Content marketing is increasingly becoming more competitive. As a platform, the internet is simply replete with a variety of marketing-related content of various types and quality. Ultimately, with this content-rich environment, comes a greater demand for higher quality. This demand comes not only from the end-user, who is becoming more used to navigating (and, in many cases, ignoring) this deluge of content, but also from entities like Google, Bing, and Facebook, who view the experiences of their users as understandably critical. And as more brands allocate higher budgets towards content creation and marketing, you can expect that the bar will only continue to raise. In this article, we’ll discuss a few of the content amplification strategies that can help keep your content king.

Produce High-Value Content

Let’s be honest, would you promote or be willing to share subpar content? Of course not. Don’t lose sight of this reality — it’s as close to the end-user perspective as you can expect to objectively get in marketing. If it’s not good enough that you, yourself, would share it…chances are it won’t gain any traction with anyone else.

So start by creating top-notch, epic-quality content. Create content that is truly value-added. More importantly, create content that you would be proud to be associated with and that your audiences would consider a resource, or, at least, a source of entertainment.

Extract Nuggets and Share

More often than not, a brand or business can tweet and share snippets of their content with a minimized link to full content on their social media platforms. It’s something that many businesses fail to take advantage of, in spite of the ease of doing so.

This can do wonders for your content’s reach and mileage if you use this strategy effectively, and not just by widening the funnel. Consider any time that snippet gets shared via other social media platforms — you’ve probably set it up with a tracking URL for your analytics (and if you haven’t, you definitely should) and you’ve just gone from being another voice in the wind to being a Source.

This not only amplifies the content itself, it also works towards establishing a sense of thought leadership in connection with your brand.

Leverage Successful Content

There’s a neat strategy you might have heard of called the Skyscraper Technique, and Brian Dean of backlinko.com recently did a fantastic case study about this on his blog. You start with finding the biggest and best piece of content anyone has ever put on the web regarding the topic, industry, or keywords in question. Find out what this piece of content does well, why it sees the rankings and engagement that you’re looking for. Then find its weaknesses. If you’re lucky, something’s been poorly optimized. But it could be that the opportunity you’re looking for is that the content isn’t interesting enough, doesn’t communicate effectively, or maybe it’s trying to convey something to the wrong people in the wrong way.

Regardless, you want to find the biggest and best piece of content on the horizon and build something even bigger and better. Create content that is truly powerful enough that it becomes the point of reference on that topic. Do note that this is an intensive strategy that demands serious investment, but can also provide significant rewards.

Use Influencers to Increase the Reach of Your Content

With the rise and proliferation of social media channels has come the rise of social media celebs — people called influencers. These people have amassed a fan base or following, ranging anywhere thousands to millions, who are ready to consume content from them. Their audiences often like and prefer them to “real celebrities” because many of these people have the appeal of being more relatable to the “average-Joe” and more similar in terms of interests and perspectives.

Look for bloggers and social influencers with large and active audiences and ask them (and yourself) if your content would be a good fit for their reach. You can start with simple Google searches, or you can find a software-as-a-service platform like NeoReach’s influencer marketing platform to help connect you directly with influencers appropriate to your business and manage your campaign. Influencer marketing is quickly becoming an effective means of getting your content in front of the right set of eyes and, in the final analysis, that’s what marketing is all about.

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Below are several characteristics that distinguish a leader from a boss:

Leaders Lead

Bosses tend to rule and demand that the work is done. They will micromanage because they don’t have trust in the team to successfully complete a project. Bosses will also be very quick to analyze and criticize the team’s mistakes.

Leaders, on the other hand, are individuals who will assist their team with words of encouragement, ideas and suggestions, and positive feedback. They are not there to watch their employees fail but to help and lead them to a positive outcome.

Leaders Listen

Bosses will be quick to demand that tasks be done, but won’t be open to discussion or hear out their employees’ ideas. They expect them to just obey and listen and proceed with their job without mistakes.

A leader, however, is open to their team sharing their insights and questions. They are willing to advise and provide feedback to their employees. Leaders want their employees to develop and reach successful outcomes and are conscious that for that to happen, they have to be involved.

Leaders Learn

A leader is open to new ideas and learning from their team. They are not embarrassed to learn from someone in a position lower than them, as they understand there is always room for more growth. Not only are they willing to learn, but they also are pleased to teach. They enjoy sharing their knowledge and experience with their colleagues.

Leaders Love

Leaders have a passion for not only their job but also, to see their employees succeed. They are not afraid to step down and get involved with the project at hand.

Being a boss can be a rewarding job if you take on the characteristics of a leader. Your employees will respect you more if they know that you are not there to scold and criticize every move they make. Yes, as a boss you are in a higher authority, but be sure to do so in a way that is constructive for the company and your employees.

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However, any web developer that wants to remain relevant has to consistently improve on their current knowledge and skill-set. You need to familiarize yourself with new tools and technologies in the industry.

