content marketing Archives - Page 2 of 9

B2B Website Best Practices to Follow in 2018

Posted on April 30, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

Digital channel in marketing has changed how leads are generated in B2B business. Today it is completely possible to sit back and watch your leads coming to you.

But this is possible only when you have successful website, effective lead page and a content marketing plan that works.

Your website is your digital presence and it is where your leads will come in contact with your business first.

Therefore it’s important that you have website that best projects your brands as well as convert those leads for you

In this blog we will share best practices to follow for your B2B website in 2018.

But first it’s important to understand objectives for your website.

The requirements of a B2B website are very different from a B2C website. For starters, your deals are generally high value meaning that customers spend a substantial amount of time researching on the solution.

The buying cycle is also longer sometimes running into months or even a year!

You should hence assist your customers in their search. The website that adds most value throughout the buying process will be more likely to convert the lead.

What kind of a site will add value throughout the process? Read on to know.

Target your Site

Your website must be as targeted as your marketing strategy. Who do you want to serve in the market? Is it small business or big corporates?

The next step would be research everything about your target audience. You must have an average visitor’s expectation from your website and even the solutions they are looking for.

Aiia, which is into promotional products, does this beautifully by speaking directly to their customer’s emotion. This is possible only when you know your audience intimately.

You must design your site for your audience and write in the language they speak. Every industry has its own lingo and jargon.

Speaking in that language will tell your readers that you understand them and have experience in their industry.

Automate Processes

A good website in 2018 must take advantage of automation available today. You can automate email campaigns right from collecting mail IDs to nurturing your mailing list with an email campaign. Use Auto-responders to confirm visitor actions like sighing up for a webinar or eBook.

A lot of queries can be resolved through an FAQ section or a chatbot. Use of chatbots lowers customer care calls and also resolves customer objections with ease.

In fact according to study by Nuance Enterprise, 75% of customers said they find self-servicing as a convenient way. More customers prefer instant chat based solutions over calling a company executive.

Personalize Experience

With tools such as ConvertKit, Mail Chimp and Optimizely you can personalize your website for each client who visits your website.

The first step is to collect data on how visitors are interacting with your website. Next is to identify segments of visitors and how they differ from each other.

For a B2B website the segments could be region, past purchases, industry and buying stage. Not all information will be available with you but you can use cookies and other tools to identify which category your visitors falls in.

Tools such as Hubspot and Smart Content allow you to create smart lists for your website. For example, all visitors from Asia-Pacific will be shown a different homepage image.

ConvertKit allows you to take specific action based on visitor event. For eg, it adds all the first time visitors to remarketing ad list automatically.

Make it Intuitive

There are so many decisions to make when it comes to design. Design affects how your brand is perceived, your customer experience and even your conversion rates. Always strive for a website that is intuitive and easy to understand.

Above picture is an example of how your website should NOT be. The visitor has no way to know where he is on the site, there is information load and too many call to actions. Keep the following in point in B2B website design:

Show the navigation path (also known as breadcrumb) at the top of your page. It tells the user how they landed on the page
Limit call to action to one or two
Videos have become very popular but they can also be distracting sometimes. Use manual pay video and avoid autoplay
Highlight selected menu option
Have thank you pages and action confirmation page like “thank you for signing up”
Keep your website design consistent on all pages. Different colors and fonts can cause confusion in visitor’s minds.

Keep Improving

Lastly, maintaining a high converting website is a continuous process. Just implementing the above practices and forgetting about it is not going to make a huge difference in the leads you collect.

For true transformation you must continuously test what is working and what isn’t. Improve something every day and you will soon see that your website can be your biggest source of leads and revenue.

In the fast changing digital world you cannot afford to stop working on your website.

What is the Future of B2B Content Marketing in India

Posted on April 23, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

What do you think is the future of content from a marketing point of view? How are marketing teams preparing for the sudden upsurge in the demand for B2B content?

How is the world of content marketing expected to evolve in the coming years and what is it that companies must do to stay in-sync with the developments? These are some common questions running in the minds of several business owners.

The world of content marketing has grown bursting with energy. Leading tech players are hiring screenwriters. Content providers are flourishing.

Businesses are constantly battling to create more creative content and design. The strategy of marketing teams is focused more on content marketing plans with the ROI of white papers and blog posts increasing.

The digital marketing community sees content as something that is here to stay. This is primarily because content is, at the end of the day, one of the best and most influential ways of engaging with the target audience at a human level.

It helps to explore new concepts and innovations. It helps to learn new skills and sends out an inspiration to all those reading it.

Content marketing is expected to become more powerful in the coming years. What’s more is the way it is being used. Here are some predictions on how the future of B2B content marketing will shape in India:

Personalized Content

Any marketer would know that there is a plethora of information available online, however, the number of hours with the target audience has reduced significantly.

Readers have shorter attention spans and therefore their demands are changing.

If marketers wish to make an impact and reach out to their target audience in the best manner possible, they must generate personalized, relevant content.

This content must clearly and concisely answer the reader’s query in a short reading time. Technology is also evolving to help marketers appropriately personalize content giving it the right outcome.

Quality is Priority

The same kind of content is being generated by all marketers for the same sets of target audiences. Relevant content is being created by just about everyone and that’s not enough to gain the eyeballs.

Then, how do you get yourself noticed? You need to ensure that your content is high-quality and what you are creating is some of the best resources in your industry. Here are a few key points that can help you churn useful content:

Identify the pain points of your industry and offer appropriate solutions. Please note, readers are looking for quick solutions and therefore, you must focus on these.
Examples, testimonies, experiences, and case studies have a great impact on the target audience since they are relatable and strike a chord.
Act as a content curator providing detailed information about a particular topic using relevant links.
Surprise your readers with a list of tactical tips that offer great solutions.

