you have a clear objective many other decisions such as content topic, target audience, content format, etc., become clear.

2. Do I Know my Audience?

 You cannot come up with a content strategy without knowing who your audience is. Everything you do has to appeal to your target audience, so if you don’t know them you are pretty much shooting in the dark.

You must know your visitors/ readers/ customers like the back of your hand. Ask yourself if you can answer these about them:

  • What are their pain points?
  • What are they searching for?
  • Where are they searching for it?
  • What is the buyer’s journey?
  • What are their hopes and fears?

Yes. These are intimate questions and you should know your audience intimately.  Without knowing this you risk building content that nobody even wants to read.

3. Does my Plan have Visual Content?

Every content strategy is not the same and in fact should be different depending on your business. However, visual content is form of content that must be a part of every strategy today. It’s too profitable to leave out or ignore. After all, video content will make up 80% of all traffic by 2019.

This means that your content plan must have infographics, videos and images in it. Visual infographics not only explain your point easily they are also more fun and are shared 3x times more than any other form of content.

Video platforms like YouTube are also turning out to be a good source of website traffic. It is a great way to attract new visitors and get them curious about your offering. So invest in video channels early on and pay attention to video search optimization.

4. Is My Content Optimized for Mobile?

 Mobile traffic is another trend that is here to stay for good. More than 60% of traffic not comes from mobile and so your content must be optimized for mobile audiences.

With Google Hummingbird update it has become even more important that content creators serve the mobile traffic first.

This means content built for small screens, shorter attention span and competing with continuous notifications from other apps.

To make the most of your time your headlines must be grabbing and content length just right to hold attention. Content should also be scannable with bold headings and big fonts.

5. Does my Strategy have Feedback built into it?

 Content marketing is an ongoing strategy and does not end at publishing content. There is the whole process of moving visitors along the funnel and growing your loyal following online. All of this requires continuous monitoring and feedback from audience.

Your strategy must be flexible enough to make changes too. This does not mean changing your purpose and objectives that we mentioned earlier, but the ways to achieve them can change.

For example, you make see that influencer marketing is not working as well with your audience and decided to concentrate on email marketing only.

Of you may decide to concentrate on lead conversion rather than on lead collection.

All of this is only possible if you are listening keenly to your audience. Data on visitors, email subscribers and conversions will also give you insights into what you need to improve upon.
  

6. Do I have the Resources?

 One of the major factors impacting your success in content marketing is the long-term commitment you have for it. Content takes time to show returns and cannot be done with a short-sighted vision.

If you do not have the right resources for it, you will run out of fuel and patience to succeed at it.

You must ask yourself what resources you need to implement your content marketing strategy. Usually this includes staff time, skill training, budget, effort and management support.

For medium and large sized companies, management support becomes very important. This is because great content requires inputs from all departments and a decent budget.

If the seriousness is not driven from top-bottom then nobody in the company is going to support you with information, time and feedback.

The Bottom Line

Content marketing strategy is the glue that holds all the content making activities and gives your plan a direction. You must set your purpose clear before you set out to make any content.

Researching your audience is essential as it answers questions on what content to create, how to create and where to promote it.

Visual format, mobile optimization and feedback loop as some of the other things to complete the checklist on content marketing strategy.

A Complete Guide to Infographic Marketing

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

If you have a content marketing plan, there are good chances that it will have visual format of content such as video and infographic. Infographic became popular back in 2010 and have been here ever since.

Although marketers debated their survival with the internet becoming overcrowded with too many infographics, good quality infographics are still the cornerstone of a good content marketing plan.

Many successful marketers swear by them. They can get you tons of backlinks and some serious traffic. Marketing guru Neil Patel was able to pull in more than 2 million visitors and 41,142 backlinks by posting regular infographics on his Kissmetrics blog back in 2010. Most of leading digital marketing agencies and brands are using infographics by now.

According to a study by Infographic World, 56% of companies surveyed had used infographics and 84% considered them effective in marketing.

In this blog we will look at why infographic are so effective and how to be successful at infographic marketing. Let’s first look at what an infographic is and what are the various types of infographic you can design.

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What is Infographic?

Infographic is a visual image of information or data in its strictest sense. The visual representation could be process flow, timeline, comparison charts or sequential story too. There are many ways to represent information visually. Many infographics tell a story through the presentation of facts and statistics to add an element of surprise and evidence.

However, not all infographics should to have statistics and numbers. In fact, today, the types of infographics that we see are many. As long as it is an image that translates knowledge visually it counts as an infographic.

Types of Infographics

Here are some types of infographic and their examples.

1. Statistical  Infographics

These convey statistics in a visual way and have a story to it. They are great for getting backlinks and social shares.

Infographic Marketing

2. Informational Infographics

This is a blog post turned into a visual infographic. This can be a list-o-graphic, a process or educational guide. The idea here is to show visually what a blog post would say in text.

3. Timeline Infographics

These show the evolution of products, service, culture, etc.

Infographic Marketing

4. Comparison Infographic

These compare products, service, concepts or processes. They make it easy for our brain to compare by placing the compared ideas next to each other and bring out the difference.

Infographic Marketing

5. Geographic Infographic

This is an infographic putting together regional statistics or information on the corresponding map of a region. This is useful in representing information related to geography or showing geographical differences.

What makes Infographic So Effective?

Traffic to a website gets an average of 12% increase after uploading an infographic. So why are infographics so effective in getting traffic?

Infographics are visual

Our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than text according to 3M. 90% of information that goes to our brain is visual and we also easily retain what we see visually.

This is because the visual part of our brain has evolved for millions of years whereas the reading has been introduced to humans on recently in comparison.