The following are some tips that you can follow to get some great results as well as go on to become a web developer that’s in high demand.

Get More Reading Materials

Web developers are often in the habit of sticking to one programming or coding language and then leaving the others. Here’s what you should know: the more diversified your coding abilities are, the better your opportunities.

For instance, if you’re only familiar with PHP, you should go learn other languages like Python, Ruby, JavaScript, SQL, Objective-C, C++, C# among others. The point is don’t just stop with one even though it’s in demand.

In fact, all of the above mentioned examples are hot and in demand right now. If you were to master all these, there would be no limit to what you can do in web development; not to mention the fact that you will have more work than you can handle.

Study and Replicate Excellent Web Development Projects

As a web developer, you’ll often see world class web development projects that you can only aspire to. Here’s what you should do whenever you see those projects: try to replicate them.

Yes, we know it sounds crazy, particularly when some of the codes are way beyond your skill level. However, this is the only way to get really better at your web development. Many web developers don’t do this and end up stagnant in one spot. Don’t be like them. Replicating these awesome projects will make your grow and stretch.

Practice More Often and Frequently

The quickest way to becoming better at web development is by consistently doing more practice sessions. This means creating projects, setting web development goals and then working hard towards meeting it on or before the deadline.

For instance, instead of allowing external elements influence your designs, do the experiment in a sandbox. That way, if the code develops an issue and you need to debug it, you will be able to easily locate the source of the problem and create a fix for it.

Work Hard at Advancing Your Skills

This is how most web developers get better at what they do. Repetitive tasks and codes aren’t just enough. All savvy web developers make an effort to commit to progress. You have to continually push the boundaries of what you currently know and try something new.

For instance, instead of just using and depending on the popular GitHub that most developers use, why not try something harder? The GitlLab system is an excellent example of a new tool that you can attempt to master and get better at. The fact that it’s an open source tool means that it is an even more dynamic tool that you can use. If you also want to add it to your servers, it will work just fine too.

Always Ensure that Your Websites are Secure

It is not unusual to get carried away by the design and usability features of the new website you’re developing. That’s perfectly normal. However, of equal importance is the website’s security.
Test all websites for vulnerabilities and secure those loopholes before deploying the website and going live. If you want, test the site with asafaweb.com to ensure that it is truly secure and without any vulnerabilities.

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As a consequence, you have to time your content for when it is most likely to be picked up by your audience. The question for any aspiring marketer is when the best time for this is. Post at the wrong time and your audience will likely miss whatever it is you have posted. Thankfully, we’ve put together a handy guide to help with posting on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn!

Facebook

The most popular social media platform today. You already know how everybody expects you to have a Facebook – both a personal page and one for your business. It is also the more casual platform, and the browsing behavior of its users reflect this. Although Facebook users are on the platform every day, engagement is best Thursdays and Fridays, generally after lunch in the 1 pm to 3 pm timeframe. Thus, your best results will come towards the end of the week, around when people are thinking less about work and more about the upcoming weekend.

The worst days for engagement on Facebook are Monday through Wednesday. In fact, engagement for Facebook falls roughly 3.5% for posts that are hosted exclusively on these days. You’ll want to avoid posting on these days and focus your efforts for the end of the week.

Twitter

Everybody loves Twitter. It delivers your message as long as that message is 160 characters or less. Unlike the other two platforms of Facebook and LinkedIn, best days for Twitter engagement will vary according to what type of business you are.

If you are a business to business oriented company, then you are trying to catch people towards the end of the work day. Your best time to post is towards the end of the working day, just before people are going home. However, you have a wide window with which to post. Highest CTR on Twitter for B2B accounts ranges from noon all the way to 6 pm.

If you are a business to consumer oriented company, then you are looking to talk to people at home. Although Wednesdays do report high engagement rates on Twitter for B2C companies, you see higher numbers on the weekends. You can use a tool like Buffer to schedule your weekend tweets. Make sure that you have somebody monitoring the feed at all times, however! The last thing you want is to miss a potential time for engagement because you were at home.

One final note about timing: one tweet per day is not going to build your following or engage your audience regardless of the type of business you have. Multiple tweets throughout the day (in three to four-hour intervals) is ideal.

LinkedIn

Facebook’s more professional cousin is the best place for B2B entrepreneurs to network. While Facebook and Twitter are fantastic to reach out to more casual users, LinkedIn is essential for reaching out to fellow professionals. The best times for posting reflect the nature of the user base, with post times being ideal around when people are going to or leaving work.

Mondays and Fridays are poor days for posting. Schedule your posts for Tuesday through Thursday, from 7 am to 8 am or from 5 pm to 6 pm. The ideal time for posting on LinkedIn, however, is Tuesday sometime between 10 am and 11 am. This time of the day yields the highest number of clicks and shares.

Important Reminders About Social Media!

Although these times are ideal, remember that as with all marketing advice, your mileage may vary. As we see with Twitter, the type of business you run can greatly impact when the best time to post is. These times are most likely when you’ll see the highest rates of engagement, and should serve most individuals.