Gone are the days when mediocre content could attract the attention of your target audience. Your content now must be simply ‘amazing’.

Focus on the UX

The success of content marketing will also depend on how your content is presented. Imagine the different situations and moments in which readers are likely to access your content – while commuting to the office, waiting at the doctor’s clinic, just before going to bed, or during their free time at work.

They would sometimes just have a few minutes and at other times have hours. Your UX must be designed in a manner that the content can be scanned and scrolled easily not causing any kind of distractions and disturbances to the reader.

The way you frame your content marketing strategy today will have a great impact on your ROI in the future. Set out to create fewer yet impactful content pieces that can be elaborated upon later.

Content marketing is changing and you need to adapt yourself to the changing strategies. However, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Tailor the content as per the requirements of your target audiences and half the battle is won.

How to Use Dynamic Content to Boost Conversions

Posted on March 28, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

Creating an online experience tailored as per the needs and preferences of customers is the ultimate goal of any marketer. In fact, recent trends in technology have made it possible for businesses to modify websites as per individual viewing experiences.

This strategy involves the use of dynamic content based on various sets of information about the user giving them just what they need to engage with your brand or take steps in the direction of leading to a conversion.

Dynamic content makes the user experience more engaging and intuitive, thereby resulting in increased conversions.

It eliminates all sorts of extra and irrelevant information that could otherwise cause a friction or frustration with the customers. These techniques offer a logical step to the customer taking them forward in the customer lifecycle.

Here are 5 ways you can use dynamic content to give your website visitors a smoother and user-friendly experience to boost conversions:

1. Personalized Recommendations

Recommender systems have gained immense popularity in the recent years. This technique collects consumer data and takes users through their journey by offering recommendations and relevant content at every stage of browsing.

In fact, product recommendations tremendously help in increasing online revenue. The focus lies in improving the experience of customers engaging with your brand instead of running after the prospective ones.

The algorithm of recommender systems captures, collects and analyzes consumer behaviour and other data to recommend the most suitable products for every individual. This process is known as ‘collaborative filtering’.

However, this does not mean that recommender systems are only suited to E-commerce companies. They are also beneficial for content portals, travel websites, and other platforms.

As a rule of thumb, if your business is involved in the marketing and sale of several different products, chances that the implementation of a recommender system will be beneficial are high.

2. Improve Site Search Experience

Search technologies have advanced in the last couple of years making it easy for users to find what they need. This means that the quality of search on your website can also influence conversion rates.

Dynamic content has the ability to optimize your site search. This includes simple strategies such as autofill and autocorrect.

Another way of utilizing dynamic content to improve site search experience is by providing search terms related to the products and categories near the search box.

This enhances the discovery process as users instantly jump to the product they are searching for, rather than going through the vast product range and listing pages on your website.

With popular recommendations, filter keywords and phrases, the scope of searches is narrowed making it easier for the visitor to make a choice.

Additionally, based on consumer behaviour, purchase histories, and other data, items can be sorted as per popularity benefitting both the business and the customer to view the best available products.

3. Tailored Call-to-Action

Call-to-Action buttons are a vital part of any business website. It is the element that connects the user and the business. However, its effectiveness is dependent on the copy that it uses.

Dynamic call-to-action buttons fasten the conversion process by giving users an incentive that is absolutely lucrative and relates to them instantly.

The copy of the button is customized according to the stage of the sales funnel that the customer is in. Giving a website visitor the right touchpoint at the right time helps to generate more leads and conversions.

For example, if you are reaching out to a new lead and expecting them to download the brochure, a ‘Download Now’ CTA is what you need.

Once the brochure has been downloaded, you wish to redirect them to a testimonial or a free trial offer and your button copy must reflect the same.

Tailoring the call-to-action button improves the product adoption process since the customer’s journey is already being tracked with the right actions being displayed in front of them.

Takeaway

Dynamic content may sometimes be confused with personalization. However, the former is infinitely more powerful. Content tailored as part of personalization is fixed while dynamic content is HTML content that alters itself on the basis of the user accessing it.

How to Create Readable Content

Posted on March 23, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

It is frequently neglected that there is a connection between readability and search engine optimization. Readable content can do wonders in SEO.

When you create content, it should be:

skimmable
composed at a proper reading level
use only compact sentence structures
prefer only uncomplicated words

At the point when your content is simple to read, chances are high that your visitors will keep reading. This implies a more extended occupying time, a superior bounce rate and better rankings in seeking.

In this article, we will give you tips to make your content more readable. Likewise, we will demonstrate to you a couple of tools that check readability before you click “publish.”

Tips for composing more readable content

Try your hands on implementing the following tips as soon as possible. Editing as your own for readability for your content can be time-consuming and also tedious.

If you can intentionally take a shot at making content clear as you think of, you won’t need to invest more energy in editing subsequently. Following are the best tips to make your content more readable:

1. Establish a solid first impression

In the event, if it’s a case study or a tale about a client experience, begin with a conflict and demonstrate the client’s challenge. Individuals with similar dissatisfactions will relate and keep reading to perceive how your business figured out the issues.

Regardless of how you begin, the presentation ought to mirror the substance of whatever remains of your post. That way you don’t deceive readers and they won’t leave the page when they don’t get what they anticipated.

2. Make the content skimmable

It is a fact that most of the people just scan through the web pages or web content. It might be hurting to compose a content realizing that your audience won’t really read the entire thing.

However, if you can give valuable data, readers will discover precisely what they are searching for while skimming through the page. They won’t leave your page in dissatisfaction.