We are naturally attracted to images and spend more time with articles/ blogs that have relevant images. In fact, eye-tracking studies show that readers spend more time looking at relevant images than they do reading text on a page.

Infographics are Shareable

People only share what they think will be enjoyed by their friends or help them. Since infographics are a story narrative with interesting facts and entertaining information they are perfect to share with your friends on social media.

Infographics are shared 3x times more than any other content on social media. They are easy to view, consume and share.

They Work for your SEO

Infographics do not directly translate into higher ranking but they do give out many signals that are great for your SEO. Informative infographics get lots of links from other sites. This not only increases traffic to your site but also tells Google that other people find your page helpful. This increases your domain authority, in turn boosting your visibility in Google.

Infographics also mean that visitors spend more time on your site and reduce bounce rate. This too is a factor affecting Google ranking directly.

Elements of Successful Infographic

Of course this does not mean that every infographic will be highly successful and get you links. Ever since the success of infographics online, the internet is flooded with infographics that are of poor quality (either in content or design or both) and are not successful by any measure.

Making an infographic that is not up to the mark will only waste your time and resources. Therefore, it is important to make high quality infographics if you want to succeed at infographic marketing.

There are many things that must be kept in mind for this. Let’s walk through the process of making and promoting a good quality infographic. We will discuss the best practices in each step as we come to it.

1. Set the Objective

What is the objective of making infographic? Is it to earn backlinks, convert leads or increase your brand authority?  Not every infographic is suitable for all purpose. For example, if you want to earn backlinks, an infographic with original data is your best bet.

The designing of your infographic will also depend on your objective. Infographics meant for PR or internal communication can have heavy branding whereas those built for social sharing cannot have much branding on them.

Before you set out decide on length of infographic, colour scheme, design and content, it is first important to set the context right.

2. Select  Topic

Knowing your audience is the key to creating the right content. The same is true for infographics. Infographic topics have to be either extremely helpful or entertaining.

The topic must answer your reader’s questions to be helpful and relatable to be entertaining. It should also be about a topic that has decent search traffic too.

One way to come up with a good topic is to look at the posts that are already popular in your sites. What posts drive maximum traffic and reader engagement? You may then repurpose old content or convert it into an infographic.

For example, if ‘Industry Stats for 2017’ was one of your best performing posts, you can consider making an infographic for ‘Industry Stats for 2018’.

Another way to pick a topic is to just tag along what’s trending. Topics or events that are in news are hot because media and social influencers are already covering it. If you can put a fresh angle to trending topics or add data to it, it is very likely to be picked up by journalists and bloggers and go viral.

3. Research Well

The next step after choosing a topic is to do a thorough research of the topic. Remember your content is only as good as the research that goes behind it. Talk to industry experts and try to dig out information that is not out yet.

There is nothing better than your own data from studies you have done. Bloggers and journalists love fresh content and stats to cite and prove their point.

Make sure your sources are credible and reputable. Wikipedia does not count as a credible source. You must also mention the sources at the bottom of your infographic to add credibility to your data.

5. Script and Story

The next step after you gathers data and information is to put it in a meaningful narrative. Most of the infographics fall flat here. Putting data and statistics in visual format is not a good infographic.

Content creators must tell a story through the information. This is what makes infographics captivating and shareable. Think of all the elements of story – a beginning state of things, struggle or objections and an end with a clear message of the story.

Sometimes you may want to develop a character to convey a story. At other times the reader’s journey itself can be a story. This stage requires lot of creativity and innovation.

At the end of this designers typically build a wireframe that puts all the information in a flow. By the end of this you should have a visual of how your infographic is going to look.

6. Designing

It’s time to convert your story into visuals and usually a designer works on this stage. There are many decisions that must be made when it comes to design.

What would be the best way to put the story in visuals? The infographic could be any of the type discussed above i.e. statistical, comparison, bar-chart, geographical or timeline.

The colours must be in line with the topic and appeal to the target audience. If you plan to brand your infographic the colours must also be in line with your branding.

The icons, 3D effects, fonts, formats and colours all will give your infographic a unique look and feel.

7. Editing

The next step is editing. By this stage you would have a first version of your infographic ready with you.  You must now improve on it and cut out all the information that is not central to your message.

Just like a good written copy, cutting out the extras is what makes an infographic great. Don’t put data just for the sake of length. It is better to aim for an infographic that is shorter, to the point and crisp. The flow of information should feel interesting and intuitive.

8. Promote

Left by itself, it will take some time for infographic to start ranking in Google. If there are already better infographics by more authoritative sites in your industry, then you can forget about ranking ever on Google.

Promoting infographics helps in getting quicker return and early discovery by search engines. There are steps that you must take to promote your infographic.

SEO for Infographic – Search engines cannot read images hence it is important to give them text and HTML tags that they can. This is how search engines view your page is about and whether of not to rank them for a query.

Insert your keywords in the title of the image as well as alt text. So if your infographic is about coffee name the image file as ‘benefits-of-coffee.png’ instead of ‘image1456.png’.

This way search engines can easily know what your infographic is about. Similarly, alternative text is what shows up when your image doesn’t load but it is also a signal on image content to Google.

Also add supporting text before and after your infographic. This way you can have Headings H1, introduction paragraph and a conclusion that will be enough for Google to rank you well.

Blogger Outreach – A good infographic will earn backlinks naturally but you can kick-start your efforts with an outreach campaign too. Get in touch with industry influencers and leaders and let them know of this new infographic you have posted.

They will link to it if they find it useful. If they do not, then take it as feedback for you to improve your infographic. Do be spammy with your request or post your link in the comments as that will only hurt your credibility.

Sharing on other Platforms – You can share your infographics on other platforms too. Posting on LinkedIn and SlideShare have proved successful for many brands. We will discuss more on how to optimize your infographic for different platforms in the next section.

