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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 StorytellingStorytelling helps content marketers:
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.
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 StorytellingWhen 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:
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 StoryEmpathy 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.”
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):
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.
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.
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:
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:
This one is already created. You don’t need to do anything except for:
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:
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!
The post 3 Ways to Create an Effective Content Brainstorming Dashboard appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.
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