Last week’s favourite internet marketing reads come from MOZ, Kissmetrics, Content Marketing Institute, Social Media Today, and Copyblogger.
Knowing your competitors represents a great way of identifying your own strengths and weaknesses. Optimizing for a competitor’s branded keywords may not always be worthy, but a few strategies can help you determine if that’s the case or not. If you’re taking the self-hosted content route, you need to target the right words and phrases (with a particular focus on reviews of and alternatives to their product, and less transactional), create content that provides an improved UX, and host said content in a manner that doesn’t compromise your funnel. MOZ also goes over strategies for 3rd-party hosted content and why you should consult your lawyer or legal team before targeting your competitor’s branded keywords.
Do you know all the steps of a great content strategy? Kissmetrics explains that you should start with defining your goals, and researching your audience to find out what types of sites they visit on a regular basis and the social media they enjoy sharing content on. Next, you should focus on your niche by writing unique content that stands out. After creating the content you can measure the impact using consumption metrics, social sharing metrics, lead metrics and sales metrics. Last but not least, you should pay attention to your customers’ feedback and try to amplify your content by identifying the best channels to publish it on.
Also on content strategies, Neil Patel explained on Content Marketing Institute’s blog why these fail, and why the word “strategy” should really be replaced with “goals.” It’s important to make sure that these goals are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound), meaning that you should define your content tactics and try to diversify content types, measure the ROI of content marketing, have the eventual outcome in sight, target your business goals with the content strategy, and set a timeframe for reaching the goals.
Love letters and social media content may not seem to have much in common, but Marketing Land proved quite the contrary. In “The Pursuit of Social Persuasion” (available here), social media intelligence company Wayin provides tips on how to build your social media marketing strategy, along with examples of brands that have implemented social persuasion successfully. Not at last, you can get to learn proven tactics for bringing the most persuasive user-generated content to the surface, so that your audience can buy it.
As far as user experience is concerned, Social Media Today thinks that the five alternatives to the “Like” button that Facebook has in the works could make marketing more difficult by providing more things to measure and analyze. At this point, it depends on how the social network is going to implement this, and what changes it will make to Facebook Insights .
Adding suspense to your content could make it more appealing, as long as you’re doing that properly and avoid being accused of clickbaiting. To prove this point, Copyblogger gave as example music conductor Benjamin Zander’s TED Talk from 2008 (watch it here). Zander talked about how pointless Shakespeare’s Hamlet would have been if the protagonist had killed his uncle in the first Act, and then made a parallel to Chopin’s Prelude, Op. 28, No. 4 in E Minor. Truth be told, Zander’s observation is valid not only for playwrights and composers, but also for content creators for online marketing. The trick is to add more facets to the story, and thus, more context, so that your readers are not only entertained, but also satisfied with what they’ve learned.
That’s it in terms of internet marketing resources from last week. Next Monday, we’ll get back to you with more interesting and useful information that you can use to boost your internet marketing strategy. Stay tuned!