Make it Easily Shareable – Your infographic must be shareable on social media with a single click. Put social sharing buttons on your page and mention an embed code below the infographic. This way anyone who wants to use your infographic can do so with a legitimate link to you.

9. Test

The last step of infographic marketing is of course monitoring and feedback collection. Each site will have unique visitor profile and hence different kinds of designs, topics and promotional strategies will work for each. By monitoring user engagement and feedback you can fine-tune your infographic content marketing to perfection.

Tips to get Maximum out of your Infographics

1. Create Quality Infographics

As you can see above there are plenty of things that can go wrong in each stage of creating an infographic. Since you are putting in so much effort, it’s worth ensuring that you end up with good quality infographic.

Many companies think that their good content writer will also make a good infographic. This is not true as the skill required for visualising and designing visuals are totally new to a content writer.

It’s recommended to get your infographic done from a professional designer or at least learn about design before you design it yourself.

Below is an example of confusing infographic. The numbers are all over the place and there is no flow of story to the visuals. The small font is also very difficult to read. Such infographics can actually annoy readers and spoil your brand name.

Infographic Marketing

2. Use Different Platforms to Promote

Post your infographic on more than just your blog. Take the example of below infographic by a security network company, Solera Networks. Their infographic on ‘Are you a Hacker’s Target?’ did not get a great response.

But it became immensely successful after they cut the graphic into slides and shared it on SlideShare platform getting them 40,000 views and organic links.

Infographic Marketing

The lesson is to re-design your infographic and share it on different platforms your audience is on. You never know, the infographic that is not getting any traffic to your site might just hit it off on Facebook or Pinterest.

The key is to repurpose your content to match the mood of each social sharing platform. Pinterest is highly design based so too many numbers and data will not do well there.

Similarly, Facebook needs photos that are interesting and entertaining and too much of branding will not work in this social site.

There are also many niche sites for each target audience that you should explore. Imgur is a great platform for millennial males. You can also find sub-reddits on almost any topic.

3. Make it a Part of your overall Content Strategy

This is perhaps the most common mistake marketers make. You cannot treat your infographic like a stand alone piece of content. Infographics have to fit into your overall content marketing strategy. They must still address you target audience and target the questions they are asking.

Also infographics marketing cannot be your only content strategy. Build supporting text posts, images and videos that together form your content plan.

It is also important to keep in mind what format your audience prefers, if your audience prefers only ‘how to videos’, then building infographics just for the sake of it is a loss making idea.

How much does it cost to make an Infographic?

Infographics can cost anywhere from $5 to $5000. There is a lot of work from research to designing to promoting an infographic. The cost will also depend on the amount of work you need to get done.

You can expect less cost if you already have the data and just need the designer to put it together visually. However if you want research, content, designing, promotion of the infographic you can expect a significantly higher quote.

Here are your options at different price points if you want to get an infographic done:

1. Do It Yourself

This is the cheapest but obviously requires your time and effort. This option is suitable for small start-ups, independent bloggers and home run businesses.

You can choose many online tools available to design your own infographic. Sites like Picktochart and Canva are almost free and come with many free templates, design ideas and inspirations.

You can get started for free on both the tools, although there is limited you can do with Picktochart on the free model. They have a $15, $29 and $99 plan which give you access to templates, hundreds of images, watermark removal and much more.

Canva allows you to do much more with their free plan and is by far the best option to create drag and drop free infographic yourself.

You can also learn to operate tools such as illustrator and coral draw to create your own infographics but they will take up a lot of time to learn.

Remember that for this option you will have no help with designing and storytelling and will have to do everything on your own.

2. Hire a Freelancer

Your next option is to hire an infographic designer on project basis. You can hire one from your contacts of go to numerous freelancing sites online to hire freelancers from across the globe.

Sites like Upwork, Fivver, Design Hill , Freelancer.in and many more will give you many options to choose designers. Design Hill runs a contest for you starting at $289 where you get to pick from more than 40 designs submitted by designers competing for your project.

You can find freelance infographic designer anywhere in the range of $100 to $2000 depending on their quality of work, experience and demand.

Terms of payment, timely completion of work, negotiations, and dispute handling are some of the tricky things when it comes to hiring a freelancer on the other end of the globe.

3. Hire a full time Designer

You could also hire a full time designer in your company. This is only suitable if you have an internal content team and expect to churn our high number of infographics regularly.

The cost of hiring a full time infographic designer can vary anywhere from $800 to $3000 a month. Cost of hiring, training and employee benefits are some extra charges that you will have to bear.

4. Hire a Professional Agency

This is perhaps the best option if you have the budget. There is no risk of unfinished work and unprofessional services as in the case of freelancer. You can find reputable digital marketing agencies that will design infographics within your overall content marketing strategy.

There are even niche digital marketing companies that only make infographics. Check out Neomam’s work on interactive Infographics to see the possibilities with Infographics

These agencies may charge you anywhere from $500 to $5000 per infographic. You may get a better deal if your agency handles all of your content marketing and charges you for the whole package.

Some of the known names in field are Only Infographics, Visual.ly and DKNewMedia. DKNewMedia and Visual.ly are premium agencies and are known to charge in the range of $4000 and above.

Not all agencies are expensive though. There are many lesser known agencies that do an excellent job minus the exorbitant price.

Bringing It All Together

Infographics are great to capture your audience because they are visual stories that people love to read. By inserting data and statistics you can make them helpful as well as interesting for your readers. They work because visual, are sharable and easily digestible.

Creating an effective infographic that gets you tons of traffic requires that you set a clear objective for it. The infographic must answer what your audience is interested in and have a compelling story and design. Promoting infographic on various platforms is equally important to get early traffic.