One of the simplest approaches to make a content skimmable is to separate the duplicate with formatting techniques. Following are a couple of things to begin incorporating into your content:

Headings: Use of headings will help to recognize fundamental topics of the different segments of content. Utilize H1 and H2 labels to design your content, as well as to enable Google to access your page to understand what it is about.

Bullet points: Exactly like these kinds of pointer heads to differentiate content into segments.

Numbers & listicles: Using numbers is a simple method to compose a bit of content and split it up into sub-points and show how everything identifies with each other.

Short paragraphs: Make sure that you only put a couple of words on each line. Otherwise, it will relatively be irritating to read the content. You need to utilize more line breaks; however, an excessive number of it makes it troublesome for readers to understand the point of each passage and where to focus.

Visuals: Photos, videos, and different graphics help to separate the duplicate, as well as add interesting components to your content, urging readers to remain on the page.

Bold, italics and hyperlinks: Using these formatting techniques can feature keywords and the essential outcomes in sections.

3. Use suitable and natural language

Before creating content, you need to know who is your crowd. As you build up your purchaser personas, take note of the kind of the language your audience uses.

Concentrate on the content your audience absorb, regardless whether it is a famous blog or industry magazine, and focus on how they discuss the themes they cover.

Unless writing a technical stuff or for academic purpose, use a conversational tone. Using a conversational tone, you will have a capacity to address a more extensive scope of your audience.

Using pronouns, like “I” and “You” upgrade the conversational tone. It helps in building up a relationship with your audience by enabling them to become more acquainted with you.

It is likewise a review without bounds discussion that the prospect may have with a salesman. This kind of conversational tone is called natural language.

At the point when individuals make inquiries in a search engine, particularly when they use voice search, they are not using any keywords but they are utilizing full sentences.

So your content should answer these inquiries. Google’s algorithm has advanced to sorting out accommodating answers over keywords.

4. Be aware of word choices

Indeed, even with formatting that splits up content, complex word choices and long sentences will reduce readers. Following are a couple of formatting and writing tips to keep in mind:

Avoid fluff: Make sure you don’t use repetitive kind of words in your content. What is important is imparting your message plainly and being as connecting with as would be feasible.

Make use of active voice rather than passive voice: The subject of your sentence ought to do the activity. For instance, active voice resembles this: “Ram distributed the papers”, while passive voice resembles like this: “The papers were distributed by Ram.”

Passive voice can frequently cause negative responses since it’s lengthy and not as direct, and also sometimes irritating to read.

This is a simple error to make while you are writing, so bear in mind to search for it during the proofreading process.

Use only fewer adverbs: Like using the passive voice, an excessive number of adverbs undermine your written work. Adverbs change verbs and more often not end with ‘ly’, for example, “He rapidly hurried to class.” Instead of adverbs, use more expressive verbs. For the above-quoted example, it can be altered to “He dashed to class.”

Stay away from empty phrases and superlatives: Let’s consider the example of a baker and his marketing phrase goes like this “The world’s most delicious cookies.” That sounds great; however, the phrases are overused.

Besides, there is no real way to demonstrate it! Rather, ask what makes the following one interesting, “Does anyone has created such uber-delicious cookies that won the American Gingerbread contest last year?” This says significantly more in regards to the item without exaggerating.

How to review the readability of your content?

On the off chance you don’t have an editor on the team, recruit someone else in your company, or even a friend or family member if needed to review your content. A fresh set of eyes will be able to let you know how readable your content is.

There are also some scales that measure the readability of your content and review the average length of your paragraphs, sentences, and words:

The Flesch Reading Ease score: It rates in between 0 to 100, with 100 being the clearest. Scores rating between 60-70 can be rated as eligible for grown-up readership.

The Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade: It indicates what reading level in school is required for somebody to grasp your content.

According to Readable.io, you should aim for grade 8 or beneath to guarantee your content is readable by 80% or greater amount of Americans.

Following are a couple of supportive devices to decide these scores:

Hemingwayapp.com – This is a free web application, or else you can pay to download it to your desktop. This app is particularly valuable for authors who tend to use more complicated words and sentence structures.

It provides your content a reading level and features all the issue regions so that you know precisely what to settle.

Yoast: This mainstream WordPress module for measuring SEO meta tags and definitions additionally has a component that decides readability.

It gives a Flesch Reading Ease score, which measures the usage of passive voice and recognizes the sentence length and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Readable.io – This is a web application that checks the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade, the Flesch Reading Ease score in addition to numerous other scales.

Also, it checks content details like characters per word, number of adjectives, reading time and so on.

Grammarly: Use this as an application or as a convenient Chrome extension. As the name recommends, it checks the language structure of your content, and additionally spelling, style, punctuations, and offers suggestions for correcting your content.

Even though there is no readability score, Grammarly will catch a significant number of mistakes that will help to increase the quality of readable content.

Final Thoughts

The primary goal of writing readable content is to answer your reader’s inquiries. Your content has to be snappy and simple for your audience to absorb.

Figuring out how to create readable content needs a numerous number of rehearsals. However, it will be justified despite all the trouble over the long haul for better results of SEO.

20 Reasons Why No One is Reading Your Website Content

Posted on March 19, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

Nobody wants to accept that their content is weak and not deserving to be read. After all, why would anyone write something that is utterly useless? However, there’s still a lot of content on the web that does not attract the target audience.

Read this article to know and understand why some of your website content is not being read and why is it that your audience is not being able to relate to you:

1. Repetition

A lot of websites just repeat the content that is already available in Google searches. If a consumer can find the same topic and the same angle on a blog post through Google search, why would the audience need to visit your website?

Most content on the web is just information that’s reformatted with keyword stuffing, unnecessary links, and ads and that’s where the interest is lost. We are not recommending you to invent something new but refrain from using the same top 10 tips that everyone has already been talking about.