Finding out when the best times to post for your industry are, and scheduling accordingly, requires the use of social media tools. We went over some of our favorite social media tools in an earlier post, and this should help you to get started.

Regardless of when you post, however, remember that your goal is customer engagement. You want to talk to people, and you want them to talk to you. Customer engagement has no schedule: it will happen when it happens. I say this as a reminder that your social media manager should be monitoring social media feeds daily, and be willing to respond even if they are at home.

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Content Creation Tools

These tools are used for content creation. While we pride ourselves on never outsourcing, we have a team of writers ready to write content on a regular basis. Furthermore, we had to lean on these tools when we were starting out to locate talent in the first place. For those lacking the resources to write their content, these are fantastic tools for getting the content from elsewhere.

UpWork (formerly oDesk)

Upwork is a network of freelancers connected through a unified platform. Previously known as oDesk, UpWork retains all of the features that made its predecessor useful. Talent ranges from SEO experts to writers and graphic artists. In short, everything you need for content creation can be found on this one platform.

Jobs can be created and posted publicly or handed to a select team of freelancers. This allows you to work with the individuals that you want to work with while creating a reliable team you can turn to on a regular basis. Furthermore, each job can be paid hourly or on a fixed price. The milestones system is fantastic for larger projects and allows you to approve the results each step of the way.

For hourly work, UpWork includes a built-in “work diary” application that takes regular screenshots, allowing you to see what your freelance employee has been up to. This guarantees that every minute billed is a minute worked.

TextBroker

This platform is focused on written content and delivers fast results. When you post up a job, you can be sure that the content will be written and submitted before the day is out. These rapid results do come with a downside – quality control. You will need to pay top-dollar for a high-quality, well-written article. Anything below five stars will suffer from grammar and spelling errors. If you use TextBroker, be prepared to edit unless you are willing to pay for quality.

Content Distribution Tools

Creating high-quality content is only half the battle. You also have to get the content in front of your customers. Publishing content on your website is a good way to place your work somewhere on the internet, but you need to promote it if you hope for success. These tools are incredibly useful for getting your content distributed, and we highly recommend them.

Outbrain

Outbrain is a promotional tool used to get your content and links to your content onto trusted websites across the web. You have likely seen a tab when browsing a news website that proclaimed “featured articles” or “recommended for you.” Sometimes these articles link off-site, but the content is still engaging. These links are provided by services like Outbrain.

In fact, as a fun exercise, go to CNN.com. Click on a random story and scroll down to the bottom, you will most likely see a bunch of stories “recommended by Outbrain”. In fact, when you click these links you may notice your browser includes a “traffic.outbrain.com” URL before you are redirected.

Outbrain is thus a fantastic tool for getting exposure for all of your content!

NeoReach

Influencer marketing has been growing steadily over the past few years, and its compatibility with content marketing is apparent. Social media is inextricably linked with content marketing, but being the only one pushing your content is a poor tactic. Influencer marketing platforms like NeoReach pay social media celebrities (influencers) to promote your content for you.

NeoReach has already gathered a large number of influencers in spite of being relatively new to the space and thus far has proven highly effective in content promotion.

Analytics Tools

All the tools in the world do not change the fact that if you cannot measure it, it may as well not exist. Gathering hard data about traffic, conversions, and revenue are essential for knowing if your marketing efforts work. Here are a couple of the tools we use for measuring data to demonstrate that what we are doing makes a difference.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most popular tool for analyzing a website, and for good reason. It gives you all the information about where your traffic is coming from, where they land, where they go, and where they are when they leave or convert. Using this tool you know if the bulk of yours sales come from organic search, and can even determine what websites are driving customers away.

The one major flaw comes from the one part you’d think Google Analytics would be strongest: keyword traffic. As an internet marketer, you’d want to know what your strongest keywords are. Way back in 2011, Google updated its privacy policy so that now many of the keywords used to find your site come back as “(not provided)”.

In spite of this flaw, Google Analytics is still a very useful tool for providing traffic data and knowing where it all comes from. This way you know where your marketing efforts are succeeding, and where they are falling apart.

SEMrush

For SEO analytics, SEMrush is one of the most popular and useful tools on the market. SEMrush provides traffic estimates on your site and your competitor’s websites based on keyword rankings. It lists out whom your competition is based on keywords, what those keywords are, and where you are ranked. You can even get an overview of where your backlinks are coming from.

SEMrush is an incredibly useful tool that professional internet marketers use on a regular basis and are expected to be familiar with it. Some of the information overlaps with Google Analytics and often comes into conflict. When Google Analytics says one thing and SEMrush says another, we would default to Google Analytics.

No list is going to be exhaustive, but this is a good start and a representative sample of the tools we use on a regular basis. Every tool does have a learning curve attached to it and takes time to learn the intricacies of, but all are well worth the effort.