Lastly remember to treat infographics as a part of your overall content marketing strategy and not a standalone piece.

Whether you decide to make your own Infographic or hire and agency, a good quality and helpful infographic is sure to get you backlinks, earn traffic and improve your brand awareness.

Who is a Content Marketing Manager? What does he do?

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If you have created content or worked on digital marketing you may have come across the role of a content marketing manager in your agency. In this post we will share the role of content marketing manager and what he/she can do to grow your business online.

But first it is important to understand how content marketing fits into digital marketing.

How Content Marketing Fits into Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a channel of marketing to build an online following for your brand on the internet. This could be through website traffic, email subscribers or YouTube channel followers.

Whatever the platform, the aim is to build brand awareness and convert visitors into leads and customers. Email marketing, social media campaigns, content marketing etc. are all part of digital marketing.

Content marketing forms the foundation of all digital marketing, since it is content that gives value to your visitors and converts them into your loyal audience, followers and subscribers. Content consists of text posts, infographics, videos, audio podcasts etc.

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No matter what strategy you use digitally, good content is always going to be essential for it to succeed. For example, email marketing will require regular content that your subscribers find relevant and helpful. Without helpful content nobody will open your emails and they might even unsubscribe from the list.

Content marketing manager is someone who creates high quality helpful content with the aim of growing a loyal audience online. There are many activities and processes that form part of creating content. Let’s see what these activities are to understand them better.

Scope of Work

Content creation starts with researching deeply on the target audience. Understanding reader’s pain points and building content around it is essential to create relevant content. Without this, you risk putting out content that no one is even interested in reading.

Content managers can build on it if this information is already available with marketing department in the form of buyer personas and target market studies done.  If not, then it is the content manager’s job to find out about their audience.

Converting knowledge gained on target audience into a content strategy is the next step. This involves setting measurable targets (growth in subscribers, increased CTR, increases conversions etc.) and developing a plan to achieve this. There are two parts to this-

1.Content planning – involves building a plan that details what content topics should be covered, in what format and on what channel. For example, a content manager may choose YouTube for educational videos or write a long form content on the blog.

Here the content marketing manager decides everything down to titles for the blog to the timeline for completion of each content piece. This plan has to be flexible enough to change in response to audience, market and competitors.

2. Content Plan Execution – This is the process of executing the content plan. Activities involve writing, video production, social media posting, sending emails and audience engagement. There is team of writers, video production, social media manager etc. that the manager must work with.

Lastly, content marketing manager must monitor content performance parameters and come up with ideas to continuously better the content. Feedback and customer engagement is an important part of successful content strategy.

Roles of a Content Marketing Manager

Roles of a Content Marketing Manager

As you can see the scope of content marketing manager’s role is big. It stretches from research to project management and more. Therefore there are many roles and duties that he or she must deliver on.

  • Manage Team

A content marketing manager has to manage a team of writers, SEO specialist, video producer and social media manager. Depending of the size of the company some people may take on multiple roles.

It is advisable to have a team doing all of this as managing all of this by one person is very difficult for a brand. Some start-ups may start with only person for content but if you want to run campaigns that have a big impact then you will have to grow your team.

So he/she must also have management and leadership skills to manage a diverse set of people.

  • Content Strategy

As mentioned above setting a content strategy and plan (both are different) is the role of content marketing manager. This strategy must fit well with the overall marketing strategy of the company (offline marketing) and the business goals.

This requires someone who has experience and far sighted vision for the brand. This is why it is advisable to have someone with a good amount of digital marketing experience as a content manager.

  • Project Management

Implementing content plan requires project management role. Not everything will go as planned and there might be hurdles like delay in content completion, video production, negative feedback by audience. Content marketing manager has to be quick to make changes in such a case. He or she has to make sure all the projects within the plan are working in coordination.

  • Cross-functional collaboration

There are many functions a content manager has to work with. In fact there is no department that will not come in contact with content team .They have to work with products team to understand the product/service, collaborate with marketing team to work within branding guidelines and customer insights.

The more people content marketing manager works with, the better will be the content created.

  • Initiating Marketing Campaigns

Marketing campaigns give a boost to your online audience and increases brand recall.

Content marketing manager proactively launches online marketing campaigns. This could be influencer marketing campaign, email campaign, social media giveaways or live webinars. He is responsible for generating new ideas and testing them out too.

 Putting It All Together

Content marketing manager is responsible for making a content strategy and executing it to grow online audience. Their role starts from studying the target audience to developing valuable and relevant content for them.

For this they manage a diverse set of team and collaborate with almost all functions to come up with content that converts visitors into leads and customers.

Why Hire a B2B Content Marketing Agency in 2018

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B2B businesses are excessively talking about the need for a content marketing agency today. Hiring a content marketing agency is like having a support for your in-house team. They extend your resources and help you save time to focus on other activities.

Here are some important reasons why you need to hire a B2B content marketing agency in 2018:

1. Limited Internal Resources

One of the most important reasons to look at hiring a content marketing agency is limited internal resources. Most companies have a small content marketing team, who while being highly qualified don’t have enough time to prepare and execute a comprehensive content marketing approach. The content marketing agency helps to fill these gaps.

2. Sharing Your Story

Most B2B owners know that they do not have an interesting story. But not sharing the story at all gives these B2B businesses an impersonal, boring, and functional image. A content marketing agency focuses on the story you have and shapes it into an appropriate marketing strategy. It allows you to connect with your target audience keeping their perspective in mind.

Specialists at a content marketing agency understand what communication appeals to the target audience. They explain how your services can offer solutions to make their lives simpler. With the right story and right marketing strategy, you carve your own niche and establish a relationship with the people.

