Coming up with a continuous stream of high-quality material is critical to your content marketing success. But, the longer you are using inbound marketing, the more likely it is you’ll run into periods where your brainstorming sessions don’t produce a downpour of new ideas but a light drizzle at best. Fear not and grab your umbrella! We’ve got a number of time-tested tips for ensuring your sessions are productive.
As a leading content marketing agency in Colorado, we’ve observed that there is a common “trajectory” for content marketing that can leave a marketer perplexed and a little disappointed. New to the strategy and utilizing only in-house resources, you come out of the chute hot with some great content. Your target audience, hungry for actionable insights, grows rapidly as prospects gobble up all the materials you produce. Then, out of nowhere it seems, interest in your content and your overall reader/viewership plateaus or even starts to drop. Why? Read on.
The rallying cry of Jason Nesmith (played by Tim Allen) in the movie Galaxy Quest was "Never give up! Never surrender!"—which are excellent words of advice for many content marketers. One of the biggest challenges facing content marketers is that too often their executive management is looking for instant results and therefore struggles to buy into the basic tenets of content marketing, i.e. it is a long-term strategy of producing quality content customers crave, not a short-term campaign. Another huge challenge is often that the content marketer is completely overwhelmed and cannot keep up with the demand. The "never give up" advice is equally important in that case as well.
“Email marketing” — meaning relentlessly blasting your prospects in the hope of getting a few lukewarm leads — has gone the way of the dinosaur. Email, however, is still a necessary and powerful tool when it comes to connecting with your target market. That said, there is a right way and a wrong way to use it. If you want to leverage email to attract and engage your prospects as opposed to irritating and alienating them, there are certain rules to follow.
Every day, more companies become aware of the benefits of content marketing and more marketing material gets created, published, and promoted. Consequently, marketers are having to be ever more aware of best practices for getting their content noticed. One area that is often overlooked is something very fundamental: the naming of a piece. Smart companies are starting to give this critical detail a second look.
There's no hiding the fact that we are unapologetic HubSpot fans here at 30dps. So I will make no pretense at this being an unbiased answer to the title question. However, we do occasionally run across folks with whom we have a discussion about the "high cost" of HubSpot. Candidly, we put off our own decision to start using HubSpot for over a year, largely because of the perception that the cost was too high for our meager marketing budget. But since the day we pulled the trigger on it, we've never looked back with anything but satisfaction and gratitude.
Establishing value in any business can be a challenge. And marketing and advertising agencies, I believe, have a special challenge due to the nature of the industry, i.e. how well an agency does its job directly effects how a client's business is perceived in the marketplace. There is little doubt that the combination of DIY website tools, freelance websites, WordPress templates, and a glut of newly-skilled and eager, young, graduate graphic designers and web developers presents consumers with lots of choices. So in light of that, why, the questions go, are agencies so bloody expensive?
Let me start this post by being very clear: It’s the quality, not the quantity, of your inbound marketing content that will get you noticed, establish you as a thought leader, and help you attract prospects and make sales. That said, if you can create a high volume of high-quality content, you are that much better off.
Anyone who has spent much time playing the game of search engine optimization (SEO) surely knows that it can be a difficult game to win, largely because the rules of the game keep changing. Certainly, the days of black-hat tactics and underhanded efforts to coerce your way to the top of Google search results are gone. Yet, virtually everyone we encounter is convinced that they NEED to be on page one–of course, they are not alone. Recent surveys show that increasing website traffic is one of the top priorities for most marketers these days which largely means improving search engine rankings. However, with over a BILLION websites out there and only 10 organic slots on any Google search results page, it is a mathematical impossibility for all of them to be on page one.
Neuromarketing… the term has a hint of futuristic menace to it. And if that appeals, I hate to break it to you, but there’s nothing menacing or evil about it. It’s really just referring to the practice of seeking to understand how the human brain functions in potential buying situations and taking steps to appeal to it in order to increase the odds of a sale.