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As professional social media managers, we use a number of tools to give us all of these functions and more. Below we list some of our favorite social media tools, and detail what they have to offer to your campaign.

Social Bro

Social Bro is an excellent social media tool for Twitter and Instagram users. One of our favorite features of Social Bro is the ability to identify when your audience is online. This information is essential as it allows you to optimize your tweet schedule. Social Bro will help ensure all of your carefully crafted tweets make their way in front of your customers.

This particular platform also offers tools for a direct messaging campaign. Direct messaging is fantastic for inviting people to webinars or creating targeted promotions. The features of this application are numerous, and it is for this reason that we use Social Bro in all of our social media campaigns.

CrowdFire

Another tool that works well with Twitter and Instagram is CrowdFire. Formerly known as JustUnfollow, CrowdFire is used to help manage your audience. In the social media world, there is an unspoken expectation. If you follow somebody, they ought to follow you in turn. If somebody does not follow you back, then you will need to locate this person and unfollow them. Using this tool you can quickly locate those guilty of this social media faux pas and take action. The tool also helps you find additional people to follow based on who your competitors are following.

IFTTT

Not strictly a social media tool, but a more general tool that you will find incredibly useful for all of your social media applications. When working in any campaign, one quickly discovers there are certain tasks that are time-consuming, and often annoying. IFTTT (short for: If This Then That) is an automation service that allows you to tie multiple platforms together and coordinate actions.

Some examples of how we use IFTTT in our social media campaign include taking an image we post to Instagram and tweeting it as an embedded image. You can also use this tool to publish content across multiple platforms at the same time. Say you want to publish something to both Facebook and have it post to Google+ automatically? Using IFTTT makes it possible.

Google Alerts

One of the hardest parts of managing a useful social media campaign is in keeping up to date with industry news. Setting up Google Alerts gives you a daily feed of headlines based on your most relevant key terms. This gives you plenty of content to talk about that is relevant to your target audience. Google Alerts is a useful tool not only for your social media campaign but also for your general use.

Buffer

A very well regarded social media tool, Buffer lets you schedule tweets and posts in advance. This tool can work with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and even LinkedIn. Combined with a tool like Social Bro is when Buffer shines. By using the analytics data generated by Social Bro, you can schedule posts through Buffer to take place on the weekend or after work. This ensures that you do not have to change your work schedule to get content in front of your followers. Buffer also provides analytics for your tweets so you know what works and what does not.

These are five of our favorite social media tools, but many more exist. Using the above, however, will get you started on your social media campaign. This will ensure your success online and get your brand in front of a wider audience than would otherwise be possible. If this all seems a little overwhelming, just remember we are always here to help with any of your social media needs.

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Of course, you already know this. You have had the meetings, talked it over with your most trusted advisors, and you understand that trying to put your internet marketing efforts into silos will only result in failure. This is what leads to the next question: where do you start? How do you break down silos that have already been built up or, better yet, prevent the silos from being constructed in the first place? The following tips will allow you to create an integrated internet marketing plan that, in time, you will be able to turn into a fully integrated advertising strategy.

Change Begins at the Top

The first thing to remember that remember is that silos tend to be created as a way to make a steadily growing firm easier to manage. Preventing their creation, or breaking them down, requires commitment from managers. This means encouraging communication and pushing employees to step beyond their defined roles and show initiative. Team structure should be built around this group dynamic instead of splitting off teams into hyper-specialized roles. This degree of specialization may yield objectively better results, but said results will likely end up being subjectively worthless for your business objectives.

Furthermore, the design of silos is such that, even if those occupying them recognize a problem, they are powerless to tear them down on their initiative. As a consequence, if they have already been established it is up to management to bring them down.

Have a Unifying Plan

A business still needs to have all parties moving in the same direction. This is true regardless of how big your company is. Without that unifying vision, everybody is left pulling in a variety of different directions, and nobody is entirely sure where they are supposed to be going. In internet marketing, this is even more important, as you want to create a unifying tone across multiple platforms. Most people have multiple social media accounts, browse blogs, and consume wide varieties of content in numerous ways. If they get crossed messages across these various platforms, it could easily confuse your consumer.

Having a transparent strategy will allow everybody from the top to the bottom to know what they are supposed to be doing at any given moment. This also creates a clear sense of what other individuals outside of a particular specialty will be doing as well. Without this communication, your blog writer will end up writing content that doesn’t mesh with your social media audience. You can get far more reach when both your content creators and your social media managers (to name one example though this dynamic exists across multiple specialties) are both working to the same ends.

Incentivize Teamwork and Initiative

Remember that the various specialties in your internet marketing department all work with and complement one another. The whole point of this article is to break down silos, yet it is easy for employees to feel confined to those silos and focus on just doing their one job regardless. As such, provide incentives to those employees who break out from their traditional role and take on more responsibility than their job title would otherwise demand. You should also reward initiative, those employees who do things that need to be done without having to be prompted.