3. A Team of Specialists

Words play an important role in painting a picture of your business. Even if you offer something boring, content marketing experts have the acumen to prepare it interestingly.

When you hire a content marketing agency, you work with a team of specialists who are skilled in a particular area. They are constantly involved in the task of creating content and understand the target audience’s expectations well.

4. Produce More Content

Content marketing today means constantly churning high-quality blogs and articles. Small B2B teams cannot keep up with the pace of content development required to meet industry demands.

A content marketing partner not only assists you with the preparation of a suitable strategy for your brand. It decides on the types of content you require to reach your target audience. Finally, it also produces this content for you in your voice creating a dialogue with the audience.

5. Updated with the Current Trends

When working with an agency, you are certain that the experts are aware of the latest marketing trends. Internal content marketing professionals have a knowhow of what’s happening in the industry.

Agency specialists, on the other hand, also understand what’s working in different industries with increased exposure. They work on client campaigns on a regular basis. They understand the pros and cons of every tool that is implemented and only choose to use the best.

6. Vendor Relationships

For the success of a comprehensive B2B content marketing strategy, it is vital to use different channels, software, and tools. This way campaigns produce the right results. Owing to their nature of work, content marketing agencies have ongoing relationships with different vendors.

 When a company hires a content marketing agency, it can leverage from the bonds that these agencies have with third-party vendors. Establishing connections with several different types of vendors on its own can be difficult, especially for a B2B small business.

7. Cost-Effectiveness

This may sound contradictory but is true. Establishing an internal content marketing team will require employees with various skills. It will also require subscriptions for different software for campaign management.

Even if you hire the various positions at entry level, you will be spending much more than what you would with an agency. Therefore, when you compare salary costs with retainer fees, you will definitely want to pay the retainer fees.

8. Lead Generation

Last but not least, B2B content marketing agencies help to drive and track leads. They concentrate on every lead that is generated and ensure that you do not miss out any. They have the right software to measure deliverables and map the output they have reaped from different efforts.

Hiring a B2B content marketing agency is advisable for most B2B firms today. It eases out the process of creating content allowing in-house teams to focus more on sales and customer service. Firms can focus on their growth projections and improve revenue goals without hiring specialist employees for these fields.

How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy in 2018

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How do you know what’s the right content strategy for you in this ever-changing digital marketing world?

Google has come a long way from ranking results which are just stuffed with keyword. Also, many brands have proven that ranking content strategy is not about ranking first on Google.

So many start-ups have been successful with email marketing, social media, video content etc. For example, Leadpages grew its subscriber list from 0 to 15,000 within a year mainly from email marketing and tons of helpful content.

There are numerous ways to create and distribute your content. By the time you start implementing your video marketing plan you hear that influencer marketing is the next big thing.

This is precisely why picking a strategy and sticking with it is difficult for most marketers.

Add to this that most topics and niches are overcrowded by now. You will find brands already ranking with great content no matter what your niche is.

So how do you succeed in this challenging scenario? You have to be up to date and ahead of your competition in content marketing.

This is why we have put together a recipe to build a content marketing strategy that’s perfect for 2018 in this blog. Here is what you need to include in your strategy.

Remember that strategy for each company may be different but these are the basic ingredients that must be there in your content strategy if you want to succeed today.

Write Insanely Helpful Content

How Google ranks results has changed over the years and will keep changing in future too. There is just one way to make sure that you are ranking for years to come in your niche. And that is to write high quality content that answers reader’s questions.

Think of the pain points your customers face in your industry and create content to solve their problems. The content must be twice as helpful as the number one ranking result.

Even if you are not focusing on search engine it is a good practice to benchmark against the best performing content and then surpass it.

If the number one result on Google gives ‘10 helpful ways to increase sales’? Write ‘21 helpful ways’ instead to attract users.

Is the top content unbeatably good? Shoot a simple video to make the same points and embed in your blog. People (especially millenials) prefer to watch information rather than read it.

Remember there is always something you can do to improve the content already out there.

Write Long Form Content

Longer blogs typically perform better. The sweet spot according to most studies is 2000- 2500 words. However, even posts of up to 4000 words are now doing better in many niches.

Since every topic is overcrowded with content, it is now time to go niche in your topic and write in-depth content. In short write to cover more in narrow topic rather than touching on various topics in your industry.

Write for ‘Best women’s trekking shoes for Himalayan treks’ instead of ‘trekking shoes for women’ and cover everything possible under the narrow topic.

This also makes sure you are targeting long form keywords. Also, readers who fall under your narrow target are more likely to subscribe since you answered exactly what they wanted.

Of course it goes without saying that this level of micro-targeting can only be possible if you have done an in-depth research on your target market.

Use Video Content

2017 has seen a huge jump in visual content consumption. Cisco estimates the video content traffic will be 80% of all internet traffic by 2019.

Given that 4x times more users prefer watching a video rather than reading about a product it makes sense to invest your efforts in video. Live streaming on social media is big today. So is infographics and recorded video for helpful content.

Podcast is also gaining momentum since it allows users to multi task or listen when they are driving. So, simply converting your existing content to video or audio could also get you lot of traffic.

Optimize for Mobile

According to Business to Community nearly 80% of Internet usage will be from mobile in 2018!

That is a huge portion which should flip the way you look at device usage. It primarily means that brands should now start building for mobile and then optimize the content for desktop.

Use AMP pages for better mobile experience, make apps and focus getting share of the mobile screen for a winning content marketing strategy in 2018.

Have a Driving Purpose

This is important in an age where the internet is overflowing with similar looking ‘me too’ content. Being original and having a purpose sets you apart to your target market immediately. People connect with brands that have a cause and value that matches their own.

