Nearly half of millennials (43 percent) have been misled by medical information on the internet. A recent Harris Poll found that people tend to click the first article that comes up in a search, even though such articles are often advertising content aimed at selling medicine or medical devices.
When people aren't searching, they are often coming across such misleading content via social media. Of the 20 most-shared articles about cancer on Facebook last year, over half, according to The Independent, contained claims discredited by doctors and health authorities. How does this misinformation make its way into widely circulated articles?
Often, it is there on purpose: Content marketing -- corporate advertising disguised as articles, videos and information -- is being systematically manufactured on an industrial scale....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Spin is spin, even when it is written by journalists. Tamara Pearson takes a look at fake content marketing.
As the father of an 8-year-old boy, most of my disposable income is tied up in little plastic bricks. In my house, you’ll find thousands of them in bins, several elaborate sets on display, and a distressing number of the (razor-sharp) things underfoot.
I’m not complaining, really. I have as much fun building with them as he does. And as a marketer, having Lego around is a good reminder of the value of content marketing. Great content can drive marketing goals while providing something of real value to its target audience: The Lego Movie was a 90-minute commercial for Lego, but it was also entertaining and heartfelt. I laughed, I cried, I bought $100 worth of tie-in toys… everybody won.
Your B2B offering may not have that Lego coolness factor. The Industrial Turbine Movie is unlikely to score with critics or with audiences. But content can still help you build your business.
If you’re just getting started with content marketing, start with this guide to content marketing strategy. Then use the following tips as an advanced class to make your content even more valuable to your audience. And, most importantly, to connect that audience to your business goals....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Get more mileage out of your B2B content marketing efforts with these 11 tips: Consistently deliver quality content that encourages readers to take action.
When it comes to innovation, being first isn’t a prerequisite for being the best. This seems to be the guiding principle behind the recent introduction of LinkedIn video, the business-oriented social media giant’s first attempt at incorporating native video content into its extensive range of benefits and features.
As practically the last among the largest and most popular social media platforms to add a native video feature, all eyes are on LinkedIn, as users eagerly anticipate how this new feature will change the way they maximize their presence on the site. Initially tested among select users in the United States, LinkedIn video is scheduled to be launched to all LinkedIn users within the next few months.
LinkedIn video offers all sorts of new possibilities to its tremendous user base of professionals, social sellers and marketers. Now, LinkedIn users can upload and share videos directly from their mobile phones, allowing their network to enjoy unique and original video content that’s relevant to their industry and more importantly, is of interest to their target market....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Melonie Dodaro shares the lowdown on LinkedIn’s newest feature, LinkedIn video, and how you can use it to give your social selling efforts a welcome boost.
Going viral is the elusive, holy grail of content creation. You put hard work into a story, video, or epic meme, and hope that the internet masses will appreciate your work for the masterpiece it is.As we all know, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Is there a way to simply just, go viral? We wanted to figure it out.
First, where do we have the biggest chances of going viral? Facebook is a live wire for your content to reach levels of virality. Of course, there are ways to go viral on Twitter, Youtube, Instagram and the like as well. But Facebook offers an enormous audience and with its friends and family algorithm, you’re more likely to reach more and more people as your audience starts sharing.
Consider the Dodo, LittleThings, NowThis, and of course, Chewbacca Mom. Their success is rooted in Facebook’s snowball effect....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
What are the secrets to going viral? Newswhip shares how to predict the top stories, outshine your competition, and learn your audience inside and out.
As part of our previous social media strategy, our posts were connected to lead generation goals -- and most had a strong tie to our brand and promoting our content. Now, our content is all about our audience -- and not all about us. We needed to refocus and remember that our audience members are people, just like us. If we wouldn’t want to see a piece of content in our Facebook News Feeds, why would our audience? We wanted to test the effect of focusing our content on our audience -- what they want to learn about, what their goals are, and even what struggles they face.
In short, we wanted to be more social, and less promotional.
This doesn't mean we recommend doing away with sharing blog content or ebooks on social media entirely. After all, it's hard to come up with new ideas for creating social media videos to share every day of the week. We're just saying you shouldn't post a link to a blog post or ebook on Facebook and call it a day. Instead, get inspired by the ideas and salient points, and repurpose your content into Facebook videos, Instagram albums, or Snapchat Stories. You can still use the good ideas -- but use them to create native social media content that performs better for the medium.
If your current social media strategy sounds like our previous, all-about-us approach, don't worry -- read on to learn how we've changed things up.