An example of rewarding teamwork and effort in the marketing space, for example, would be if somebody in your internet marketing department comes up with an idea for a campaign that asks users to solve a puzzle that requires them to go offline as well. If that employee then goes to the other specialists in your marketing team and arranges for the offline components to be put into play and assembles the pitch on his own to management to release the funds for the project, then a reward is in order.

Furthermore, to prevent individuals from hogging the glory, your best bet would be to provide these rewards to the entire team. Pay particular recognition to those who stand out, but the last thing you want is for employees to start undercutting those who have brilliant ideas in a way to benefit themselves at the expense of others – this would act as a disincentive to taking initiative.

Reorganize Your Teams

Any attempt at breaking down silos will require a reorganization of your teams. If you still have a team solely consisting of social media experts, a group solely of SEO experts, and another team solely of content marketers then the silo effect will be inevitable. As such, it is essential to mix up your teams.

Resist the urge to lump people together by job description. Instead, have teams consisting of a marketing manager and a specialist for each channel within that team, and encourage these groups to work with one another. Your internet marketing efforts are not a series of tubes; it is a combined effort of many parts moving towards a common end.

Quantify the Results

Attempting to break own silos built up over time in your internet marketing department requires justification of the time invested. Make sure you quantify results after implementing this re-organization. This is also essential for attempting to reward teams that work well together; you have to be able to quantify their results and justify any rewards given.

Successfully quantifying the results of each group does require knowledge of what your marketing objectives are and what goal each team should be trying to fulfill. It also helps to have clear, realistic standards for each team to meet.

In the end, trying to break down silos in your internet marketing efforts is no easy feat. It requires dedication and patience, and no small investment of time. If you are starting small and do not have silos built up, you are in a better position than those who have already created them. In either event, this guide should help you to break down silos in your internet marketing efforts, or at the very least provide organizational tips to prevent those silos from being built in the first place. You can also find further resources on this matter through sites such as Marketing Land and Forbes.

The post Internet Marketing Has no Silos: How to Get Rid of Them appeared first on Rank Executives.

Given the potential for profits, as evidenced by this and additional data (much of which can be found at the Cause Marketing Forum), it is clear why most businesses would invest in cause marketing. Of course, it is not without risk, and appearing to be insincere may turn off your customers or at least irritate them. A perfect example of a cause marketing failure would be the Starbucks Race Together campaign back in March, one which ended up backfiring spectacularly. The last thing any company wants is to start a campaign that is not only ineffective, but the only response is condemnation. As such, making sure you look sincere is important. Otherwise, you’ll end up a lot like Starbucks. Here are some steps to take to make sure that if you engage in a cause marketing campaign, it sounds sincere.

Mesh the Cause with Company Culture

Go through your company and ask yourself: does your company culture reflect the cause you want to support? For smaller businesses a little hypocrisy can be covered up, but a larger company with more eyes on it will have to go over every detail related to the cause with a fine tooth comb. If your attempt at cause marketing appears hypocritical, people will call you out on it. It is not just a matter of data of course – speak with your employees and get to know them. Find out how they feel about it and look at demographics data, age data, and more information to ensure consistency.

Tying into this is the old saying “practice what you preach”. Remember that every cause supports a particular course of action or lifestyle, and if you are going to join in a cause be sure you incentivize those actions or that way of life. Nobody is going to blame you if your employees refuse to jump in, but you can offset accusations of hypocrisy or hopping on the bandwagon by providing incentives for the desired behavior.

If your company sells hunting supplies and employs hunters as one example, giving to an organization like ASPCA or PETA would appear very hypocritical and inconsistent. If you claim to support our troops, put that into practice by hiring military veterans. Furthermore, make sure that company events, if they do not tie this cause in, at least do not contradict it.

Related to company culture is understanding your business’s history. No business can make a complete 180-degree turn on a topic overnight and be believed. If you wish to support a cause, and it does not mesh with current company culture, accept it will be a painstakingly slow process to get people to support you. Given that, it may be better to seek out a cause that meshes with the business as it stands today.

Do Not Simply Cut a Check

If all you do is give money and do nothing more, you are not going to see the expected returns from cause marketing. The best way to show your sincerity in a cause marketing initiative is to donate you product or service to the cause in question. Being able to give up a bit of profit is seen as easy, taking a loss on something you and your employees invested time, money, and resources into is a bit more challenging.

If your company is service oriented, resist the urge to solicit your employees to perform a service for a charity for free. You’ll get a weak response, and if you make it mandatory you will invite grumbling and low morale, which could lead to loss of employees. Furthermore, demanding employees to invest their own time and money into a cause marketing campaign while the company expends no resources does not speak to sincerity. Paying your employees to work on a charity project for free will not only demonstrate your commitment to the cause, it will probably boost morale.

In the case of a product-oriented company, again resist the urge to take a cheap route. If you have multiple variations of a product to give, find the one that best fits with the needs of the non-profit you are supporting. Even if that particular variety is more expensive than others, give it away anyway – this will again demonstrate sincerity to your observant customers.

