We understand your frustration. We also know how to guide you along a content marketing strategy that will get your message in front of the right people. A useful starting point is the realisation that the challenges your business faces are not unique. Major reports, such as the Content Marketing Institute’s recent B2B Small Business Content Marketing: 2013 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends – North America, reveal that B2B marketers face similar issues globally.

Challenge #1: Engagement

Over half (54%) of small businesses feel challenged by producing the type of content that engages people, with 21% citing this as their single biggest challenge. Encouragingly, this suggests that marketers are prioritising quality over quantity, and rightly so; prospects who engage with a company’s content are far more likely to go on to initiate a relationship with the organisation.

Solution: Initially, you’ll need to work on your company’s definition of engagement, then go on to create a set of metrics around that. For instance, some businesses value email subscriptions, as subscribers often go on to attend events and convert, while others will have found that LinkedIn interactions generate leads for them. Measure your defined metrics continually to determine which types of content, and placed where, yield the best results.

Challenge #2: Volume

A significant 64% of small businesses are challenged by producing enough content, while around a quarter (26%) perceive quantity as their biggest challenge.

Solution: Of course, more does not equal better. As mentioned in the point above, quality is key in the realm of content. That said, there does need to be a consistent flow of content to achieve results. As such, there are ways to be clever around content that will both free up marketing resources and maximise the value of each piece produced.

These are: producing evergreen content (ie. perennial themes that can be swiftly updated), curating content (sharing great stuff already put out there by your own organisation or other valued content creators) and thirdly, repurposing content (reworking existing content into new formats to extend its lifecycle).

Challenge #3: Budget

Interestingly, nearly half (48%) of marketers at large/enterprise businesses feel challenged by lack of budget, as compared to just 38% of small business marketers. This could well be because enterprise marketers have to work harder to get buy-in, often needing to jump through more internal hoops to get budgets approved and signed off. Furthermore, small business marketers may just be more familiar with having to be resourceful in their content efforts due to perennially tighter budgets.

Solution: Lack of buy-in and/or vision from the top is a common root cause of budget constraints. To tackle this thorny issue, draft up a coherent presentation to show the potential ROI of content marketing activity to justify the costs involved. Compared to PPC activity, content marketing yields high returns, and can become an organisation’s most efficient lead generation channel when planned effectively. While written for the US market, this ebook by Kapost and Eloqua on Content Marketing ROI usefully breaks down the cost per lead of content efforts to help make the case to the board.

Over to You

What is the greatest single challenge your business faces when it comes to content marketing? What approach do you take, if any, to overcome the issue?

The latest figures from ComScore show that during March 2013, some 182.5 million Americans watched 39.3 billion online content videos during that month alone, surpassing the 13 billion ad views threshold for the first time. That’s a lot of eyeballs hungry for video, and a tremendous opportunity for businesses to create quality content for their target audiences.

It’s all in the timing

When it comes down to it, people are busy. In the age of the lunch hour meaning a quick sandwich taken at the desk, people need their content similarly snackable and easily digestible. The fact is, most people would rather spend two minutes watching an information-rich video than ten minutes reading an article.

As such, video is the perfect medium for your company to quickly and clearly communicate its message and explain why your target audience should do business with you. What’s more, video is an ideal way to build links back to your own site.

The video search opportunity

Video search results are favoured by web surfers – a study by aimClear stated that videos in universal search results have a 41% higher click-through rate than plain text results.

Maximise the exposure of your video content by taking advantage of the less competitive ‘video’ search on Google. To illustrate, you may have noticed that when you search for your corporate video content on Google using the ‘Everything’ search option, your company doesn’t even make it onto the first page of results. However, when you perform the same search using the ‘Videos’ option, your company may soar into a top ten position.

While video search remains a less cluttered space, take advantage by creating the best videos on your niche. Remember though, that Google prioritises content-led video over video ads, so keep quality and information front of mind when developing videos.

