Get a sneak peek at the MarTech keynotes!

I’m excited to reveal our first two keynote speakers: Mike Volpe, CEO at Lola.com, and Cesar Brea, Partner at Bain & Co.

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Here’s how to stand out in a crowded streaming service market

Some automation across digital platforms has eased the burden of manual labor when marketing extensive streaming video-on-demand inventory.

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Marketing to the managed inbox: Why digital marketers need to own deliverability

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SMX Advanced is next week. Don’t miss out!

This is your chance to learn actionable SEO and SEM tactics from a community of brilliant search marketers. Join us in Seattle June 3-5!

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Consumer study finds ‘personalization’ lowest on long list of retailer considerations

Consumer behavior may not be what you think it is.

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Foursquare buys Placed from Snap to create location-measurement powerhouse

The company said the move advances its goal “to become the world’s most trusted, independent location technology platform.”

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New B2B Marketing Research, LinkedIn Sales Navigator & Ad Transparency Updates, Using AI Wisely, & US Digital Ads Top $100B

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What will happen to influencer marketing if Instagram ‘Likes’ go away?

Instagram recently tested eliminating “Like” counts on posts, a move that would likely empower influencer marketing agencies.

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Emotion and Empathy: The Storytelling Keys to Content Marketing

People, of course, love storytelling. It holds them their interest and makes learning easier and more intuitive. 

How does this relate to marketing. Well, storytelling is the very essence of content marketing. You are telling the story of your brand and what it can do for customers. 

Strategic Storytelling

Storytelling helps content marketers:

• Sell or market
• Share customer successes
• Create a sense of urgency
• Educate, coach, and mentor
• Entertain and amuse
• Energize, inspire, and spur to action

What matters in storytelling and marketing is how you make people feel and what impression you leave them with. It can shape their image of your brand in people's minds and have your audience associate it with strong emotions that provoke them to action. 

Great storytelling relies upon emotion. It can make something that should be dull sing or make what sounds trivial seem epic and important. Empathy is the key. We all connect and feel for each other. By using content marketing to forge an emotional bond with your customers, you become more likely to earn their brand loyalty.

Marketing is a conversation, and conversations almost always include storytelling. Look at it strategically. 

• What emotions are you looking to stir with your content?
• Are you looking to educate your audience?
• Inspire or energize them?
• Are you informing them about the latest industry trends or software updates?

Storytelling can help with all of that. 

Put together a strategy of what you want to achieve and how your content marketing can accomplish that.

How do you know how well you are doing?

Some customers might give you direct feedback, but you can always rely on your metrics and data to see if you have properly gauged what works with your customers.

Important Things to Remember about Storytelling

When it comes to content marketing and storytelling, it does not always have to come down to just written content. You have a variety of mediums to use and see which better suits your audience. You might try videos, podcasts, songs, demos, and more. And, written content can come in many forms: 

• Emails
• Landing pages
• Ebooks
• White papers
• Text messages
• Social media posts
• Newsletters
• Scripts
• And more

Do not limit your imagination and thinking. Let your metrics, instincts, and strategy guide you toward the content forms that will work best for your audience and business needs.

As such, don't think that you need to be doing B2C to harness the power of emotion and it isn't right for B2B. Sometimes, you might be dealing with a mix of B2C and B2B, especially with the line between them blurring all the time. Besides, there is room for emotion in B2B, even if you are only pointing out how your brand can help make someone's life and job easier and aid them in achieving success. Ambition, having goals, wanting to do better at your endeavors, and relieving stress are all emotional things. Feel free to tell a story about them. 

Also of importance, remember that you can have the best content in the world, but it will mean nothing if its presentation is bad. So, your content, regardless of its form, needs to be easy to read, understand, listen to, see, and engage with.

What Goes into Every Story

Empathy makes us care for others and the people in stories. We understand and sympathize with them. We see ourselves in them. That allows emotions to stir us up and makes us understand the lesson or message you want to impart and causes us to take the action you wish us to.

Thus, empathy and emotion must go into every story. They make good stories great and more memorable, and make content marketing more effective and powerful.

                                                     

Find out more about the usefulness of storytelling and emotion in content creation and how they create a softer sell with “The Art of the Soft Sell in Content Creation and Inbound Marketing.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Qualtrics and Adobe add new integration for improved data and customer experiences

New extension seeks to help digital marketers better understand consumer behavior to improve digital experiences.

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3 Ways to Create an Effective Content Brainstorming Dashboard

I am a huge believer in content. Providing great trendy content is by the most reliable and efficient way to market your site. No wonder many Internet marketing companies are switching to various content marketing services.