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Facebook has powered more than 1 million video views for HubSpot and here's how they did it.
For small businesses looking to keep up with bigger players in their industries, tools have emerged to level the playing field, allowing those of us looking to make our voices heard of expanding our reach.
From ideation and promotion to tools that help your content truly stand out from the noise, consider how the following platforms can serve to help you reach your content marketing goals – whatever they may be....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
These tools will get your content marketing rocking.
All over the world, brands are united by the same goal: to generate unique content that their customers can relate to, and thus, help them earn better business outcomes. They spend infinite time, money and resources on this objective, and develop complex buyer personas to help them achieve optimal results.
However, intangible questions remain, including what are the basic pillars of content marketing? How do brands create compelling content that can be used to attract customers and ultimately boost sales? What is the secret to a truly successful content marketing strategy?
These questions may be intangible but they are still ones that every content marketer today should ask and strive to find answers to.
Strap yourself in to learn my 12 simple rules for successful content marketing.
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Jeff Bullas has 12 tips for content marketing success.
This short video was produced to show how quick and easy it is to produce a video from an existing blog post using the free Lumen 5 video tool.
Lumen 5 is an AI-powered video creation platform that turns blog posts into engaging videos. Using the tool is easy, intuitive and surprisingly fast. After producing a few Lumen 5 videos, I expect you could create one in as little as 10 minutes from existing content like a blog post. You can see my original blog post here http://bit.ly/LaoTzu8 to compare it with the video produced so effortlessly.
The creative and marketing possibilities are very intriguing and so far Lumen 5 is free although it may offer more features for a price in the future. For now, it's an interesting tool to explore.
Businesses, bloggers, trainers, authors and really anyone can use it to produce social content to drive audience engagement online. Great thing is you can focus on your message, visuals and creativity without having to touch the technology.
You can get more info and demos for the app at www.lumen5.com.
Jeff Domansky's insight:
With Lumen 5, producing video content for social media is simple, easy, intuitive and fast. My demo was taken from an older blog post about writing for the internet. Lots of potential for this tool.
With Lumen 5, producing video content for social media is simple, easy intuitive and fast. My demo was taken from an older blog post about writing for the internet. Lots of potential for this tool.
Most of us try to find the Google answers to at least 3 – 4 questions on a daily basis. Considering this, the apps or websites which host content about which people ask questions are bound to have huge traffic rates.
Wouldn’t you want your website or app to be one of the most talked-about ones? Wouldn’t you want to put up content which prompts user discussions and helps keep you in the news?
Finding content ideas that trigger user interaction to bring about a real change in your field of work is a very challenging task. All the more if you need to put up such content on a regular basis.
What would help would be a way in which you could find what makes users tick every now and then. What are things people like talking or asking questions about? Bloomberry is a unique online tool that lets you find out just that....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Bloomberry is a must-have, free-for-now (beta testing) research tool perfect for PR, marketers, bloggers and content producers. Read a great description of how it works and how to use it. Recommended reading! 10/10
Bloomberry is a must-have, free-for-now (beta testing) research tool perfect for PR, marketers, bloggers and content producers. Read a great description of how it works and how to use it. Recommended reading! 10/10
Bloomberry is a must-have, free-for-now (beta testing) research tool perfect for PR, marketers, bloggers and content producers. Read a great description of how it works and how to use it. Recommended reading! 10/10
An Accenture study from this year showed that 81 percent of consumers report wanting brands to get to know them and understand when to approach them, as well as when not to. And, for those more interested in ROI, technology market research giant Gartner predicted last year that “by 2020, smart personalization engines used to recognize customer intent will enable digital businesses to increase their profits up to 15 percent.”
Here’s a look at a few brands who are doing everything right – whether they’re working with robots and tech, human beings, or both....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Personalization works and these four examples show how.
The greatest accomplishment of my professional life is owning the top three results on Google for “content marketing buzzwords.”
We did it, guys. You, me—all of us, really, for saying horrible, nonsensical things every day. We are mad men and women, speaking in an indecipherable tongue, cruelly confusing our nana at Rosh Hashanah, who heard CPC as PCP and got excited. Let’s get to it....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Gamification? Newsjacking? Micro-moments? Business lingo is truly a horrible language, and these content marketing buzzwords are the worst of the worst. Thanks for sharing, Contently.
Both the younger and older groups were considerably more likely to say they were spending more time streaming full-length TV shows and movies, and similar percentages said they were spending more time with short online video.