Where to place online video

Your own corporate website is the obvious starting place for any video content, but to truly maximise its SEO benefits, you’ll want to place video content extensively across the appropriate social channels.

YouTube is still considered the cornerstone of video SEO strategies. As well as being among the top three social media channels, YouTube is regularly ranked among the top three most visited websites overall in the US. As such, 42% of companies name YouTube within their top three priorities for social media activity.

But while YouTube is the reigning king of mass online video consumption, there are still plenty more outlets where you should consider distributing your video content, including: Facebook, Vimeo, LinkedIn, DailyMotion, Metacafe and Google+. Of course, the channels chosen will always depend on the type of video in question and the target audience.

How to post video content

When posting to any web property, be sure to correctly title and tag videos. It sounds like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many video titles are stuffed with typos or completely untagged. These options exist to make video easier to discover, so enable any search and sharing features available.

As a guide, always think customers first, search engines second. Only when you offer true value to your customers will you be rewarded with good search engine rankings and the ensuing link-sharing and revenue-boosting opportunities.

In summary

Essentially, search engines exist to bring searchers the data most relevant to their query. Inbound links help the search engines to determine the relevancy of data. When people find your video to be valuable – whether that be in the form of information, entertainment, humour, controversy, instruction or inspiration – they are more likely to share it, fuelling linking activity.

The better your video content, the more viewers will feel compelled to share it, the better your overall online presence.

1. Tap into audience emotions

Good content informs, tells a story and leaves the reader somehow better equipped than they were before seeing it. Great content, however, does all this while eliciting a strong emotional response from its desired audience. This is the stuff that gets remembered and is more likely to forge a connection between consumer and brand.

Who’s doing it well?

SAP is one brand using digital content to effectively tap into its target market’s emotions. And to great success. Its innovative Love Hate Data campaign, for example, invited its audience to identify as either data haters or data lovers. The effort included a microsite, infographics, blog posts and two Twitter accounts with the handles @datalovers and @datahaters.

Created to promote SAP’s entry-level business intelligence tool, Crystal Solutions, this campaign sparked more than 700 conversations online and generated 580,902 impressions.

2. Create multimedia content

The beauty of content marketing is the significant potential to tell a richer story and engage more meaningfully in a range of text-based, visual and audio formats. When combined, different formats can serve an audience’s information needs really attentively.

Who’s doing it well?

Naturally, educational institutions would be missing a trick if they didn’t use content to teach their audience something about their offer. Video is the perfect medium for bringing concepts and processes to life, therefore illuminating the teaching methods used.

Open University supports its video marketing on YouTube with extensive podcasting activity. OU was, in fact, the first British university to create a YouTube channel. Its performance is strong, with some 45,000 subscribers and over 12 million views to date on its main channel.

In a savvy move, OU also channels its efforts into podcasting to reach both existing and potential students in a format they could enjoy on the go. It also supports its content marketing strategy with social content optimisation, and now boasts a network of 96,000 fans on Facebook and well over 59,000 Twitter followers.

3. Bolster video with written and visual content

When a piece of video marketing content goes viral, the first thing to do is to celebrate. This should, however, be swiftly followed up with supporting content activity to encourage further social sharing and favourable brand exposure.

Who’s doing it well?

US-based glass and ceramics manufacturer Corning enjoyed huge viral success with its A Day Made of Glass video, which attracted more than 21 million views on YouTube.

The video was launched at the company’s annual Investor Day in New York on 4th February 2011. By late April 2011 it had racked up 12 million YouTube views. But rather than resting on their laurels, the marketers at Corning created a dedicated page on its corporate website about the video, with additional complementary written content.

Tapping perfectly into the popularity of social image sharing, Corning also developed a series of images that fans could easily share via social networks, and supported this approach with PR activity.

What’s more, Corning’s sequel, A Day Made of Glass 2, also went on to become a huge consumer success. Not bad for a video intended to create conversations with product design and R&D audiences.