However producing great content on a regular basis may be overwhelming (and as many people believe, impossible). Coming up with new and new great and popular article ideas is something we are all struggling with. Therefore organizing and streamlining your brainstorming process is so important.

I have come up with three efficient ways to create a content brainstorming dashboard (feel free to try them and stick to any or all):

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Content Brainstorming Dashboard #1: Keyword Dashboard

I am not going to lie: My major source of inspiration is keyword research. Maybe it’s because of an SEO background but I have yet to find a more effective content inspiration source than the actual search queries.

There are lots of tools to research keywords we listed previously: Simply run all / any of them and create a unified spreadsheet to copy-paste everything into one document.

So how to use this list for brainstorming.

Here we turn to keyword clustering technique, that is grouping key phrases by meaning. I described the technique in much detail here.

Serpstat is a great tool to create a keyword dashboard:

Serpstat identifies related keywords by looking at Google SERPs for each query and identifying those queries that trigger overlapping URLs.

You can choose between soft and hard clustering to determine how closely related terms should be within one group. And you can change the relevancy setting any time after your cluster is created.

To get into more detail about how the tool works, read this article describing their method.

Once I create my cluster breaking my keyword lists into actual article topics, I always run the tool called Text Optimizer that extracts related terms from Google search snippets and allows you to build more varied and comprehensive content:

You can create a nice PDF export of this dashboard and send to your content researcher or writer. This tool works wonders for improving content quality.

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Content Brainstorming Dashboard #2: Aggregate and Filter Your Sources

We all have some individual sources of inspiration. The most well-known are:

1. Buzzfeed

Find the hottest trending stories that are being shared all over the social networking spectrum here. They have several ways of finding content. The first is seeing the most popular on the front page. Then you can go by category, like Politics, Tech, Lifestyle, Sports, Animals, What’s Hot and More. Above that are more specific items, under LOL, WIN, OMG, Cute, Geeks, Trashy, FAIL and WTF.

2. Tech Meme

Known as the first to often catch any technology related news, especially where it is trending, Tech Meme is one of the most popular sites that is still rarely talked about. You can see top news or what is newly released. The format is really simple, and they have a search bar if you find you need something specific. One useful element is a ranked list of their top sources, which is worth checking out.

3. Lifehacker, MakeUseOf and Digital Inspiration

I am a tool gal, so it’s quite natural that I love tracking the above sites for new tool reviews and round-ups. There are other numerous options here but I have found the above three quite exhaustive.

4. Visual.ly

If there’s anything hot under the sun, chances are, it’s been already “infographed”. Tracking new infographics is one of the best ways to come up with cool content ideas (especially round-ups). Besides, infographics are created for re-publishing, so re-using them is not only legit but highly encouraged.

Again, quite a few options here, but I like Visual.ly because they have a very handy RSS feed that displays an infograph thumbnail and short description.

Obviously, you can have your own sources depending on your niche. The above ones were picked because they are more or less niche-less, so writers in any vertical may find them useful.

So now that we have determined the sources, let’s aggregate them!

Buzzsumo has a great feature called “Trending” that delivers you daily updates from your chosen categories but you can also set up your own dashboard inside it by simply listing your favorite domains:

Buzzsumo will also generate some additional info for each story inside your dashboard (virality, social media spread, etc.) making it much easier to monitor.

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Content Brainstorming Dashboard #3: Trend Tracking

Trend tracking is a must if you are into content marketing.

The Internet is a whirlpool of information. Graphs, memes, articles, whole books, movies and albums, shopping carts, pictures, personal comments list goes on and on. Most of the stuff on the web you will never see, much less use. It is constantly updated and often what is posted will become obsolete within days, even hours.

There is just too much to shift through, and blind searches aren’t helpful. Endless supplies of topics will leave random search attempts for the sake of finding trends an empty endeavor.

Having a list of trend tracking tools by hand when you are stuck will improve your content brainstorming productivity. When trying to come up with a good post idea, try visiting one of these trend tracking dashboards:

1. Google Trends – One of the most well-known and used sites for this purpose, Google Trends gives you an easy to understand look at what is hot right now. They are all based on what is being searched for most at the moment through the engine. When you select one of the search terms, it takes you to a collection of stories on the topic. You can also see more terms, and search out anything else.
2. Trendsmap – Sometimes what you need to brainstorm is simply to switch to a completely new layout. Want to know what is being posted on Twitter based on the location of the tweeter? This is a real-time map that takes trending topics and shows them based on where it is most commonly being shared. You can see what is being talked about all over the world.
3. Reddit – The ultimate source of user-generated discussions, both sad and funny, Reddit is a must when it comes to being aware what is going on around the web.