I post regularly, and with a real passion, about the importance of producing high quality content. It is certainly important to clients of our content marketing agency, who want their material to be shared (and of course, all absolutely do!), so it has to be good enough to rise above today’s digital din. It’s all about quality, quality, quality!
Kelly is a marketing manager, and as such, she often finds herself under intense pressure to deliver results. Lately, as sales have dipped a bit, she’s feeling the heat even more. She needs to get new campaigns underway, pick up the pace on content production for existing inbound marketing initiatives, and in general start generating more leads. But her already-overworked marketing team will be hard-pressed to up their output, and there’s no time to recruit, hire, and onboard additional staff.
In order to be effective in content marketing, you need to be able to produce great content efficiently. To do that, you need a digital marketing team that works like a well-oiled machine. The business skills (writing, designing, project management, etc.) of your team members are important, of course, but so are their personality types. The best teams are made up of people whose perspectives and areas of focus vary and complement one another.
If you’re passionate about college basketball like I am—or if you’ve watched any sports on TV at all in the last few weeks—you know that March Madness is upon us once again! And, of course, you know that another passion of mine is content marketing, and how, with sustained effort and focus, it can elevate a company from a pretender to a contender. I was thinking of March Madness and content marketing the other day, and it occurred to me that the two have a lot in common.
Whether you’re preparing to dive into content marketing for the first time or are a content marketing veteran, it stands to reason that you can’t be effective if you don’t know what content you have. And I’m not talking categories here (“We have some white papers. And we have some case studies.”). I’m referring to an itemized accounting of every single piece of content — in any form — that you possess.
What’s old is new again, as they say. Or said differently, it seems that any consumer preference you can think of is like a pendulum—no matter how far it swings in one direction, it’s always coming back. That’s why I suppose it’s no surprise that I’m beginning to hear people talking about print again as an element of an inbound marketing strategy. If you’re thinking, “No way!” read on.
How’s that for a head-scratcher of a headline? Another way to state it would be that “... the Answer is Answers.” What I’m getting at is that at the end of the day, the primary reason visitors come to your website is to get their questions answered. “Can it do what I need it to do?” “Is it as cool as it looks in the ad?” “Does it come with a warranty?” “How much does it cost?”
Well, we’re smack dab in the middle of the entertainment industry’s awards season. The Golden Globes have been handed out, the Screen Actors Guild Awards have been presented, and the Academy Awards are just ahead. And while winners of the annual Content Marketing Awards (CMAs) won’t be named until September, the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) has just announced its “call for entries.”
While I wasn't watching, something wonderful happened at 30dps—we went from being a local marketing and advertising agency/web design firm here in Colorado Springs, to being a national boutique marketing agency that specializes in inbound and content marketing, growth-driven website design, and HubSpot integration. While we still serve an occasional client here in Colorado Springs (and count ourselves fortunate to do so), increasingly our clients are in the Denver/Boulder area and cities all across the country.
I love people, so I'm still a sucker for face-to-face meetings. But the truth of the matter is that with tools like GoToMeeting and Webex, you can still have a lot of the personal touch you enjoy about meeting in person with your long-distance customers. With the convenience and reduction in cost associated with virtual meetings, they have become a very compelling way to conduct daily business. I have worried in the past that we might lose the human connection that comes from the face-to-face. But with an occasional use of video conferencing, we seem to maintain the personal, high-touch relationships that we so much believe in, and seem to lose very little in the process.
One of the core elements of inbound marketing is the thoughtful, constructive, and strategic use of keywords. Keywords are first and foremost the words or phrases that users enter into search engines when they are attempting to find information or a company's website they are interested in. Understanding keywords and how they are used is critically important to any inbound marketing effort. Because these words and expressions are a reflection of interest on the part of the searcher, they are also critical to search engines' logic, and must therefore be a critical element of the inbound marketer's strategy.