The Cloud? Big Data? Both are topics being discussed a lot at the moment, but you’ll be hard pressed to find two people with identical definitions. Referencing buzzwords is fine when you’re talking to those in the know, but when it comes to reaching potential customers, it probably isn’t the right approach.

The truth is that your prospects are time-stretched and information-overloaded: can you risk demanding that they translate wording before getting to your key message? Chances are, they’ll click elsewhere at the first sniff of ‘blue sky thinking’.

Why do people use jargon?

Opinions on jargon remain divided. In the red corner stand the jargon-philes, willing to load their content marketing with enough buzzwords to make even a management consultant blush. In the blue corner stand the staunch anti-jargonists, insisting on proper command of the English language in order to convey clear messages.

As a journalist by trade, my heart leans towards the blue corner brigade. After all, what is the point of language if not to communicate clearly and effectively? Yet the content marketer within notices the ease with which I use the word ‘content’, which would surely have been considered jargon before the profileration of – let’s call a spade a spade – writing, images and the like distributed for marketing ends?

How to avoid jargon

Some might say that overuse of jargon indicates a lack of actual knowledge on a topic. After all, it’s far easier to churn out some standard clichés than to explain, in basic terms, what is being discussed.

A few starting points to avoid killing your content with jargon are:

1. Hire experienced writers to create content. Preferably, these will be experts in your niche who truly understand the sector. A good starting point is to scour bylines of relevant trade titles, the ones which your end client also reads.

2. Look to jargon-busting icons who have become leaders thanks, in some part, to their direct, accessible style of communicating. Encourage your marketing team to watch one of the late Steve Jobs’ talks on TED as an example.

3. Cut the jargon from meetings and daily working life. Think of the five examples of jargon you fall back on the most, and conjure up another way of saying the same thing in laymen’s terms. When you stop using jargon throughout the day, it will start to naturally disappear from marketing materials.

4. Keep the overall goal of your marketing efforts in mind with every piece of content produced. This might be to inform your audience to understand your product or service better, then to ultimately buy it. Then aim to drill down to this pinnacle, this core message, as clearly as possible.

Over to you

We’re all guilty of using jargon sometimes. Which buzzword are you most guilty of using and what piece of industry jargon really gets your goat?

1.Use LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn might not be the right network for every business. For marketers seeking to reach Joe Public with their messaging, we generally advise using Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to augment a blog strategy.

However, for organisations keen to increase their blog traffic and establish a thought leadership position within a given industry, LinkedIn Groups offer a hugely cost-effective channel. Reaching a targeted, business-focused audience, LinkedIn Groups also create viable commercial opportunities.

Select groups wisely to ensure your message is getting in front of the right people. For a boutique PR shop, ‘Public Relations and Communications Professionals’ would be a shrewd starting point, boasting over 250 professional members. A healthy number of members is important, but so are engagement levels as measured by numbers of comments and interactions.

Remember, every time a new blog post or article is posted to the community wall, each member with the appropriate message settings is privately emailed about your blog. That’s some extremely potent direct mail marketing to a highly targeted audience, for free. One word of caution; there is a fine line between targeted promotion and spam. Limit your blog posting to only the most relevant Groups to avoid members of multiple Groups getting blog fatigue.

2. Create Podcasts

The buzz around podcasting is nothing new. Some 45 million people download and listen to at least one podcast per month in the US alone. Furthermore, with the volume of podcasts produced remaining relatively steady since 2011, that represents a good opportunity to capture a chunk of market share for your sector (source: The State of the News Media 2012).

Podcasting is an excellent and often underused strategy for boosting blog traffic. Writing for Problogger, Chris Ducker recently revealed how he racked up 10,000 downloads via iTunes and bagged the number one spots in the “Business” and ‘Marketing Management ‘ categories in one year since launching his New Business Podcast.

His blog post offers a mine of information on setting up and publishing podcasts and is well worth a look.

Many people are intimidated by the idea of creating podcasts, thinking it will involve expensive equipment and costly production efforts. In truth, minimal equipment is needed – above all, budding podcasters will need to invest time in planning and creating content.

