90% of Customers Find Content Marketing Useful [VIDEO]

When it comes to your customers, it’s not what you say so much as how you make them feel. This was the driver behind Uberflip’s recent video infographic, Consumers & Brands: A Love Story. In it, Uberflip answers two key questions: How do customers really feel about brands that create custom content, and do brands that invest the time and effort in content marketing come out on top? Watch below!

Everything you need to know to get started on LinkedIn #infographic

When it comes to B2B marketing and communications, LinkedIn is considered the most effective platform of all because it drives more traffic and more leads, creating various marketing opportunities for professionals and brands.LinkedIn is the largest professional social network in the world and has been growing in importance both for individuals as well as for companies.

But why is that?

To answer this question one must understand how LinkedIn differs from Facebook, Twitter and co.

When you are thinking about how to best utilise LinkedIn for yourself as a professional or for your company, the first step is not concerned with how to grow your network, what content to share or how to create the perfect update; it’s about understanding how LinkedIn works.

To be successful on it, the first requirement is to be familiar with the specifics of the social network, what it’s all about and what it offers. Otherwise you won’t be able to use its power to your benefit.

This is where the following infographic comes in place. It offers all the important facts and figures about LinkedIn to help you develop a thorough understanding of how it works, who uses it and for what purposes and so to adequately develop your strategy.

12 Most Creative Blogging Content Strategies

If you want to keep your blog fresh and fun for readers, it’s essential that you post creative content. Lucky for you, there are all kinds of ways you can generate blog posts that have the creative flair you want — here are 12 strategies to do just that:

1. Giveaways and contests

What They Are:  A contest on your blog can involve any kind of competition you want, whether it’s asking readers to create a funny commercial for your product, write an essay about why they are the biggest fan of your product, etc.  The second part of this strategy, the giveaway, involves the free products or rewards given out to the winner.

Why They Work:  Contests and giveaways allow you to:

• Create links to your website (which is excellent for SEO)
• Increase traffic
• Promote social engagement
• Increase brand awareness

2. Infographics and videographics

What They Are:  Infographics and videographics are visual representations of information. As the names suggest, infographics are in the form of a picture and videographics are in the form of a video.

Why They Work:  Infographics and videographics are excellent blogging tools for many reasons, including:

• Visual appeal (audience is much more likely to be engaged by an infographic than lengthy text)
• Quick information access (graphs allow you to take in facts and statistics faster than you could reading through a document)
• Social media exposure

Essentially, any organization can take advantage of this popular content form. For example, the recovery center 12 Keys Rehab creates infographics and videographicsthat have scored them massive social capital (thousands of pageviews and social shares).

3. Polls

What They Are:  Polls are surveys of public opinion where data is gathered through responses to questions.

Why They Work:  Polls allow you to:

• Engage your customers and prospects
• Gain insight regarding customer preferences
• Receive feedback from customers about your products and services, receive suggestions for further improvement, or source information for an article

4. Webinars

What They Are:  Webinars are interactive conferences or online workshops. HubSpot does exceptionally well with their webinar campaign.

Why They Work:  A few reasons why webinars deserve a place on your blog include:

• Cost-effectiveness as a marketing tool for your business
• Increased customer loyalty
• Generation of new forms of revenue

5. Challenges

 What They Are:  Challenges are competitions you present to your blog audience on any topic you choose; they can range from “Find the Funniest Baby Picture” to “What is the Best Movie Quote of All Time?”

Why They Work:  Challenges are great for many reasons, among them:

• Audience involvement
• Increased site traffic
• Brand exposure

6. White papers

 What They Are:  White papers are a form of content with built-in marketing messages.

 Why They Work:  White papers come with many perks, such as:

• Efficient lead generation
• Opportunity to promote newsletter sign-ups
• Greater odds of getting more “likes” on Facebook

7. Free resources

What They Are:  Anything you post on your blog that is useful or beneficial to your audience could be considered a resource; possible examples include templates, lesson plans and activities, user manuals, how-to guides, recipes, etc. Furthermore, free resources should be seen as an extension of your blog, granting your overall site more substance.

Why They Work:  Besides the obvious point that everyone likes free stuff, free resources are effective with regard to:

• Expanding your fan base
• Raising brand awareness
• Promoting customer loyalty
• Creating something as simple as a badge boosts fan engagement

8. Series and themes

What They Are:  Series and themes are blog posts that focus on a specific topic over an extended period of time. 12 Most is one of the best examples out there!