2. Excessive Use of Product Name

Some website owners tend to write their product name over and over in an attempt to register it in the minds of the consumer. However, more mentions of the product in a small piece of content weaken the overall readability of the piece. Consumers tend to view it as forced promotion and you lose their interest.

3. More Focus on We

Content today is over-emphasizing on the brand and company itself. Statements that position the brand before the customer appears as excessive bragging leading to a frustrated reader. Try and eliminate the ‘I’ and ‘We’ from your marketing material.

4. Need to Upgrade

Website content may seem outstanding at the time of development. However, with changing market dynamics, innovations in technology, and new research, it is important that you update the obsolete information. Content must regularly be made fresh and relevant.

5. Eliminate the Obvious

Writing something that is obvious and the target audience is already aware of is an act that makes your content weak. Nobody will spend time reading your content if you say exercising regularly is important to lose weight or cutting down on your expenses can help to save money. Get rid of such obvious facts and bring in content that is advantageous for the readers.

6. Long Introductions

Some blogs start with an introduction to the topic that lasts around two paragraphs before the actual answer begins. This is more like the filler and can be avoided. If you skip these paragraphs and get to the most important information, it will help to keep the reader glued to your webpage.

7. Engage

Your topic may not be interesting but the way you write the content must be. It must have emotion, enthusiasm, a story, or a voice that adds a humanistic appeal to your content. Readers will only convert if they get excited after reading your content.

8. Monotonous

Long-form content is suitable for research papers and dissertations. Your website content must have a combination of video, text, images, music, and other elements that can break the monotony and keep the target audience interested.

9. Every Article is a Listicle

You must have come across articles like ’10 ways to lose weight’, ‘5 tips to grow your hair long’ etc. While these were a trend as finding information through a listicle was easier, avoid getting obsessed with it. Every article that you post must not be in the form of a listicle.

You need to provide the reader with a mix of educational, concise, precise, and appropriate information that helps them enhance their knowledge.

10. Misleading Content

Some webpages do not deliver the content that it promises in the title. If that is the case, your reader would just be deflected from your website and would not want to come back for any kind of further information.

11. False Information

There isn’t anything worse than providing wrong information. Google allows every reader to cross-check what has been mentioned by you and if you have written something incorrectly, it will completely kill your content and your website.

12. Lack of Appropriate Sources

An important aspect that most marketers ignore is to cite appropriate references and sources. Data used from trusted sources instead of editorializing helps to establish credibility. Credibility then leads to trust and it results in loyal customers.

13. Track the Length

Several discussions and forums have been created on the appropriate length of a webpage. There have been conclusions in favor of a 500-word post as well as a 1500-word post stating that they both can keep the reader interested as long as the content fulfills its purpose.

Content must value the time a reader is spending on the blog and therefore provide information that is worthwhile.

14. Relevancy

Every word on your website must be relevant to your brand, its products, and services. Bad content is irrelevant and customers are just not interested in reading it. If your content does not answer the real question and does not entertain, it will just fail.

15. Negativity

While stating the neutral facts related to your industry is good, putting your competitors in a negative light is not suggested. If you try to pull your competition down, they will try to do the same.

The outcome then would not be loyal customers but a battle between you and your competition resulting in continuous judgment by your target audience.

16. Fluff

Sometimes website owners add extra words to their content just to match with the design of the webpage and satisfy Google. However, these extra words can be noticed as fluff by the reader and tend to give a bad audience experience.

17. Selection of Words

Words used on the website must be compelling enough. Flowery words don’t always do the task and therefore, words selected must complement the goal of the content and must clearly convey the objective to the target audience.

18. Too Long, Too Boring

Most readers tend to exit the page if it has around 5000 words written on it. This is because they don’t have the time to read through the entire thing even if it provides the most factual, accurate, and relevant information.

It is therefore important to wisely break down the information into something that can be read easily and quickly. The same goes for large volumes of images and long videos.

19. Routine SEO

Sometimes content is just written to tick off the requirement in the SEO plan. Such a piece can easily be recognized and will fail at attracting organic traffic.

20. Not Mobile Friendly

The use of smartphones to access websites has increased tremendously. This means that your content must be mobile-friendly. The font and alignment must be such that readers can easily view it without having to zoom in or scroll left and right.

Takeaway

With the website content mistakes mentioned above, you may have realized what you need to fix. So, get going and make your content perfect so that viewers actually read what you want to say and then transform into customers.

How to Implement a Successful Personalized Marketing Strategy

Posted on March 1, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

If you have purchased products from Amazon or Flipkart, you will be able to see the amazing effects of personalized experience.

You will be able to see a list of suggestions based on your search history. Also, most probably you will receive a follow up email which contains similar collection of books based on your recent purchase.

We will not be surprised to see if you return to purchase more; it is because they are based upon your likes and interests.

This is why most of the marketers believe that personalized marketing campaigns are crucial for the success for their business.

If you wish that your customers want to come back for more purchases, you need to provide them with personalized experience that matches their wants and needs.

This means that more visits equal to more leads and more leads equal to more happy customers. Let’s take a look at how to implement a personalized marketing strategy:

1. Review your strategy

Before you execute your marketing strategy, think about the following questions to perceive how your organization can handle the strategy implementation:

What brand value I would like to offer my customers?
What kind of customer trends should I enable for e.g., repeated customer visits, increased trust, lot of purchases etc.?
What are the marketing resources that we have/can create which may change one strategy over another?
How much time does the plan need – whether short term/long term requirement?
Do I actually have enough resources such as people, tools, time etc. to achieve success?