Blogging platform WordPress makes it simple to get going, so the question to ask is not so much ‘if’ to create a podcast, but ‘when?’

3. Add value to other industry blogs

The first component to this step is to continuously read other relevant blogs within your sector, adding value to the discussion wherever relevant.

Organisation is key when tackling the overcrowded blogosphere. Set up a Google Reader or use RSS feeds to thoroughly monitor competitor blogs. You’ll swiftly learn the valuable lesson of what topics are being discussed within your sector. Leave interesting, well thought-out comments wherever possible, adding value by offering your own perspective.

Secondly, we’ve recently discussed the value of adding guest blog posts to your own corporate blog . There’s also great value in guest blogging for other blogs. Select blogs relevant to your industry that already have a strong readership.

Over to you

These are just three of a whole host of blog boosting methods. What tactics have proved most effective in driving traffic to your business blog?

At first glance, it seems that these businesses are doing everything right:

With dedicated marketing teams in place, their websites have been upgraded with customer-centric content and active corporate blogs are in place.

Social media activity is being used to support all content posts and each is effectively sticking to the golden rules of content marketing:

1) Don’t talk incessantly about yourself

2) Provide useful information that offers value to your customers

3) Avoid product-focused content at all costs

What’s more, each marketer we spoke to was experiencing a certain level of “success” with their content efforts. Their videos were being shared on Twitter, images were being pinned on Pinterest and blog posts were re-appearing on Facebook timelines.

Yet with aforementioned best practice in place, even the most stellar content can still fail to gain traction and translate into sales. Without a coherent strategy, marketers risk creating superb standalone pieces of content that people read, enjoy and share without ever being motivated to go on to purchase.

So, here we have numerous excellent individual content assets. Each is well-written, keyword-rich and fully delivers on its promise as per its title. Alone, they each stand their ground as effective pieces of content. Yet they don’t connect to each other to create the problem-to-solution story that customers so need. With no progressing storyline, the efforts fail to guide the customer along a journey to buying.

Let’s return to the progressing storyline idea. To apply this, consider that each customer, or potential customer, is on a journey delineated by different buying stages. One’s job as content marketer is to help them make the small decisions that propel them to progress to the stage. Progress – we all need it. Your buyer needs it…your sales team need it…you need it.

The challenge then is to create content that is bespoke to each buying stage, creating the momentum required to fuel the journey along to that coveted purchase decision. Key to this is tending to buyers’ differing informational needs along the pathway to purchase.

So here it is, the big one, the secret to generating sales; content marketing requires more than a one-size-fits-all approach. Rethink your strategy to cater to the needs of your primary target persona, mapping content onto specific buying stages for maximum success.

Your sales team will thank you for directing quality leads in their direction (and for providing them with a bank of content that can be harnessed within their sales efforts), your customers will thank you, and ultimately, so will your company.

To discuss how your content strategy could generate quality leads and actual sales, call us on 0845 555 9264.

Guest posts improve your blog

As a dedicated blogger, a more useful stance is to examine how inviting guest bloggers can actually enrich your blog.

Crucially, allowing guest bloggers to post to your blog actually increases your network. Of course, it’s advisable to carefully review any blogger you’re thinking of inviting or accepting to post on your blog. The most beneficial posters will be experts in your sector or those with senior positions in companies or fields related to your blog, rather than full time bloggers. They will bring with them true expertise, and are also likely to have their own valuable following.

Grow your reach

What does this mean for you? Guest bloggers are highly likely to promote their guest posts within their own blogs, Twitter feed, LinkedIn account and so on, drawing their readers to your blog. Posting to another blog, especially if the guest is highly respected, acts as a seal of approval on said blog, laying down the welcome mat for new, high quality audience members.

If they are impressed with what they find there, the natural progression is that they will become at least semi-regular readers of your blog, if not devoted followers.