Why They Work:  Series and themes are helpful with:

• Establishing your position as an authority in a specific subject area
• Engaging readers (especially ones with a strong interest in that topic)
• I think they work exceptionally well for 12 Most because readers have an expectation and writers already have a framework

9. Controversial topics

What They Are:  Controversial topics involve divisive “hot button” issues about which people tend to have strong opinions.

Why They Work:  These topics are great because they:

• Boost audience participation (people will want to weigh in with comments expressing their opinions)
• Increased brand exposure — posting about controversial topics is a surefire way to get people talking and raise awareness of your blog. Of course, we run the risk of backlash, but if you’re passionate about a topic it can be a homerun with your readers

10. Futuristic topics

What They Are:  These topics predict the outcome of certain events and they provide conjecture as to what could happen in the future based on current trends. Examples include: “What is the future of social media?” or “What will our future healthcare system look like?”

Why They Work:  Futuristic topics can:

• Promote engagement
• Entice readers to interact, responding with whether they agree or disagree with your prediction
• Optimize for early-bird searches, such as “iPhone 6” or “PS5”

11.  Interesting questions

What They Are:  These questions are original and thought provoking, primarily about topics that make readers stop and think for a second. Examples include: “If you had a theme song that played every time you walked into the room, what would it be and why?” or “What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?”

Why They Work:  Interesting questions are effective because they:

• Promote engagement
• Increase loyalty (finding interesting questions and content on your blog makes it likely that readers will want to keep coming back for more)
• Are generally fun!

12. Podcasts and article audios

What They Are:  Podcasts and article audios refer to a form of digital media that’s part of a series of audio, video, or PDF files subscribed to and downloaded through web syndication or streamed through the internet to a computer or mobile device.

Why They Work:  Podcasts and article audios provide a variety of benefits like:

• Opportunity to strengthen relationships with current readers
• Flexible options for your audience to take in your blog content (for instance, someone who has a long commute will appreciate being able to listen to your podcast in the car)

You can spice up your blog content through a number of different strategies. Play around to find the ones that work best for you.

4 Tools That Improve Your Social Media Analytics

Do you want more insight about your social media activities?

Are you looking for a tool to bring important analytics to one place?

In this article, you’ll discover four social media analytics tools that deliver clear insights about your business’s social media activity.

Why Analytics?

Social media analytics are more than numbers.

Analytics give you the data you need to improve your social media engagement, make marketing decisions and tie social media to your bottom line.

To use analytics effectively, the data needs to be presented in easy-to-understand formats.

Here are four tools worth checking out:

#1: Receive Automatic Reports Daily Via Email With Social Report

The one thing we check every day is our email. So it makes sense to get social analytics and updates automatically delivered to your inbox.

Social Report is a comprehensive analytics tool with a very affordable starter account that lets you to monitor up to five projects, each with an unlimited number of social accounts for only $9 per month.

To get started, sign up for a 30-day free trial of the plan that best fits your business.

Once your account is created, you can set up your first project. Under your project dashboard, click on the Add Social Media Accounts option to start connecting all of your social media accounts and other important business accounts.

Account options you can choose for your Social Report profile.

Social Report connects to all of the major social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, Foursquare and many others. You can also add any individual groups you own on Facebook and LinkedIn, your Google Analytics and online stores.

Once you’re set up, you can access lots of graphs to analyze audience growth, engagement, reach and activity. You can also find demographic details about your social audience on each social network you’ve connected.

Demographic information about your social media audience.

What you’ll really love about this tool is that you can get a daily digest summarizing the most important activity from each of your connected accounts (pages, profiles and groups) via email.

You can learn more about members of your LinkedIn group.

LinkedIn group insights from a Social Report email.

Get a quick summary of your audience and activity on Twitter followed by a list of your tweets, mentions, direct messages and new follower details.

Twitter profile insights from a Social Report email.

Get a list of new activity on your Facebook page, a summary of your fans, page views and referrer URLs leading traffic to your page.

Facebook page insights from a Social Report email.

Social Report’s daily digests keep you up to date about most—if not all—of your social media activity, without you leaving your inbox!

#2: Share Analytic Reports With Stakeholders Via Cyfe

Like dashboards? Then you’ll love Cyfe. You can create an unlimited number of dashboards with an unlimited number of widgets for only $19 per month.

To get started, create a free account and get a feel for the way Cyfe works, then upgrade to the premium plan to go unlimited.