You can use Buzzsumo to aggregate your favorite sources. You can also use this spreadsheet: The brainstorming spreadsheet aggregates search results from the following sources:

• Google News;
• Reddit (Top)
• YouTube (Top rated)
• Twitter Trending
• Data.gov, and more.

This one is already created. You don’t need to do anything except for:

• Copying it;
• Searching your copy for your keyword;
• Scanning through results for interesting ideas.

You are free to hide any of the columns if you want less (depends on your niche). Or you can edit your sources.

Further reading:

• Your Ultimate Guide to Productive and Informed Content Marketing Planning
• 6 Actionable Ways to Overcome Writer’s Block Now
• How to Build an Asset Creation and Promotion Strategy to Set up Steady Traffic Sources

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Conclusion

Traditionally we think that the creative process is counter-productive. You need time to brainstorm. In today’s world most of us don’t have time at all but we brainstorm a lot. How do you increase your brainstorming creativity? Please share your ideas in the comments!

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From martech silos to an omnichannel stack

Here are three key technology buyer considerations when making the transition to a true omnichannel stack.

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What It Takes to Launch the Next Great Blog, Podcast, or Video Channel

This week, we had some resources for any new, ambitious content-based project you want to get off the ground. (Or...

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Maintaining Your Focus: What B2B Marketers Can Learn From My Home Improvement Snafu

The sweet smell of fresh cedar is wafting in the breeze around my homestead this week—along with hint of marketing inspiration. Let me explain …

Best-Laid Plans

To take advantage of a long holiday weekend and a string of dry-weather days, my darling husband and I embarked on a “small” home improvement project: Sanding and staining our recently built 16-by-16 deck—plus an intricate one-story staircase. She was such a beauty following her construction last fall. But as is tradition, a delightfully heinous Minnesota winter set in. When spring arrived, she looked weary and weathered. For months, we prepared to offer ourselves up to the cause once warmer weather came. And with the help of how-to YouTube videos and a lot of strategic Googling, our confidence and can-do attitudes were on the rise. When that fateful weekend arrived, we weren’t so naïve to think this project would be easy—it would take time, attention to detail, teamwork, and a bit of strategy to do it right. We didn’t fancy ourselves skilled craftsmen, rather capable apprentices who knew how to wield a sander and paint brush. We were ready. But in accordance with the prophecy of best-laid plans, things quickly went awry. From seemingly unavoidable inefficiencies to tool malfunctions to weather miscalculations, what started as a one-day-tops project has officially spiraled into a multiple weekend ordeal. We were worn down and frustrated, not knowing exactly what to do at times. Do you see what I’m getting at, B2B marketers?

Facing Failure

The frustration and disappointment that comes with falling down on what you thought was a well-planned or strategically innovative initiative is something every B2B marketer has had to face. Maybe you’ve gotten buy-in on an influencer marketing initiative and determined a few weeks in that you don’t have the bandwidth, niche expertise, tools, or timeline to execute effectively. Perhaps you’ve invested a sizeable portion of your budget in a marketing automation tool only to discover you lack the integrations, process documentation, or internal resources to get it fully off the ground. Or more simply, a tried-and-true tactic isn’t driving the results it used to—and you may not even know why. Regardless of the situation, the anxiety and emotion you feel can make it incredibly difficult to gain the perspective you need to quickly pivot your approach. So, how do you accept what’s happened and move ahead with ambition and confidence?

Finding Focus

When small or seemingly insurmountable challenges arise, success is directly tied to our ability to keep our eye on the prize: The goals or outcomes we hope to achieve. With our objectives in focus, we can rely on our smarts and experience (and perhaps even a little insight and help from a agency trusted partner) to guide the most effective tactics that come next. Frankly, after just one hour of sanding, we knew it was going to get ugly if we didn’t adapt to the reality of the situation. That said, it took us a full three hours to fully accept our fate, and refine our approach and reset our expectations. Through repeated equipment failures, four extra trips to two different hardware stores, and now being the proud owners of four sanders of varying sizes, the sanding is complete and the staining is planned for the next string of sunny days. Here she is after 20 hours of sanding—a near spitting image of her original glory last fall: So, remember this B2B marketers: You have a lot on your plate and things don't always go as planned. From creating relevant, engaging content on unsexy subject matter to contending with increasing competition, buyer distrust, and long sales cycles, B2B marketing is no cake walk—it’s an endless work in progress. However, with a steadfast focus on your end-goal, there’s no such thing as failure, just another opportunity to get it right. [bctt tweet="With a steadfast focus on your end-goal, there’s no such thing as failure, just another opportunity to get it right. @CaitlinMBurgess #B2BMarketing" username="toprank"] Looking for more crafty inspiration? Check out our post on three “real-life” tools that need to be staples in your B2B content marketing toolbox.

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