But the amplified video viewing didn’t necessarily mean they were watching less TV. Among the younger group, 40% said they were watching the same amount of TV as last year, while 35% said they were watching at least a bit less and 25% were watching at least a bit more. The older users (ages 18 to 34) were more likely to say they were watching more TV.
The study found that younger internet users are shifting away from text-based types like blogs and publisher sites....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Marketers new challenge: Gen Z is shifting away from blogs and publisher sites.
Since our first reader in August of 2014, we’ve steadily increased our traffic, and we're now consistently drawing 5,000 plus readers per month to our blog. Our traffic is increasing at a growing rate, and we're optimistic about doubling or tripling our traffic in the upcoming year.
If you're a small company like ours — under 20 employees — you're probably wondering how we can consistently publish over 100 quality blog posts annually in addition to getting our “day jobs” done. The answer is in our process.
There are five important steps that make up our process, and each is critical in helping us accomplish our goal of publishing 100 high quality new blog posts annually. These steps use the HubSpot blogging and social tools....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
The story of how one HubSpot user built a strategy of publishing high-quality articles to increase their website traffic by 300%.
Maintaining a publication schedule, preparing an annual calendar and planning topics for the whole year will help publish a significant number of blog posts in a year. I guess we could also use artificial intelligence to narrow down on topics that are most likely to be of significance in the coming year!
Business-to-business companies in industries of all kinds are increasingly seeing the impact of successful content marketing campaigns, with those campaigns even becoming the norm for gaining viable leads and converting them to customers.
A recent study by The Content Marketing Institute found that nearly 90% of B2B marketers are now using content marketing as a core component of their online marketing strategy. And 52% of companies not currently using content marketing say they will launch a new campaign within the next 12 months—meaning, by the end of 2017, over 95% of B2B marketers will be utilizing content marketing.
How can your company compete in this highly competitive new approach to gaining customers and keep from being left in the dust? Read our 10 trends for 2018 to get ahead of your competitors and begin implementing strategies others will be catching up to next year....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
The stats are powerful and positive for content marketing ROI.
In January, I wrote a post called Content Shock which explained that we are entering a new phase in the evolution of content-based marketing. There are primarily two dynamics driving this change:
The amount of content on the web is literally exploding. By 2020, the amount of web-based information (most of it consumer-driven) is expected to increase by 600%. Think about that for a moment. If you can imagine the vastness of the Internet today, in six years we will have six of those.
Today an average American spends about 10 hours a day consuming content, a number that has risen steadily year by year. But there is a threshold to the amount of attention we will be able to devote to content, which will further challenge a marketer’s ability to get messages through to their audience and stakeholders.
I wrote about a third factor — the development of advanced content filters — as another emerging issue that will make it harder to get our content to emerge as the signal instead of the noise.
My conclusion was that these pressures are bound to thin the herd. Content marketing as we know it will not be a sustainable strategy for some businesses, and it will become more difficult and expensive for almost all of us.
How do we break through this information density and win in a hyper-competitive content market?...
Here are brief descriptions of 10 possible strategies to break through....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Mark Schaefer suggests 10 strategies to breakthrough content shock. Recommended reading. 9/10
Today’s audience has trouble focusing because of their hyperactive, commotion-ridden environment. Everyday, people are exposed to more webpages, TV shows, social media posts, instant gratification technologies and data.
The Attention Economy records how one Sunday New York Times edition presents more factual data than 15th century readers could access in their entire lifetimes! According to new research, social media marketers are turning to visual content to get the job done.
The power of visual content marketing isn’t a new concept. Graphic designers have always had a role to play in marketing and advertising, even on traditional media like TV and newspapers....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Check out 16 types of visual content that can ramp up your readership.
The truth about business is that no matter how great your products are, you won’t be able to sell anything if no one knows you exist.
Your business relies on marketing to guide consumers to your products.
And that’s why today, I’m going to show you what makes Facebook such a powerful tool for targeting on social media.
If you’re new to the world of social media marketing, don’t worry. I’m going to show you the step-by-step process to building and managing a Facebook Business page that will convert....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Neil Patel's tips will get your Facebook Business Page delivering traffic. Simple, clear, effective.
When starting out with a content marketing strategy, it can seem intimidating to go at it alone, especially without tools, resources, or help from a content marketing agency. I mean, would you ever throw someone into the ocean without a life jacket? Of course not. But when you task your marketing team with the challenge of creating, executing, and measuring a great content marketing strategy without the tools they need to do it well, that's basically what you're doing.
Now, you don't need to assemble a huge team to be successful in content; small content teams can still achieve impressive results. What you do need is to give your team the support, structure, and resources it needs to get the job done.