Guest posts enrich your content

You probably launched your corporate blog to develop and establish your own voice and deliver a specific set of owned messages. This is all absolutely valid, but the overriding purpose of any blog should be to provide useful, relevant and meaningful information to its readers.

All regular bloggers know only too well how challenging it can be to generate exciting, original content day in, day out. Guest bloggers allow you some breathing space and provide temporary solution to writer’s block. This not only frees up resources, allowing you to, say, spend more time tending to employee or client needs, it also ensures your blog maintains high standards.

Guest posts also offer your readers a fresh angle and set of opinions. If this feels too much like relinquishing control of your blog’s voice, remember that you can still offer your perspective via replies to comments generated by the guest post.

How to choose guest bloggers

Now that you’ve made the decision to add guest posts to your business blogging strategy, the next step is to develop a set of guidelines. These should clearly establish the benchmarks for what you will and will not accept.

As a rule, try to avoid posts that are overly short, or stuffed with back links to the author’s own blog or affiliate links. As the hosting platform, unfortunately your post will be “punished” by Google for carrying poor quality content.

With that in mind, remember that you don’t have to accept every guest blog post that you’re offered. Quality is far more crucial than quantity, so be discerning and avoid bloggers that use a scattergun approach offering poorly repurposed, link-stuffed posts far and wide. Ultimately, use your research and gut instincts when deciding whose content to publish.

You scratch my back….

The good news is that once you build a reputation for generosity in allowing other bloggers to write guest posts on your blog, you should then have more success when pitching to guest on other respected blogs – a surefire way to enhance your credentials as a thought leader in your field.

Over to you

Do you allow guest posts on your business blog? How have guest posts impacted on your blog’s visibility and performance?

While there’s clearly nothing wrong with such a strategy, promoting corporate blog activity only after posts have been published runs the risk of limiting exposure and reach. The ideal strategy strikes the perfect balance between being well-planned, yet also opportunistic.

As a guide, prolific social media and content commentator Lee Odden suggests that in order to effectively scale blog promotion efforts, around two to three times as much work should go into growing social networks as goes into linking content to them.

Building social networks can seem like a constant and largely uphill struggle, yet without this activity even the most ardently planned editorial calendar can fall foul of online invisibility.

With its content calendar established, a business then needs to consider outreach activity on the core five social networks: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest. If the corporate blog publishes a significant amount of video content, then YouTube is a logical addition to bolster a video SEO strategy.

Investment is key for ROI on blog promotion activity. Remember the old adage ‘write it and they will come’? It’s not true. Publishing even the most relevant and interesting content isn’t enough without promotion. And promotion itself is futile without an interested audience to receive it. Make network growth an early priority within your business blog strategy with a few simple steps:

1) Curate interesting content and interact with others once it’s published. Google News is a useful starting point.

2) Use a tool such as HootSuite to keep tabs on all social communities and monitor topics of relevance that encourage interactions.

3) Create lists of influential Twitter users in your sector and follow that list within HootSuite for engagement opportunities.

4) Comment and interact on other relevant blogs to create a credible footprint within your niche online community.

5) Deliver a core message and takeaway with each blog post, crafted to appeal to your target audience’s needs. Be very specific with this (for example, use a title like ’10 ways to publish a marketing e-book’ rather than ’10 ways to get published’).

As you start to get more creative with your business blog posts, the potential for promotional activity often increases. Images, embeddable media like Slideshare presentations or video offer opportunities to promote posts on YouTube, Pinterest or Flickr, along with bountiful content repurposing opportunities to attract further traffic back to the original blog post.

Daunting though blog promotional activity can seem, in many cases just sticking to two or three of the suggestions mentioned here can vastly improve the exposure and visibility of blog content.

How do you use promotional activity on social to support your business blog?