2. Research and Analyze your audience

When you are done with planning your strategy, it’s time to gather some information about your audience and you will be able to use that for your marketing program. These are the ways you can research about your audience:

Surveys
Questionnaires
Discussion groups
Feedback via website or email
Social media platforms

Try to collect maximum amount of information from your potential prospects or customers. One or two queries might be enough rather than a drawn-out survey.

3. Choose right marketing tactics

Choosing the right marketing tactics is very crucial in the process of personalizing marketing strategy. Here are some of the marketing strategies to choose from:

Send emails from humans, don’t sound like a brand

Email is one among the simplest ways to create a personalized experience for your prospects. Rather than having the sender name as company’s name, create it from the name of an actual agent working on your promoting or marketing team.

Also, think about adding that agent’s photograph and his/her’s email signature to the body of the email to indicate that actually that agent took their time and energy to craft the message and can get some responses.

Even if you employ email templates, guarantee that they don’t appear as if they have been designed by a promoting/marketing machine. It is because you want to sound credible in your emails.

Use recipient’s name for emails

Writing “Dear Customer,” “Hi Customer,” “To [First Name]” etc. are all not at all preferred for your email communication with your prospects.

A lead’s real name is one among the best items of lead intelligence to assemble. If a prospect has filled out a form at any point of time, you can easily get their first name and email address.

If not, most likely you should not be emailing them. Most of the email service providers give you the opportunity to customize the email messages with recipient’s forename; so what’s more to think? Take advantage of it!

Make use of marketing automation tools

Based on content interest, automation tools will be able to trigger lead nurturing campaigns. While you will address completely different business problems and topics inside your content, that does not mean that each one of the prospects have an interest in all told topics.

If a prospect downloads an e-book targeted on specific topic, for instance, program your automation tools to automatically enter them into a lead nurturing campaign which will deliver content relevant to the initial topic and personalizes email messages based on supported data of that original content which was downloaded.

Segment email database by marketing persona

There are number of ways to segment email database; but the most effective and easiest way is by marketing persona. For example, if you have classified three separate marketing personas that combine your ideal customers, segment your email list into three different blocks.

Then, personalize the messaging used in independent emails sent to each blocks using the language that individual persona always uses and responds to.

Focus on creating persona driven content

Persona driven content is a key factor to consider when you begin with the process of personalization. Produce new content or modify the existing one to handle the exact needs and problems of your varied marketing personas.

Contemplate the very fact that one persona might have issues that the other persona doesn’t have. When you prepare a non personalized campaign, your one-size-fits-all content policy won’t fit with the particular problem of persona, which will be a drawback.

However, with a personalized approach that is targeted at a selected group of prospects, you will be able to address that drawback and make more customized and valuable content for those potential prospects.

Respond personally to customers on social media

Nowadays customers depend upon social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google + to research about the products and to make buying decisions.

It may appear to be an easy task to assign a real person to respond to customer queries on social media; however, several companies choose to automate it.

You need to check your social media activity on a daily basis and respond to them in a personal manner which provides suitable and rightful content that can address each persona’s needs.

Generate targeted landing pages

If you lack the bandwith to create content targeted for each of your personas, you have an option to create targeted landing pages for your different offers.

Make sure to customize the messaging and language on your targeted landing pages to handle the precise needs of particular segment, and do that for every phase.

Build targeted company’s product page variations on LinkedIn

LinkedIn company pages provides amazing targeting tool that permits you to personalize the products or services that a visitor sees on your product page in LinkedIn.

You will be able to target based on demographic info such as trade, job function and geographic area.

Use Google + topic circles to target content

Google + topic circles is another way of using social media platforms to supply a lot of personalized content distribution. By using Google + Circles, you will be able to create many totally different topic circles depending upon the different interests of your targeted page followers.

The next step is to poll your followers, raise that Circles they would wish to be side to, and simply distribute only targeted content to those Circles. This offers an individuality and personalization.

Lead intelligence to help in personalizing sales follow up

Lead intelligence or knowledge you gather concerning your leads/prospects consists of demographic data, customer behaviour on your website etc. which can be very useful as you outline segments of your business’ client personas.

However, it may also function as a robust lever to assist your sales team to personalize their sales pitches and perceive the wants of a lead before they even pick up the phone to dial the prospect. A well prepared sales agent can close the deal in no time.

4. Regularly update and refine personalization process

Like all other methods, personalized marketing process needs constants review and improvement to make sure of 100% effectiveness. The best way is that let the campaigns run for some weeks and then evaluate the results.

By this way, your team will be able to get a correct impression of exact progress over time, instead of getting a quick picture of how your personalization process is advancing.

It is also crucial to re-check all of your technological integrations to make sure that you have got access to holistic image of information.

During the refinement phase, marketers may take a step back and judge certain strategies or aspects of their personalized marketing campaign.

Let’s see how incorporating personalized marketing campaigns can be beneficial for your business:

1.A large compilation of client data: Personalization methods track the habits and activities of potential prospects; which in turn provides marketers with valuable knowledge that may not be available with conventional marketing campaigns.

If you are passing your leads to sales team, they will get a better clarity of whom they are merchandising and how the products/services matches with the client’s needs.

2.Loyal brand followers: Once customers feel that their needs are fulfilled and a company actually takes care of them, it is doubtless that they will definitely come back to the company in future to shop additional services or products.

3.Valuable business insights: Data gained from trailing customers will assist you in confirming what works and what doesn’t work in regard to marketing tactics and messages.

Takeaway

It is evident that customers prefer to buy more from retailers who can personalize their shopping experience across various channels.

Don’t be too late if you haven’t started implementing personalization strategies listed above. Companies who can successfully implement personalized marketing experiences will be able to witness an increase in sales and customer loyalty.