Once you’ve created your account, set up your first dashboard.

Create a new dashboard on Cyfe.

Inside your new dashboard, you’ll add widgets to track your social accounts. The following are available for social media.

Add a variety of social media widgets in your Cyfe dashboard.

There are also widgets for Twitter, Twitter search and YouTube.

Depending on the network you choose, you’ll be able to create widgets to display your audience size, activity and keyword searches.

Configure your social media widget.

You can also create dashboards and widgets for many other platforms includingGoogle Analytics and AdWords, WordPress, AWeber, FreshBooks, PayPal and Moz.

View your social media activity in dashboards with Cyfe.

In addition to being able to quickly see the most important information about your social accounts, you can create reports based on your dashboards. Cyfe sends the reports to you at your preferred frequency.

Create reports for yourself, your boss and your clients.

Keep everyone up to date on the status of your social media marketing with dashboard data emailed to you, your boss and your clients.

#3: Establish ROI With SumAll

Want to connect your social media activity to other areas of your business?SumAll can help you do that. First, you’ll need to sign up for your free trial. Then you can start connecting to your social networks.

Choose platforms to connect within your SumAll account.

To get the most out of your SumAll account, be sure to connect to other platformssuch as Google Analytics, Constant Contact, Amazon Payments, eBay and Shopify. This helps you visualize how your activity on social media affects other areas of your business and your bottom line.

Once your data has loaded, you can add various streams of data to your chart by selecting them from the library on the left side.

Select platforms from the SumAll library menu.

As you add different data points, they’ll appear on the chart. This allows you toanalyze how your activity on one platform affects the activity on another.

For example, chart your Twitter activity and PayPal transactions to see if an increase in tweets leads to an increase in income.

Compare social activity with other important business data.

Now, you can find out if an increase in Instagram posts leads to more Facebook engagement, or if an increase in followers on Twitter leads to an increase in sales on Shopify. The potential to find social media ROI is limitless.

#4: Explore Social Audience Demographics With Google Analytics

Last but not least is Google Analytics. Goals help you link your social media activity to conversions on your website.

The easiest way to get social media data from Google Analytics is by using the standard social media report under Traffic Sources > Social.

Learn more about your social media activity in the social media overview.

Here, you learn more about the website traffic you receive from top social networks. Note that this only covers popular networks—Google Analytics doesn’t officially categorize a lot of smaller niche networks as part of their equation.

Under the Conversions section of the social reporting area, you can find out which social networks have led to the most conversions, including the value of those conversions if you set up values in your goals.

See which social networks drive visitors who convert the most.

Alternatively, if you’d like to view all of your Google Analytics data based on traffic from social networks, you can create a Custom Segment. To do this, click on Advanced Segments and then + New Custom Segment.

Click the + New Custom Segment button to start a new custom segment.

Name your custom segment and start adding the domains for each social media network you want to analyze. Each line should say Including > Source > Containing > domain.com. You can add up to 20 sources total.

Pin It

Creating a custom segment in Google Analytics.

Save your custom segment and you can view everything in your website’s Google Analytics data based on traffic from the social media networks you specified.

Custom segments can show you the top content consumed by your social media referrals, how many social media website visitors come from mobile devices, what countries your social media website visitors live in and other specific insights that will help you do better online business.

Over To You

These aren’t the only tools available to help you track and use the data from your social media analytics, but they do show that measuring or reporting social media analytics doesn’t have to be difficult or overly time-consuming.

What do you think? Which of these tools do you find most interesting? What tools do you use to measure and report your social media analytics? Share your favorites in the comments!

How to Avoid Content Marketing Mistakes

Great content should inspire loyalty and interest from potential consumers. As more companies embrace the importance of content marketing, there are still many common missteps. Here are some content marketing mistakes to avoid:

Mistake #1: Not setting clear goals

Attempting any type of content marketing without having any clear goals in mind is pointless. Your content will not be able to achieve what you want if you don’t even know what you want. What can you do? Take the time to develop goals that support your overall business strategy. Examples of some goals might be:

• Increasing website traffic
• Generating social referrals
• Building brand awareness

Once you’ve established your goals, then you can create action items that can help guide your content marketing strategy.

Mistake #2: Not involving other departments

In many organizations content creators often work in silos, and more often than not these content creators are not communicating with each other. This results in confusion and mixed messages for consumers. If two departments are writing about the same topic without talking to each other, then this not only creates duplicated efforts, but if the content is not consistent, then it may confuse your customers as well. What can you do? Create a master editorial calendar that guides content for multiple platforms. This will encourage consistency and collaboration.