Luckily, there are tons of free tools out there to make your content marketing process a little smoother. Below, I've listed eight of my favorite free content marketing tools:...
Jeff Domansky's insight:
With the help of these tools, you'll be on your way to executing a solid plan to engage audiences and build influence -- all without spending an extra penny from your budget.
With the help of these tools, you'll be on your way to executing a solid plan to engage audiences and build influence -- all without spending an extra penny from your budget.
The efficacy of using videos in online marketing has long been known to digital marketers. Video content has come to dominate the web and, with it, the nature and focus of many a big brand’s marketing strategy. The power of video to increase the reach of businesses, build brand identity, boost social followings and secure valuable new leads is becoming plain to all and sundry.
Yet, despite this universal acclaim for video (something that can be seen through rising budget spend on video), there is still a huge amount of confusion as to exactly how it is helping businesses achieve their aims. Perhaps a lot of the confusion comes down to the slippery and often misleading nature of video marketing data and with it a difficulty in pinning down a reliable idea of ROI.
In this article for Search Engine People, I want to look at ten video marketing metrics and how they can be used to establish ROI. First though, let’s take a look at the importance of goal setting.
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Tips on how to measure your video marketing ROI from Searchenginepeople.com.
“Content needs to be highly entertaining or informative to break through the clutter in today’s media environment,” says Stacy Taffet, Senior Brand Director at PepsiCo.
That’s why the old View-Master toy now has 360-degree imagery and virtual reality capabilities. Automaker Lincoln put itself back on the map with stylish ads featuring an alluring new identity with Matthew McConaughey. And they’re not the only ones. The following old-school brands have recently made comebacks through clever, creative, and strategic content marketing....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Polaroid, Lego, and Pepsi have recently made comebacks through clever, creative, and strategic content marketing – here's a look at their tactics.
We’ve managed to outrank competitors in Google that have $9+ million in outside funding with our little self-funded, 40-person content creation agency, by an immense 3 percent. We rank organically for more than 11,000 key terms, with organic search visibility worth $57,000+ monthly.
And we haven’t paid a penny in ads — across six years — to gain the majority of our leads and clientele. They’ve come straight from these rankings.
How well do they convert? Very well.
After optimizing my strategy and increasing my content investment, we had the best sales month we’ve ever had and now my agency is on track to break our first seven figure year.
99 percent of our leads come through organic content marketing. I’ve never invested a single dollar in PPC....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
A personal how-to on content strategy from a CEO who has sold over $4 million worth of content services.
In a world where everyone seems to be constantly churning out content, you may be feel like you’re not doing enough.
However, there’s an upside and a downside to what I’m about to tell you.
The upside is: There is no universal “right amount” of content to publish. There’s no magic publishing cadence for achieving content marketing success.
Rather, the key is to figure out how much high-quality content you can produce on a regular basis – and then maximize it through your distribution channels to reach your goals.
And that’s the downside: You have to find your own best publishing cadence – based upon your goals – through testing, trial, error, and optimization....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
"How much content should I publish?" That's one of the most common questions customers ask us, and something every content marketer wonders, at some point. Here's Newscred's answer.
Content marketers seek to answer peoples’ questions. And when people have questions, they turn to Google.
Which means that our content must appear prominently in search.
As an Account Manager at NewsCred, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some of the most innovative and advanced content marketers in the business. Despite them leading the content marketing space, many still struggle to get their content in the top spaces of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), unless they invest in paid search.
The good news is that there’s a fairly untapped opportunity to rank even higher than the first result on the page: Google answer boxes....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
If you’re a content marketer, you should be talking about Google answer boxes. Here's what they are and how to optimize your content to rank in them.
Email is among the most powerful marketing channels available, but as brands work to grow their email lists, they’re finding that the most effective tactics can also be some of the most difficult to rely on.
A March 2017 survey of marketing professionals worldwide from digital marketing research firm Ascend2 showed 42% of respondents said content marketing is the most effective email list growth tactic, while 50% said it’s the toughest to execute.
But that doesn’t mean content marketing is innately challenging. Marketers may simply not have the time or manpower to work on it in-house.
In fact, according to separate data from digital asset management company Widen Enterprises, 43% of US creative and marketing professionals surveyed said that having enough bandwidth to create content is the top content marketing challenge....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
A recent survey suggests it is challenging, but it’s also one of the most effective tactics.
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Spin is spin, even when it is written by journalists. Tamara Pearson takes a look at fake content marketing.