11 Examples of Successful Content Marketing by Travel Companies

Posted on February 28, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

Travel & Tourism is one of the most exciting industries to work for. With a gross booking of $1.6 trillion in 2017, global travel industry is one of fastest growing sectors. Increased connectivity and technology are only going to make it easier for travellers to explore the world.

Today, travellers make their own booking after extensive research on the internet. 97% of millennials share their travel experience on social media. Hence, there is tremendous scope for digital marketers in the travel space.

Right from dreaming of a destination to booking accommodation, travellers search for information in all stages of their planning. Because of this, online marketing success for travel companies is largely dependent on providing the right content at the right time.

These 11 companies used content strategy to inform and help travellers in various stages of their search and saw phenomenal success in booking revenue.

#1 TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor is a giant in travel industry with more than 300 million unique visitors every month. TripAdvisor originally hired content curators to develop content for the website but soon saw that user generated reviews were attracting more traffic.

The site encouraged user content and has been known for helpful posts by real travellers ever since. In fact user generated content is the main contributor in the site’s rise to number on travel accommodation site.

TripAdvisor has proved that user generated content can be a solid content strategy. It is not only a credible form of content but also self-sustaining requiring minimum work from TripAdvisor.

#2 Mr. and Mrs Smith

Mr. and Mrs. Smith operate in luxury segment for couples. This is an example of business that had its target niche carved out right from the beginning.

This is also the reason for inspirational content on their website. From content on northern lights to feature on stylish boutique hotels, their site is enough to make you pack your bags right now!

They have also used content to position their brand as a mix of luxurious and quirky. Speaking on their brand, founder James Tamara said “We wanted something playful and a little bit mischievous, because a sense of humor is an important part of who we are.” The brand has reached enviable position since its inception in 2003.

#3 AirBnB Guidebooks

AirBnB is the star child of both travel and tech industry. They rely heavily on content by local guides and hosts to provide value to users.

The app and websites gives travelers an inside scoop on local experience and events.
AirBnB has also used helpful guidebooks to share information with travelers looking for in-depth information.

Every local host could post a guide meaning that there is tons of information available on AirBnB app or website.

#4 SNCF Europe

SNCF, France’s state owned railway company, combined experiential marketing with video content. They placed doorways in the middle of busy cities that opened into LED screens displaying live feed from other cities. Here is a video of the campaign that went viral.

The video got millions in views and the campaign titled ‘Europe: It’s just next door’ saw massive publicity for the brand.

#5 Four Seasons

The fiercely competitive travel industry keeps all players on their toes. The Canadian hospitality giant Four Seasons is known for its successful content marketing strategy in travel space.

The hotel chain has taken on a role of travel content media house by producing upto 3400 content per week across 400 distribution channels.

They have a comprehensive content strategy and leverage real stories, attractive visuals and quality content to engage with customers.

The phenomenal success of their content marketing has led to more than 2 million weekly impressions across all channels.

#6 Bonvoy Adventure

Bonvoy Adventure implemented their SEO and link-building strategy to draw traffic to their website. They did this by inviting guest posts which earned them credible referral links.

With a deeper understanding of their target audience they were able to provide better content and leverage it for their existing email marketing channel. They also did a page by page audit to improve their SEO signals and rank higher results.

The result was a 148% increase in website traffic and 200% increase in onsite transactions.

#7 Kimkim

Kimkim helps travellers to plan itineraries. A well thought content strategy is how they were able to grow their organic search by 300% !

Their strategy was to partner with local travel specialist to come up with their exciting profile snapshot and blog content. This way they could also focus on long-tail keywords that travellers were searching for.

Targeted content along with link building and PR grew Kimkim’s traffic massively within 4 months.

#8 Tenon Tours

Tenon Tours has successfully implemented the inbound marketing funnel to increase their conversions. They concentrated on converting visitors to leads and leads to customer by applying sound principles of inbound marketing.

Of course the foundation of any inbound marketing is great content. For this, Tenon re-purposed their best performing content in the form of guidebook and used it as a lead magnet to build a list. They were able to increase their conversion rate by 34% after nurturing leads through email channel.

#9 Shorefield

This is a great example of how targeting can help your company to go to the next level. Shorefield had luxurious properties across UK as well as fair amount of traffic to their site.

However, operating in the luxury market, it was important that they had the right kind of visitors on their site.
Plagued with irrelevant traffic, the company decided to invest in SEO. With focus on buyer personas and long tail keywords the site increased its organic conversion rate by 86%.

#10 Intrepid

Intrepid is an Australian travel company with strong brand values. As the name suggests they target travellers who are adventure loving, fearless and looking for new experiences.

Having figured out their target market, implementing on content strategy was much easier for them. They started with their content website – The Journal which focuses on responsible travelling and off beat experiences.

With a targeted content, the company has successfully built a following of travellers who are aligned with the brand’s value. They have more than 496 K followers on Facebook, 86,000 followers on Twitter and are steadily growing their YouTube channel too.

#11 Trivago

Here is another example of a company who has invested in a long form regular content in the travel industry. Trivago has a digital magazine called ChekIn.

An interesting point to note in CheckIn is that Trivago is extremely cautious about promoting itself in unrelated articles. The magazine is genuinely helpful mix of articles and videos that are meant to inspire and inform travellers.

Takeaway

There are a lot of content opportunities in travel marketing to play around with. The rising popularity of visual content is good news for travel industry that uses videos and images extensively.

Today’s independent traveller is starving for information and sound advice on new destinations. The examples in this blog prove that knowing your target audience and providing them with required content can take your brand to a whole new level.

How to Host Webinars to Increase Conversions

Posted on February 12, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

Deciding on the format of content is one of the key aspects of content marketing. There are many formats that your content can take.

This includes blog posts, podcasts, video, e-book, webinars, etc. How do you know which one is best suited for you?