Creating unique, original content that is compelling, relevant and engaging is, of course, crucial to the content marketing agenda, yet there should also be room to share curated content that fulfils the same criteria. This will tell the story that your organisation is not ego-driven, but a well-informed and active member of its respective community. As an added bonus, it will help to broaden your content spectrum and offers a useful way to increase your overall output of quality content. Here’s how to get started as both a creator and curator:

1). Analyse and evaluate

First up is a content analysis, during which honesty is key. Does your brand blow its own trumpet that bit too often? Many marketers are completely unaware of how much “me, me, me” time their content strategy is guilty of.

Conduct an honest audit to establish if it’s time to rethink content curation by first analysing your last four weeks-worth of social shares. If more than 50% of your content links back to your own website, this suggests scope for improvement. Aim for at least 75% of your updates leading back to your site via a third party to maintain credibility with less ego.

Another method is to evaluate your ten most recent business blog posts. If the average number of links to third party web properties is the wrong side of one, it’s time to do some curating.

2). Revisit the content marketing strategy

We’re experiencing an epidemic of egotistical content marketing. To treat the symptoms, start at the beginning, by revisiting your original content marketing strategy.

When collecting and curating, always come back to those core topics and issues your brand is striving to be associated with.

Step away from the loudspeaker system, and rethink the needs of your online audience. Consider the information that is crucial to their decision making process, whether that be new studies and research, changes to sector legislation, breaking news or slowly emerging trends. Your job as content curator is to polish and disseminate this content, adding a fresh, useful spin if and when appropriate.

As a guide, aim to weave curated content into your bespoke original content calendar to achieve roughly 50+% curated content.

3). Measure and monitor

You wouldn’t assess your household budget without first measuring everything that comes in and out, and curated content is no different. Evaluate all KPIs to gain a core understanding of whether your content curation strategy is in fact working.

This should encompass your brand’s success at attracting (with metrics to include likes, followers, circles, site visits) and at engaging (metrics may include retweets, shares, comments, inbound links).

Over to you

Has your brand succumbed to “me, me, me” content marketing? It’s easily done, but the first step to recovery is to have awareness of the problem. For advice on how to balance the creator/curator role, call us on 0845 055 9264.

Not only is video a powerful tool when used on your own website, driving page views and evolving your site into a dynamic, interactive destination – it should also now be an integral part of any social content strategy. Here are five reasons why:

1. YouTube is the world’s no.2 search engine

Marketers generally view infiltrating Google results as the pinnacle of SEO efforts. And with Google the most powerful search engine in the world, it’s understandable that brands and bloggers alike strive for top search rankings there.

Yet Google’s little sister, YouTube, ranks as the second most important search engine, attracting 870 million unique monthly visitors with its continually updated professional and amateur video content.

2. Video SEO is super simple to implement

Unlike web SEO, which typically takes a hefty amount of effort, time and resources to set up effectively, video SEO is extremely straightforward to implement.

On YouTube, companies merely have to fill in metadata fields with their usual, pre-determined SEO keywords and phrases. Data fields include meta tags, descriptions, titles, date, location and closed caption. Simply add any information relevant to the video, and the process is well underway.

3. Video is incredibly socially mobile

YouTube users are a sociable community that enjoys sharing inspiring content. In fact, 50% of YouTube users go on to make some form of social connection with the content they have viewed.

To further encourage video content to go viral in the social sphere, share it on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. This should encourage social activity and crank up your video views.

Tools such as Vine, a new short video app, allow the sharing of short clips (maximum six seconds) on Facebook and Twitter. Since clips appear inside tweets without redirecting users elsewhere, Vine offers an eye-catching and uber-trendy way of differentiating your brand in an overwhelming ocean of marketing micro-content.

4. Click-through rates are higher on video

Visibility in search results is, of course, all-important to an overall SEO strategy, but rankings count for little if they don’t drive click-through rates. Video content that appears in Google’s Universal Search results (allowing for results in the form of images, news, local listing and videos to appear on page one of traditional search results), enjoy a 41% higher click-through rate than plain text.

So, once video content successfully stakes its claim in Google’s ranks, it is far more likely to be clicked on than any other type of results – an attribute every marketer should surely want within their SEO arsenal.