This is evident in case of the younger population. According to AdWeek, 49% of millennial will seek out brands that align with causes. This is more than any other generation.

Let’s Wrap It Up

Going niche is the best strategy to capture audience that is bombarded with unnecessary information all the time. Give your audience something they looking for and in a format they prefer and you are bound to succeed. Writing long form content which is helpful essentially takes care of this.

Focus efforts on video and mobile screen since that is where most of population is consuming content in 2018

 

 

The What, Why and How of Content Marketing:

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

Content marketing is disseminating information to your customers in the form of words, images, infographics, videos, and blogs that eventually translates into building customer engagement, trust and establishing a company’s image without writing any sales pitch. Interesting!!

But there is more to it. Content marketing is not a formula; instead, it is an approach which helps you reach your target customers  by giving them something that adds value to their existing knowledge base and encourages them to buy.

Today, B2B companies are using nearly 30% of their digital marketing budget in content marketing. It has grown as one of the most influential media of communication between companies and their customers.

Why Content Marketing?

Knowing why you are doing content marketing is very important. While creating workflows, assigning responsibilities, and building a content calendar is an essential activity, but knowing the various reasons behind content marketing is pivotal.

Take a step back and look at the big picture, understand whether your brand needs it or not at first place. If the answer is ‘Yes,’ then what will be its ROI? What additional resources do you need to execute the content marketing?

Begin with the end in mind is the key to content marketing, therefore dive deeper and know why your brand needs content marketing. Some of the reasons are enumerated below:

Create Brand Awareness

When you share content in diverse forms with your consumers, it creates an impact on their minds. Content marketing helps you distribute your varied content on different media and establish your brand identity which is very important for the beginners.

Improve SEO and Traffic:

When you are present where you should be, it has an impact on your SEO and Google rankings. When Google ranking increases, it increases the number of visitors landing on your website. More visitors, eventually mean more business and revenue. Therefore, content marketing plays a vital role in improving search engine ranking and bringing traffic.

Enhance Engagement

When you write better content in the form of blogs, videos, infographics, and emails, it turns customer awareness into something more meaningful. A great content pays the way for more customer participation, helps in building a better relationship that can add an individual’s experience with your brand.

Increase Brand Perception

Building brand perception takes time, and it gets created from various sources. Content marketing is one of them. People gradually learn to identify you from your content, its presentation, tone, and style; that helps you in becoming a brand in the eyes of your consumers.

Helps generate leads

Content marketing is a handy tool in generating a lead when you write engaging content on your website or other social media platforms; it encourages your customer to sign-up to know more about your product and services. Therefore, while the objective of content marketing is to attract your customers, it eventually leads to generating more leads.

Increase Sales/Revenue

When you do content marketing in the right manner, it increases sales. The primary objective of content marketing is not only to convert potential leads into customers but also to retain customers and to maintain them as loyal buyers for future. Your content assists your consumers in deciding to purchase.

Become a Thought Leader

When you write enticing content, share your opinions about pertinent topics, you become a trusted resource. People listen to your thoughts and refer your opinion before they make a buying decision. Therefore, content marketing also helps a marketer emerge as a thought leader.

How is Content Marketing done?

There is no one size fits all when it comes to content marketing, different brands and different company sizes pursue different content marketing strategy. While a consistent presence on social media gives expected results to one brand, blogging, and video marketing fits the nature of other business.

Let us dig deeper to understand how content marketing is done:

B2B Content Marketing types:

Webinars

Nothing can substitute the experience of a live webinar when you want to generate qualifying leads. They are scalable and compelling and demonstrate what you want to communicate with your customers. Although expensive, it speaks about the viability of your product and proves to be a powerful tool for companies in B2B marketing.

Blogs

Come what may, the blog remains as one of the most effective and surest ways to deliver your message to your customer. It adds to customer’s knowledge and assists customer buying behavior. B2B marketers can use blogging to their best of their advantage and generate revenue.

Email

Email marketing brings positive value for B2B marketers. Its biggest benefit is not only the way it gets delivered to the customers but also in it being the best tool for nurturing the lead. Crafting regular emails forms an integral part of content marketing and is one of the most dependable strategies too.

Social media:

Undoubtedly the cheapest and the most consistent result producing platform, which is integral to any content marketing effort is social media. When done thoughtfully and with absolute consistency, social media marketing creates results that no other platform offers.

White Papers

White papers are valuable research and data points that give not only information about the business but also elucidates on industry trends, stats, government regulations, etc. In B2B, the white paper holds their importance and should be considered as a critical element for content marketing.

Infographics

When you want to pass on your message to your customer in a quick form without taking much of his time, infographics are a handy tool. It is entertaining and visually appealing, therefore should form a part of any content marketing effort.

Case Studies

Through case studies, a customer is advocating your brand; you are mentioning how you helped his brand in reaching new heights through various marketing efforts. Such case studies engage customers who have the same pain points, and it inspires them to take help from your company. It is a great approach and should form a part of your content marketing strategy.

Check the video below to get an idea about content marketing methodology

 What are the popular B2B Content Marketing tactics?

When you adopt content marketing in your marketing strategy, there are a few tactics which you should know about. Whether you are B2B or B2C, these tactics will make way for your success.

Let us list down the most important ones for you:

Create content that connects with your audience: Everything you create should work towards building your brand and connecting with your customers. The objective should be to reach the target audience and not the largest audience through content marketing.

Deliver value: This is the golden rule, deliver value at every touch point you interact with the customer. Educate, advice, advocate, entertain, inform and inspire your customer at every point to make your content marketing effort fruitful.

While selling, sell tactfully, do not push your customer to buy or load him with a lot of unnecessary information or messages, and don’t just speak for yourself, sell subtly.