Market the Non-Profit

You can do more than just donate your product or service, you can also donate your marketing resources as well. If the cause you support does not have much exposure, you can help to promote it through the channels and relationships you have already established. This will not only increase exposure for the cause, but also demonstrate the commitment of your company to raise awareness for whatever cause you are choosing to support.

If there is no non-profit organization (or none that seem trustworthy) supporting the cause, you can also form one of your own and commit marketing resources to that group.

Do Your Research

In all of the above points, there is one unspoken rule that should guide every endeavor: do your research. Most of these causes are very nuanced and have far more surrounding them than meets the eye. If a problem in the world were easy to fix, it would already be resolved. If you are going to throw your company’s weight behind fixing an issue in the world and want to seem sincere while doing it, be sure that everybody who interfaces with the public is knowledgeable about the problem.

Say you are supporting a cause trying to resolve global poverty. Understanding the nuances and causes of poverty around the world will create the impression among your consumers that you not only understand the problem, you are being effective in resolving it. The surest way to ensure lifelong loyalty when it comes to supporting a cause is to one day be able to turn around and say “we fixed it!” Most of these problems (like world hunger) will probably remain in place for centuries, but demonstrating an understanding of the challenges will at least help convince the public you are not in this merely for the financial benefits

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Everything is content. From the very article you are reading to white papers to YouTube videos, it is all content. However, if everything is content, does that not imply that everything is content marketing? The answer to that question is no. While all content has objectives, and content marketing without an objective is foolishness, there are many nuances that distinguish content marketing from other forms of marketing.

The goal of content marketing is to inform your audience, to become a resource for more than just a product. You are not merely telling them that you have a fantastic new service that is going to make their lives easier if only they fork over some of their hard-earned dollars. You are giving them your expertise (usually for free) that, over time, will likely make them as much of an expert as you are. However, the unspoken statement underlying your content is ‘you could read up and try to apply this yourself, or you can hire the people who already have this knowledge and save yourself lots of time’. Well, guess in our case, it is now a spoken statement.

However, there are many forms of marketing out there, and content marketing is just one more drop in that vast ocean of marketing tactics. What separates content marketing from all of these other forms of marketing? What are the strengths and weaknesses compared to these other forms of marketing?

Content Marketing Characteristics

There are many traits that distinguish content marketing from other forms of marketing. We will go over each of these traits in turn. Those features include flexibility, value to the reader, and permanence.

Flexibility

Out of all existing forms of marketing, content marketing is the most flexible. Content may be presented in any form that the advertiser determines is necessary for achieving their current marketing objectives. It is not just the flexibility in the types of content, but in the way you distribute that content. Rather than confining yourself to specific platforms or timeslots, you are free to distribute the content as you please because the content is yours.

While you want to avoid duplicate content, nothing bars you from sending out a useful document via e-mail, then publishing that same documentation on your website, then promoting it on social media. This allows you to adapt to the market, and let your content go where your users are.

Value to the Reader

This is the most important aspect of content marketing. A good campaign will deliver high value to the reader, making it so that they do not just tolerate consuming your content: they want to consume it. A good content marketing campaign will offer consistent, regular value to the reader in the form of information, or even amusement. As a consequence, a well-executed content marketing campaign will not only be accepted by your target audience, they will seek out this content and share it with friends.

With other forms of advertising like website banner ads, even if you have impressions that does not mean you are getting sales. In fact, it is hard to measure how many true “impressions” an advertisement has received. Sure, you can count how often it was loaded on a person’s web browser, but who is to say the person even saw it? I recall seeing a heat tracking that chart for a web page that had banner ads in the columns and it showed how people were all over the content, but ignored the banners.

Great content offers great value to its reader, and the reader will consume it without any additional prodding. This is one of the factors that makes content marketing stand out from the rest.

Permanence

Most forms of marketing are temporary, ephemeral things. They last only for the duration of a timeslot on TV, or for as long as there is money in your pay-per-click account. This means, no matter how great your ad is, if your market does not show up to view it at the exact time it is made available, they may never see it. This frustration is something that content marketing does not have to deal with, especially in the online space.

Every piece of content produced, as I have stated before, lasts forever. Admittedly this is something of a double-edged sword: if your content is bad, your humiliation is eternal. However, if you do it right, this means that content will continue to deliver conversions throughout its entire life. There is still a “maximum effective lifespan” for any piece of content you create: people are not going to go digging for a ten-year-old article unless it happened to go viral. Regardless, so long as people find your content relevant, they will keep sharing it, giving it exposure far beyond what other forms of marketing can deliver.

Content Marketing and Other Marketing Forms

While knowing the hallmarks of content marketing is important, one must understand how it is different from the other forms of marketing that exist on today, and where its strengths and weaknesses lie. To help with this, we will compare content marketing briefly to Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and traditional marketing channels such as television.