Mistake #3: Only using the blog to market your content

Are you only using your blog to market content? In order to broaden your reach you should include channels your customers are already using, and exploring different ways your content can be shared.What can you do? Try leveraging blog posts to develop infographics or even including videos in your blog posts. Exploring different channels may inspire additional opportunities for you.

Mistake #4: Talking too much and not listening

Nothing is more annoying than a brand that is always selling. If this sounds like you, then you’re missing the opportunity to engage with your readers. Listening to what your consumers are saying about you and other interests will only help you learn more about them. This will also give you the opportunity to respond to relevant concerns. What can you do? Try asking questions, or even responding to questions your readers put forward. You should also try engaging with the social community – share interesting and relevant content from others. You’ll be surprised at how much this can expand your reach!

Have you come across other content marketing missteps? Share them in the comments bellow!

HOW MUCH BUSINESS ARE YOU MISSING OUT ON?

What is a reactive purchase? It’s a good question, and one that you’ll soon have an answer to. Understanding the behavior of your target market and buyer is essential to sales and marketing success. Today the two don’t exist as standalone silos; marketing success is no longer tertiary in determining sales success.

What Is A Reactive Purchase?

You might have some idea of what a reactive purchase entails from the wording of the phrase. There doesn’t seem to be one clear cut definition, but I define a reactive purchase as: “A purchase initiated by a spontaneous need, or desire, for a product or service”. The key word here is ‘reactive’, which means to respond to a stimulus.

Why Are Reactive Purchases Important?

Humans are impulsive by nature. The majority of us, contrary to what we’d like to believe, aren’t all seeing, all powerful decision makers with the kind of clarity usually bestowed upon deities. A purchase will only generally fall into one of two categories, a meditated purchase, or a reactive purchase. A meditated purchase is exactly the opposite of a reactive purchase, but we’ll talk more about the distinctions between the two shortly.

The key question is why are reactive purchases important and why should you care? The simple answer is, the majority of purchases are in fact, reactive.

Is My Product Or Service Considered A Reactive Purchase?

The concept of a reactive purchase is fairly simple, differentiating between a reactive and meditated purchase can sometimes be trickier than you might think.

Let’s use a simple example that any business owner will be able to relate to. The end of the year is fast approaching, and that also means your financial year is coming to a close. You’ve been receiving letters from the HMRC, or IRS, informing you that you need to get your affairs in order and file your annual return as well as all your financials for the year.

Up to this point, you had given taxation no thought and had been focusing on growing and scaling your business, as such, this creates a spontaneous need on your part, a need to either spend a lot of time and effort getting your affairs in order, or the need to hire an accountant, and fast.

The thought process of the individual in question will be simple. I need an accountant, I better find one, and I’ll run a search on Google for ‘accountants’ and start picking up the phone.

 

Another simple example would be a company experiencing declining sales. They decide on the spur of the moment that they would benefit from SEO Services, so decide to enlist the help of an SEO Company to rectify this.

What Isn’t A Reactive Purchase

The distinction between a reactive and meditated purchase, comes down to subtle distinctions between the two. I will use the same instance of a business owner requiring an accountant to illustrate how this need might fall under the reactive purchase bracket, or be considered a meditated purchase.

The end of the year is fast approaching, which also means your financial year is coming to an end. You’ve had this in mind for several months now and have been considering how best to approach resolving this problem. After attempting to wade through the mountain of financial information at your desk personally, you decided this wasn’t the most valuable use of your time and that outsourcing the task was the best option. You’ve asked around a few times if any of your colleagues could recommend a good accountant, and you’ve been referred to 4 or 5 different providers, which you’ve run a bit of due diligence on and agreed to meet when you have some free time. As the final month of your financial year rounds the corner, you pick up the phone and call one of the accountants you were referred to and agree to outsource the task to them.

As you can see, the defining factor here isn’t the type of product or service itself; rather it’s the buying process and the stimulus that prompts the buying decision.

When the decision is meditated, the route to purchase is often very different. Recruitment is a great example of a B2B service that is very often, a reactive purchase. A company makes a huge sale and as a result needs to hire more skilled workers to cope with the work; they immediately need the services of a recruitment agency to handle this quickly and efficiently. Queue a reactive route to purchase.