Make use of user-generated content: Any content marketing effort is futile if it does not involve the ultimate user. User-generated content is a fantastic way to engage your customers and make them feel valuable.

Different content mix: Do not just stick to one content type, instead create a combination of different content that suits a B2B company and more specifically your brand.

Seek feedback: Feedbacks from your customers help you improve your brand image, therefore make sure that you ask your user to give feedbacks either on your website or through an email.

Optimize and audit your current strategy: When you optimize and monitor your current strategy, you get to know what you were doing wrong or which activity was the most result producing. Therefore, it is an important tactic to monitor and optimize your strategy from time to time.

Plan a distribution strategy: A content distribution strategy is crucial as it brings your content in front of your audience. Therefore, plan a robust and yielding content distribution strategy.

Build relationships: The last but not least content marketing tactic is to focus on building relationships rather than just conversion or revenue. It gives far-reaching results, and building relationship with customers has other notable benefits too.

B2B Content Marketing trends in 2018

The inclusion of Artificial intelligence and virtual reality:

Brands have to embrace AI and VR in their marketing mix else there are all chances that they might lose their customers to their competitors.

Influencer marketing will be on upsurge:

Influencer marketing will move away from the hands of big brands to the smallest level of business; it will spread its wings across all spheres of business.

Original content will top the list:

In 2018 too, nothing will be more important than the creation of original content. The marketer will focus on newer ways to create fresh and unique content to mark their presence.

Personalization and customization will be necessary when marketers will deliver product or service to its consumers in 2018.

Future of B2B Content Marketing:

The future of content marketing is at an all-time high this year and will see a quantum increase in the years to come. A little bit of change in their strategy and marketers will enjoy a host of benefits from their content marketing strategy and will earn more. A few changes that the marketers will have to embrace:

  • More investment and a higher budget
  • Increased use of Search Engine Marketing
  • Explore all social media channels
  • Communication and documentation of strategy

Tying It All Together

Content marketing is a time taking action, it does not produce results overnight. It might take few months to even a year to see the results of a content marketing strategy. However, the effects can be significant, and it can become your most cost-effective marketing channel.

How Much Does It Cost to Make a Promotional Video

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

A promotional video has inherent great worth in it. Those appear genuine as characters in them display real facial expressions and body language.

The dialogue of the characters in the video simply adds meaning and power to the ideas behind the creation of the product. Lending the product a bit of candor, the promotional videos lend credence to the concepts of utilities in the product.

More often than not, promotional videos are most effective in giving detailed product demonstrations. Moreover, the videos have proven their mettle in engaging the attention of the viewers.

As entertainment and educational values are ingrained in them, the videos are great marketing tools.

As the videos are really persuasive, the messages in the products and services stay etched in the minds of the customers forever.

Making a commercial video includes several types of costs.

Let’s make a list of them.

  • Cost of camera
  • Selection of location and cost involved
  • Fees of models or actors
  • Post production costs

Although the above costs would vary from case to case, there are certain factors that influence the costs. Let’s know them one-by-one.

Script and the idea behind it

“Ideation” or generation of an idea is the most important part of making of a promotional video. For this, a creative script writer could literally cast a magic spell through an interesting script. Usually, a good idea leads to compilation of a good script.

A witty script writer simply transforms the idea to an interesting script. A good script writer could charge between 4000 to 10000 rupees. For a commercial video, a good script is the first stepping-stone for making a successful commercial video.

Shooting of the video project

Cost of transportation

This part of the making of the commercial video is the costliest. It has many things that simply add to the piling of the expenses. Let’s begin with the cost of transportation.

The production houses charge 20 to 30 rupees per kilometer. They could even charge a fixed amount for the same.

Cost of camera

The cost of camera with the operator could cost an additional expense of 20,000 to 30,000 rupees in a day. This amount is applicable for a commercial in a national television.

But if the commercial video is being made for a local television or simply for a cable network, the complete all inclusive costs could come to 30,000 rupees.

Cost of additional equipment

Besides the above, the producer would have to incur additional types of costs, such as charges for track and trolley, chains and jibs, and lights etc.

Actors and models & their fees

The popularity of actors and models plays decisive part in the cost of making promotional videos. When the advertiser makes up his mind to hire popular models and actors, it certainly adds to the cost of video. If the budget for the promotional video is less, the producer could opt to hire new faces in the industry.

While the budding actresses or models would, of course, work for the producer for a paltry sum of five or ten thousand rupees, the fees of the established models or actors could come in huge amounts. Nowadays, successful television actors charge whopping amounts for their roles in the videos.

Post-production expenses

Usually, the making of a video goes through three phases, such as pre-production, production, and post-production. Editing matters the most in the aftermath of production.

The video production companies could charge up to 5000 rupees per hour for editing the video.

In some cities in India, the production companies charge 2000 to 3000 rupees for editing the video. In case the producers include motion graphics or animations, the expenses for editing even could go higher.

2D & 3D Promotional videos- a new dimension in product’s marketing

As new technology is breaking ground, 2D & 3D animation technology helps a lot to showcase products in concise and clear way.

As multi-media and video animation services are now going through a boom time, the animated videos could literally bring revolution in products’ marketing.

Moreover, animation videos are literally wonderful to explain products and concepts or ideas in the marketability of services.

To add to it, the videos are fully entertaining and those have the versatility to deliver the messages to the core audience.