Well the best format depends on your target audience and the stage of buyer’s journey they are in. Webinar is known to give great results in converting leads to customers.

According to Content Marketing Institute, over 60% of marketers are using webinars as a part of their content marketing programs. In this blog we will talk about webinars and how you can use them to convert more customers

What is a Webinar?

Webinar is just like a seminar event except that it is conducted online. It is a presentation that is done live for the people who sign up for it.

Presenter and attendees are also able to communicate through live chat.

What makes a webinar unique is:

It gives a personal touch
It gives you more focused attention as it is live
It gives you more time. A typical webinar is between 45 mins to 2 hours
t gives you a chance to resolve objections in real time
It builds relation through a two way communication
You can reach anyone across the globeYou can see that a webinar keeps your audience more involved than a blog or video post. It is the closest to meeting to your leads face to face.

What are the conversion rates for Webinars?

For this reason webinars also have a high conversion rate. Whereas email marketing has a conversion rate of 3-5%, most webinars convert between 10- 20% of attendees down the line..

Companies like Adobe, Buzzsumo and KISSmetrics have confirmed above 20% conversion rates through webinars.

How to Use Webinars in Your Marketing Funnel?

Webinars can be used at two stages in a digital marketing funnel. Firstly, they can be used to connect with your visitors.

Webinars can even be used as lead magnets to convert visitors into leads.

Secondly, they are especially effective in the conversion stage, the last stage of marketing funnel.

Someone attending your webinar has set aside an hour for you, which means that they trust you to deliver value.

Most of the webinar attendees are hence qualified leads that are ready to buy.

How do I host a Webinar?

Hosting a webinar is not difficult. There are many webinar software that are user friendly and intuitive.
Here are the steps to follow to host a webinar:

1. Decide on the Topic and Presenter- Pick a burning question that your readers have or a pain point they face in their lives. A headline that speaks out to the visitor is half the job done.

2. Make your presentation – Make you presentation ready. A BIG mistake for any marketer would be treat your webinar as a sales pitch. A webinar is first and foremost a valuable training session for your attendees.

Remember they signed up to learn what you promised in the title, not to buy your products and service. Make sure you are giving tons of value in return of one hour that they have allotted to you.

3. Choose webinar software – There are many options to host your webinar like Webinars on Air by Google, Go to Webinar, Cisco WebX, Mega Meeting etc.

Go to Webinar is the most popular one with impressive features and reasonable pricing. It has a free 7 day trial and a monthly fee of $79 after that.

The software is easy to use with intuitive design. They allow you to share your screen with attendees, set up email notifications and reminders, take polls and surveys, chat with attendees and view webinar dashboard.

Practice a mock presentation a few times for successful live webinar.

4. Promote Webinar- Start promoting your webinar on social media, web-site pop-ups, email lists and any other channels you may have to reach your audience.

Make sure your topic matches your audience’s requirement. For example, a high school student is more likely to sign up than an undergrad for a webinar on ‘How to prepare for SAT Entrance’.

5. Host Webinar and Follow up- Use the tips shared below to host your webinar. Most of the attendees don’t sign up immediately but do end up buying up from you eventually.

Add the attendees to your email marketing list and follow up with your offer within 48 hours. Nurture these leads over time by sending webinar recording and other valuable content.

Tips to Host a Successful Webinar

Be well rehearsed

If you are a B2B company share your company story along with your personal story too.

Learn all the functions of webinar software and make sure you know how to get over technical setbacks even if they occur. Being well rehearsed will also make you sound confident.

Arrive before time

Arrive at least half an hour before the scheduled time. This will give you time to check if everything is working.

It is also a good opportunity to strike up a conversation with people have arrived early and are eager to start. Ask them about their expectation from the webinar.

Keep it interactive

The beauty of a webinar is that you can get direct live feedback from your attendees. Keep your webinar interactive by asking questions and also receiving questions.

Keep moderators on your team who will answer questions in chats and keep everyone engaged. Take names of people who are responding, mention geographies from where people are logged in. All this will make attendees feel connected and part of a live event.

Bring your personality

An event is way to know each other personally. So share your story and connect with your audience.

Tell them how you landed up here and highlight the similarities between you and your audience.

If you are a B2B company share your company story along with your personal story too.

Keep it Light

One hour is a long time to ask for focused attention from your audience. If your presentation is long and boring they will either exit or drift off.

So keep your webinar light and entertaining. Use a lot of stories, short videos, jokes and real life examples.

There will be parts where you will be giving heavy information, but make sure you prepare your audience and spread out the heavy material throughout the presentation.

The rule of thumb is to keep no more than three slides of heavy concepts.

Final Notes

Hosting your first webinar may seem like a difficult job. However, it is easy once you get used to it. With a conversion rate of 20% you are sure to do more of them once you get started.

What Content Marketers can do differently in 2018

Posted on February 9, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

Content marketing has emerged as the top marketing activity today. Every business is bullish on content marketing and is investing even more into it this year.

Here is the result of survey conducted by Smart Insights asking 850 marketers to pick the most important marketing activity.

Image Credits

As you can see all marketers are aggressive on content marketing. This has increased the competition marketers face despite great content.

In this blog we will discuss what you can do differently this year to stand out and pull more traffic through your content.

• Long form in-depth Content

There was a time when a decent quality 650 word blog post had a chance to rank on page one on Google. This is not the case now. Ranking high on Google requires quality backlinks, domain authority, time and so much more.

When it comes to blogs, think of long form anchor posts of 1500 to 2500 words. These should be like a helpful guide covering A to Z of your industry or topic.

Anchor posts are blog posts that are the pillar of your site and pull in tons of traffic consistently. Do not expect to get traffic within a month.