Many B2B services may in fact actually be meditated purchases, however, the route they take to market is often the path most commonly taken by the reactive purchaser, which is a Google search then a point of contact. As such, SEO services and SEO companies play an increasingly important role in helping businesses capture these purchases, as they effectively hold the keys to reactive sales success.

From these examples, you can see how important it is to effectively understand what a reactive purchase is and why they are so important to the sales strategy of any business.

How To Capture Reactive Purchases

Now that we’ve covered what a reactive purchase is and the distinctions between a reactive and meditated purchase, it’s time to look at how you can begin capturing reactive purchases if you aren’t already.

A reactive purchase is a warm lead, it’s a qualified buyer, and it doesn’t get much better than this. The buyer knows what they want, they want it now and if you can give it to them at a price and delivery point they are happy with, you’ve got a sale.

Reactive purchases are primarily only captured in one of two ways, in my opinion.

Search Engine Optimization

The way we buy things has changed dramatically over the past 10 years. Today the buying process for a reactive purchase usually looks like this.

• Spontaneous need for a product or service, triggered by an impulse.
• Open Google, run a search query for the desired product or service.
• Open product or service provider websites in tabs, usually only the first 3 or 4 links on page 1 of Google will be opened.
• The buyer will briefly assess each provider then make a decision to contact them for a quote, or a purchase.

Search Engine Optimization is an industry that has been ubiquitous in the business world for over a decade. However, it’s also the fastest changing and evolving online marketing industry in the business world, and one that is misunderstood by 90% of those who believe they understand it.

We’ve probably all approached, or have been approached, by an SEO Company, or SEO Agency, at some point in our professional career. This experience may have been good, it may have been bad, and in some occasions it may have been soul destroying. Ahem, blanket sales pitch for position 1 Google success for all your keywords within a month or your money back.

The point I am trying to emphasise here is that a huge chunk of purchases are reactive. 90% of these reactive purchases use Google as their route to purchase. This means that when there’s a reactive purchase, 90% of the time it’s going be Google that wins you the business, unless it’s a proximity driven purchase, which we’ll cover under footfall next.

The next point to emphasise here is that almost 50% of the traffic for any search query goes to the top 5 keywords. If you’re familiar with click through rates, more commonly referred to as CTR’s, you might have come across material on this previously on resources such as Moz. If not, the CTR study carried out by Slingshot is a great place to start.

The image below illustrates how clicks are distributed when somebody types a key phrase into Google.

To use the accountancy example again to illustrate, were you to type the key phrase accountancy into Google right now and your company wasn’t ranking in the top 5 positions, chances are you’re going to reap very little reward and win little to no business.

This is where things get tricky; thanks to local search, many business owners and marketers may believe they are achieving a high level of search success, when in reality they aren’t ranking for their keyword outside of their local area. The best way to determine with any level of clarity if you are ‘ranking’ where you think you are for a key phrase is to use Moz’s Keyword Ranking Checker.

If you combine this with regular review of your Google Analytics and Webmaster panel, you’ll be able to get an accurate picture of how you are ranking and which search terms are driving traffic to your site and trigger purchase, or contact decisions.

Proximity

The second primary driver of reactive purchases is of course, proximity, or more simply, footfall. We walk past something shiny; we walk into the shop and buy it. Footfall is the lifeblood of many B2C industries. Food, fashion, entertainment, health and beauty, these industries and others are still primarily powered by proximity and footfall. It’s rare, but not uncommon, that a buyer will run a Google search for ‘café Boulder’ for example, before deciding to grab a coffee.

The other end of this spectrum is of course the meditated purchase, a family planning a vacation, holiday, or just a special night out for the family. This buyer might do their research and read up online about the best places to eat or dine out.

Capturing proximity based reactive purchases is a separate art in itself, but one that can also be driven by other marketing initiatives, such as a well thought out social media campaign designed to funnel social media visitors from a Facebook page into a café for example. To prevent myself from diverging too much, I’d recommend you check out SME’s own Social Media section for more on this.

I’m sure there are other effective methods of capturing reactive purchases out there, and I’d love to hear feedback from you all on which you have found to be the most effective.

Conclusion

In conclusion, a reactive purchase is a purchase initiated by a spontaneous need or desire for a product or service. The majority of purchases if you look at the bigger picture could be classified as ‘reactive’, so it’s extremely important to have a strategy in place to capture these reactive buying decisions.

I’d love to hear your feedback on how you qualify, and as a result capture, purchases and sales.