No need to hire models, actors, and select location and props-great advantage in cost

The promotional videos made with the help of 2D and 3D technology have great advantages in the cost of its production. Those are as follows;

  • The advertisers could create animated videos by completely adhering it to the brand guidelines.
  • In case of necessity, the advertiser could make such videos without hiring actors and models.
  • As locations and props add great expenses to the making of promotional videos, those are not even necessary, when videos have the applications of 2D and 3D technology.
  • Last but not least, the making of 2D and 3D promotional videos could take place completely through in-house productions.
Other benefits of 2D Animated Video
  • As business houses functions in stiff competition, brand building has now become tougher. Invariably, the business leaders look for means for simple but effective business promotion. A 2D animation video works in a simpler way, establishing a quicker rapport with the customers.
  • The moving objects and characters in the 2D animation video literally work wonders by keeping the viewers engrossed for longer periods.
The power of 3D Animated Video- simply unbelievable
  • The integration of 3d promotional video could integrate an immediate sense of production value as it has proven its mettle for adding a sense of depth and special effects of lighting. With apt movement of camera in 3D technology, the video seems to acquire a new high of professionalism.
  • The 3D animation not only adds dynamic movement to the video but also makes the video clip colorful with varying compositions. As a result, the transitions in the video could easily catch the attention of the viewers and convince them to buy the products and services.

 

10 Distinct Benefits of Outstream Video Ads

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As digitization steps in with its innumerable benefits, social media has grown by leaps and bounds. At this crucial point of time, marketing strategies are fast evolving new changes that could bring richer dividends.

Out-stream videos are the latest in this trend to bring in a new type of ad format, which would allow the publishers to display their video ads at different places in the content. Such videos appear in text line or in the web-page corners.

Although, out-stream videos have not gained massive popularity, the usage has now increased rapidly. As the publishers felt hurdles in the past in the creation of ads for the users, out-stream videos have brought a new lease of life, which would benefit both users and advertisers.

Let’s know about ten distinct benefits of out-stream videos.

Out-stream Videos ads- most dependable independent units

Out-stream videos work as independent units without becoming introduction to another video. For this, various distinguished publishers such as Mashable and Rolling Stone have begun using out-stream ads through in-read formats. What does it actually mean? Let’s understand.

When someone is going through an article, he or she would be able to watch an auto-play video. When the reader scrolls down the video, it simply leaves his or her area of vision. It also gives the reader another advantage to unmute the video in case he wants to listen.

Highest monetization of sites- a distinct advantage

Out stream ads allow publishers to monetize their sites without pestering the readers, which is a striking advantage. Moreover such ads have the catchy and cool formats with proven utilities to reach middle ground and bestow opportunity on the publishers to monetize their sites.

With these utilities, such videos would become immensely popular in the world of online video advertising in the upcoming years.

Unique positioning of ads in the editorial content – capable of running in any device

Out-stream ads have great innovative formats, which could position the video advertising in the center of the editorial content. Once the reader gets it inside his vision, the video begins playing. But it starts pausing, once it is less than 50% visible.

And it merges continuously back into the web-page as the reader completes viewing the content. The other distinct advantage of such videos is that it could run in every device, browser, and operating system without any problem.

Best usage in mobiles- handy and convenient

As research has shown already, highest number of readers prefers to read content via cell phones, out-stream ads run excellently on the mobile phones, especially on smart-phones.

Normally people spend more time in looking at the videos in their smart-phones, the out-stream videos have proven their efficacy.

Out-stream ads- more contextual and less insidious

As the customers have always felt that such videos appear almost like organic content, those are not invasive and naturally related to content.

It gives the liberty to the readers to view completely or partially and this advantage certainly adds worth to the overall content presentation, while adding value to the information presented in it.

Publishers enjoy out-stream ads the most- popular with brands, bloggers, and traditional media

Nowadays, all types of brands, bloggers, and traditional media have begun using out-stream video. As earlier, the readers were habitually going through grey text, addition of multicolored videos makes the content visual friendly and for this reason, the readers like to stay on the page for longer time.

Out-stream videos add dimension to story-telling- a new dimension to learning

Such videos have altogether added a new dimension to story-telling. It gives the readers alternative ways to explore. Making the information accessible to every learner, who is having problems such as lower reading skills, shorter spans of attention, and vision impairment, such ads have proven their mettle in the world of online advertising.

New way of presenting information- publishers’ delight

As the publishers have forever looked for ways to present information, out-stream videos have proven their worth in this area.

Just think of the online cooking videos, those are really great sources of passive learning. Watching such videos really adds fun as it is sometimes boring to browse a written recipe.

Unique solution for the marketing needs- complete engagement of audience

Out-stream impressions are completely unique as solutions because those do not come attached to any other content. Unlike You Tube ads, which begin even before the commencement of the videos, the out-streamed ads appear alone in the placement of ads in the articles of the websites.

This endows unique benefits on the ads to grab the attention of the audience, while the ads do not interrupt the viewing experience of the readers.

The advertisers have always found that such ads give great opportunities for their marketing needs. They have opined that such ads give them real opportunities to buy video solutions programmatically as those give better satisfaction to users.

Simply speaking, the business houses find the buying experiences of such ads extremely satisfying as their customers feel less disrupted, while they go through the content of the article.

Behavioral targeting-easier by out-stream ads

The out-stream ads enable the publishers to keep a list of videos to meet the rising demands of people, who want to place good but related ads in their content.

This helps the publishers to make the behavioral study of particular group of users and guides them to identify new chunks of essential users.

The following are the three distinct advantages that out-stream videos certainly bestow on the publishers and readers;

  • Improvement in viewing of a content
  • Better rate of clicking on the ads
  • Greater versatility in the placement of ads in the article

As a result more than 70% of advertisers and 77% of the agencies have found the out-stream ads to be uniquely effective and essential for their purposes.

Literally, such videos have brought a halt to search for new formats for making of videos that could enrich their efforts for developing engaging videos.