Content Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing

There is a whole lot of overlap between content marketing and social media. In fact, social media is an essential component of any content marketing strategy. Social media should be one of the primary methods by which you distribute content. However, you will sometimes be doing things with social media that do not tie into a content marketing campaign (such as customer service and responding to tweets). By the same token, you will sometimes have content that, while engaging, does not fit with any of the social media platforms you have a presence on (whitepapers being a good example). Here are the strengths and weaknesses of social media as it relates to content marketing:

Strengths:

• Dynamic and able to rapidly disseminate information as it becomes available
• Rapid response and instant feedback
• Flexible: supports a wide variety of content
• Shareable: good posts can be shared by your audience with a single mouse click

Weaknesses:

• Greater time sensitivity: easy for a tweet sent at the wrong time to get lost in the newsfeeds of your audience
• Lots of noise – everybody is on social media, making it difficult to stand out.
• Some platforms are more specialized or require unique approaches compared to others, increasing the potential learning curve
• Some platforms (such as Twitter) do not have strong analytics support, making it hard to quantify the impact of social media on your marketing efforts.

Content Marketing vs. Search Engine Optimization

SEO will also be a part of your content marketing campaign, but as with Social Media they have different approaches. SEO concerns itself with making sure the content you create is easily crawled by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. As a consequence, your rankings will improve, and traffic will be driven to your site, with the traffic becoming sales if your website is optimized for conversions. While there is much overlap here as well, there are strengths and weaknesses that SEO has compared to content that are as follows:

Strengths:

• Drives traffic that is looking to buy based on keywords
• Greatly increases visibility
• Faster than content marketing, though takes time to see results still

Weaknesses:

• Does not offer direct value to user
• Only works on goods and services that users know exist
• Full-time maintenance to check backlinks and update site

Content Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

We’ve just been focused on web marketing thus far, but for bigger brands with bigger budgets, the question becomes how content marketing compares to traditional marketing channels. Television, radio, and billboards have all been standbys for decades. So how does content marketing compare to these old classics? Here are the strengths and weaknesses of traditional marketing as it compares to content marketing:

Strengths:

• Able to reach a much wider audience
• Captive audience – if a television ad runs during a popular show it is almost certain to be seen

Weaknesses:

• Hard to measure and correlate a television campaign to results
• Expensive both for a good timeslot and to produce the commercial

Hopefully, this article has shed some light on what makes content marketing stand out compared to other forms of marketing. It is a truly unique way to get a person to buy your product, and one that is well worth the investment. Of course, it is not perfect, and any effective marketing campaign will make use of a combination of channels and tactics to get their content out there.

The post Content Marketing: What’s the Difference? appeared first on Rank Executives.

Go to google and type in “marketing to” without hitting return. What is the first suggestion to pop up? It is almost certainly “marketing to millennials”, and running the search populates plenty of articles (and an entire website) promising to help you capture this coveted demographic. As a millennial and a marketer, I always find it amusing when I read articles that claim to know what it is that makes me want to buy from somebody. Though, as our generation enters into careers and can finally start being heard regarding what we want, the traditional attitudes in marketing and the workplace are beginning to change. This article on Entrepreneur is a good example of this.

In this article, I’m going to take things a step further and make a suggestion I am sure veteran marketers will balk at: get rid of the “millennial” demographic, just drop it from your reporting and strategies entirely. Quit worrying about getting “18 – 32-year-olds” and instead focus on getting in touch with “people”. This article will explain why trying to hit this broad category just does not work the way it used to, and help you make a better buyer persona going forward.

We’re Too Independent

Sit down and try to imagine who a Millennial is, what that person does. There are some things that are fairly common: generally more accepting of things like gay marriage, and we are more adept with computers, but that is not enough to understand how to market to a person. You need a sense of how they communicate, how a person spends their free time, and what their day to day life is like.

Let’s take video games for example: most of us do, in fact, enjoy playing video games. In fact, according to an article by Forbes, roughly 57% of Millennials play video games at least three times a week. However… that still leaves 43% of this generation out of the equation. Furthermore, as gamers such as myself will tell you, discovering that people play video games three times a week is like discovering that people TV three times a week. It tells you the exposure is there but tells you nothing about the consumer itself. Video games, after all, constitutes a variety of genres such as puzzle games, fighting games, role-playing, first person shooters, action games, adventure games, and more! As such, that statistic is worthless in your marketing efforts (unless you are trying to justify video game product placement or advertising of some kind).

That is just one example of how independent Millennials are. I can speak for myself and say what it would take to sell to me, but what works for me does not work for many of my coworkers (a workforce composed almost exclusively of Millennials). You might be able to figure out where to find us, but don’t waste time pretending you will know ALL of us – we are all unique and have our own ways of looking at the world.