It is typical to see your traffic rising after 6 months of posting. Do everything to make your content really helpful for your audience. Use infographics and videos to explain concepts.

Any content which does not make your reader say ‘ Wow! That was helpful’ has little chance to rank in top three searches. This is how you can differentiate your content and rank higher on Google in 2018

• Go niche

Differentiating your content in an already overcrowded web can be challenging. In any industry there will be in- depth blog posts that have been on the web for five years or more.

How can you possibly compete with those pieces? The answer lies in narrowing the focus of your content.

Write about nutrition for dancers instead of writing on general nutrition. Focus on long tail-keywords that will have less competition.

For example, instead of writing on ‘ladies shoes’, focus on ‘office shoes for working moms’. This way you will not only rank higher on search engines but will also attract highly targeted visitors that are easier to convert.

• Semantic Search

Google no more relies on just keywords to rank results. It uses something known as semantic search.
Semantic search takes into account the intent of the searcher.

This means weighing in the context, location, searcher history, language style and device.

That means Google now understands that a user typing in ‘green dress online’ is more likely to purchase the dress online than if she had typed ‘green dresses’.

For marketers this means that they have to be more aware of the context of searchers and conditions under which they are searching. Content should now match situations instead of just keywords.

• Target Google Featured Snippets

There is something better than position one on Google search. It’s position 0 .
You may have noticed that Google also gives the answer to your queries in a highlighted search box above all search results.

This gives the searchers the answers at a glance without having to go to another page.

Ranking in featured snippets increases your traffic and decreases bounce rates. The great news is that you don’t even have to rank number one on Google to be able to feature in rich snippet.

To increase your chances to be featured in a rich snippet make sure your content:

Has a structured format with sub-headings
Keep your answers to the point, short and snappy
Mark up your article with structured data
Answer popular questions asked

• Explore other formats of Content

Audio podcasts have made a big comeback last year. There are more than 42 million people who listen to podcasts weekly in the US alone.

‘How to’ searches on YouTube have gone up by 70% in 2017. YouTube is also the second most popular search engine after Google.

The trend is clear. Users prefer video and audio form of content and marketers must produce this if they want to reach their audience.

Bringing it all together

Content marketing is here to stay as the most profitable channel to get leads. However, digital marketing landscape is changing continuously and marketers must concentrate on long-form quality content and niche topics to stay at the top.

Understanding Google’s semantic search and featured snippets will help to reach more audience. Lastly, experimenting with fresher format of content such as podcasts and videos will differentiate you from the other content.

Above all, it is important to keep experimenting in digital marketing. New trends emerge quickly and demand agility from content marketers.

Why Marketers Should Have a Content Plan for Social Media

Posted on January 26, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

Do you have a social media strategy prepared?

Do you know what to tweet, share on Facebook and write as your blog posts?

If you answered a yes, great! You are on the right track. If you answered a no, you’re just like the others in the market.

Marketers understand the importance of social media but don’t generally know how successful their campaigns are. They don’t focus on the content and cannot figure out what must be posted when.

If you’re also sailing in the same boat, here are a few questions that you need to ask yourself:

Do I have my existing and prospective customers here with me?
Is my post of any benefit to the consumers?

There are some other questions to ask as well but if you didn’t have the right answers to the above questions, you need a content plan.

Let us go through some of the key reasons to understand why creating a content plan for social media is so important:

1. Gives you a direction

Writing, posting, sharing – these actions become redundant if you don’t have a content plan in place. You must have clearly defined goals along with pre-decided metrics for success. You must know how and where you need to communicate with your target audience and what is it that they are expecting from you. A content plan adds a sense of purpose to your business and at the same time gives you a blueprint for the journey to your final destination.

2. Have a better sense of the target audience’s needs

If you have a content plan, you will know how to target the right audience with the right services. In the absence of a plan, customer demand for online services can be incorrectly evaluated.

3. Develops Opportunities for Conversations

A content plan helps you measure the success of your conversations. You know what works and what doesn’t with your audience. Social media platforms help you engage with the end consumer and if you are doing correctly with an appropriate content plan, you will notice an increased social media ROI.

4. Helps with Integration

A social media content plan enables everyone in the team and organization to remain integrated. All employees know what communication must be made with the target audience and there are clearly defined goals for everything.

5. Scope of New Strategies

If you are aware of your content plan and its ROI in terms of the metrics you set, you have the option of tweaking it to make it work. Without a concrete plan, knowing what works and what doesn’t is challenging.

Social media changes regularly. This means that you must also change with it. However, this change must be planned according to the current strategy. You must adapt to the changes introduced by the different social media platforms.

6. Identify your Audience’s language

If you keep tweeting without a specific content plan, you would be talking about anything and everything without knowing what your audience is searching for. It is important that you have a well-defined voice and use it when you are sharing content.

7. Eliminate the Guess Work

Once your content plan is ready, you know where your efforts need to be invested. You know how your content functions and are not wasting any time finding what you need to post. Social media platforms are time sensitive and if you are ready in advance, you are ready to make the most of this marketing tool.

8. Increased traffic

Website traffic is an important KPI for every business organization. Well planned and well placed social media updates attract more engagement, thereby generating higher click-through rates and leads for conversions.

9. Better Engaged Visitors

There are options to buy followers and traffic on social media. However, with a solid content plan, you can engage with your target audience realistically. The quantity of followers, clicks, and traffic does matter but the quality must be your focus.

10. Improved Customer Retention

Your bounce rate will start to lessen if your social media campaigns are being executed effectively. This means that you are reaching out to the right audience with the right information, and they are appreciative of the content you are providing.

Remember, social media does not have any magic formula. You need to understand what works for your business and what does not and this can only be done by devising a social media strategy and content plan.