We Know Your Tricks

There is a reason content marketing and other forms of online advertising that do not look like the advertising of old have started to take off. This is because we grew up watching TV and browsing the net, and we know what ads look like. We are familiar with popular brands, we are familiar with their messages and how they phrase things. Most Millennials might not know what a “call-to-action” is, but you describe it once, and they will be able to point it out in every commercial they have ever seen. We know what marketers are doing, and we have grown weary of these tricks. This is what makes content marketing important – because it does not look like advertising and, when done right, looks like something interesting that people might actually want to read.

Many of us automatically shut down when we see something that looks like a sales pitch. Granted, when shopping we expect the sales pitch at some point, but many of us demand authenticity from that pitch. If we feel like we just walked onto a used car lot, we are not going to trust you. Once that trust is lost, there is little you can do to win it back. If it seems like you are just trying to reach out to our generation with the same old tactics, only somehow “updated” to look more “hip”, at best we’ll share the ad as an example of what not to do.

We Hate Being Controlled

This is something that employers are starting to learn about Millennials in the workforce: that we like to feel like we are in control. Contracts, restrictions, obligations and anything that makes us feel like you want to dictate our actions is the surest way to alienate a Millennial. The note about independence above is not just regarding our lack of uniformity, but also an aversion to being dictated to. When advertising behaves as compulsion rather than suggestion, it stops working. In fact, it may have the opposite effect and turn us off from that brand.

What to do About It

OK, so you know what not to do, you know that trying to target Millennials directly is a bad idea. So what can you do about it? What is a better way to go about this? My suggestion is that you first drop the “age” section from your buyer personas if you are still using that. Many techniques that work on Millennials will work on other demographics as well and can be adapted to traditional mediums. Here are a few ideas in that regard.

Think Personalities, not Demographics

Remember that they are called “buyer PERSONAS,” not “buyer statistics.” Instead of saying you are targeting, for example, Hispanic males aged 18 – 34, focus on personalities and professions. Income is a good measure since your product does carry a price, and $100 represents something different for different income brackets. However, what you really want are personalities, you need your persona to get into the head of your consumer and learn how your target audience makes decisions.

Here is an example of how you might break down your target audience using this approach:

“Our market is highly rational and logical. They are not interested in emotional appeals and want to know what we offer, how it solves their problem, and what makes their problem worth the money we are demanding to solve it. They are not looking for a big cause to push them into a sale, but if they hear we spend our money towards nefarious ends they are unlikely to buy. They will evaluate the value of the product based on how many hours of work the price tag represents to them, how many hours a day they spend dealing with a given aggravation, and how easy it is to ignore the problem.”

The above paints a clear picture of what you need to do to capture that person’s attention and get them to buy. Based on the above, you probably can get away with a simple breakdown of features and basic reputation management. Now consider this next possible market:

“Our market is prone to flights of fancy, greatly concerned with their health. Suggestible, tends to believe the first thing they read. They want their every dollar to help some big cause, and make purchasing decisions based on charities a company donates to. Very price sensitive, looking for a bargain even if they do not offer all the features they desire.”

These two summaries are very different, and obviously for very different products targeting very different customers. However, is there anything about these summaries that suggest a race, age group, or profession? The fact is, a marketing campaign that concerns itself with age or race is missing a critical part of what makes us human: our personality.

Be Genuine

When you are producing your advertising materials, be genuine and honest. If your ad copy makes you sound like a salesman, you will lose the trust of your target audience, and they go to somebody else. Remember that before they buy your product, your customers only have your word that their problems will be solved by what you provide.

Another way to sound more genuine is to inject a little humor, perhaps some of it self-depreciating. There is a fine line between sounding humble and sounding incompetent. Only dip into a self-depreciating style if you are confident you can pull it off without looking like you do not know what you are doing. The best guideline I can offer, in general, is to write the first draft in the same way you speak. You can worry about making it read well in the editing phase, and if you do your editing right you will find the balance between sounding stuffy and sounding too casual.

Offer Freedom

Above all else, make it clear that the consumer is in control of their decisions, not you. Even the illusion of freedom can go a long way towards people preferring you over another brand. If somebody wishes to unsubscribe from your newsletters: make it easy for them to do so. Make your guest checkouts (if applicable) as easy and intuitive as checkouts for a registered guest. If you offer a service, do not make that service confining or restrictive, offer people something that they can easily integrate into their everyday life.

Above all else, avoid compulsion. If you try to compel people to buy, you may get a few sales, but as soon as they realize they do not NEED what you are offering, they will go to a competitor who offers greater freedom. Your terms of service should not be a straitjacket, and should instead allow the consumer to do what they want – even if you do not particularly like that course of action. Now, you can encourage action by demonstrating the benefits of doing what you want, but always leave the final decision up to your customer.

When you get right down to it, the trick to marketing these days is to have a product that solves a problem your customers are having, and does it better than the competition, then showing your product in action. This fundamental principle of business survives while all others come and go, and that is something that should stand true in your marketing efforts. Don’t worry about targeting age groups, instead target people. Focus your marketing efforts on those ideal customers to start, and then worry about the rest when you can afford to implement targeted, personal approaches.

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