Hey all you fledgling (and experienced) content marketers out there! I’m talking to you - if you fit into any of these categories: you have a website, you use social media marketing, you write a blog, or send emails to promote your business. So…that’s pretty much everyone who landed on this blog post.
At the beginning of each month I create a roundup of content marketing tips collected from the previous month. These are tips I feel will be super useful for my online marketing, and therefore, your online marketing, too. I spend a ton of time doing research to discover what’s working (and what’s not) in content marketing. You can depend on me to sort through the voluminous amount of blogs and articles for the top tips.
If you try any of these, let me know. Here we go…
The 5 Best Content Marketing Tips of September 2015
#1 Supercharge Your Visual Content
Kat French in Social Media Explorer gave us some terrific ideas for integrating powerful text with arresting images to create visual content that gets attention. What I love the most is her explanation of why you should always use text with your images and video:
“To take full advantage of that moment of attention, you need to frame that image with words capable of inspiring your desired action. Think of the image and its framing text as the set-up and punch line of a joke.
What does Kat mean by this? Here’s an example: I could have simply posted this photo by itself on my Facebook page, but instead I added a bit of “framing” text in the update section. It’s just a four-word phrase (From me to you:) but it made a difference in the engagement and hence, the reach of this post:
Read Kat’s entire post here: https://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/using-clever-copywriting-to-enhance-social-visuals/
#2: Use Quizzes To Get More Leads
JP Misenas wrote in {Grow} that when a business incorporates quizzes into its content marketing, especially on social media, its audience and leads can grow tremendously. These are often he types of quizzes we see on Facebook such as “Which celebrity are you?”
Here’s an example:
1. Quiz link:
2. Lead capture form: “Strategically placing a lead capture form right before revealing their results makes the participant more likely to give up their information.”
Example:
Read the entire article here: http://www.businessesgrow.com/2015/09/29/quizzes-to-generate-leads/
#3 Keep Writing That Evergreen Blog Content
I always advise my clients to think about evergreen content when planning their blog posts. Evergreen content can be reused over and over again, is always relevant, and is full fodder for social media updates. It also cuts down on the time and effort involved in consistently creating new content.
In September, Pushing Social interviewed Matt Cutts. Matt is the head of Google’s web spam team - meaning he’s best person to go to for what works on Google (and what can get your site penalized, too). Matt confirmed my theory about the value of evergreen content and he states:
“…original evergreen content should target your most important keywords, be should be longer than usual (+1,000 words), sprinkled with excellent photos and illustrations, along with several quality outbound links to relevant information on your blog or a complementary site.”
I always listen to Matt!
Read the entire blog here: http://pushingsocial.com/matt-cutts-blog-tips/
#4 Use Instagram For Your B2B Service Biz
I’ve barely dipped my toe into Instagram for Be Visible’s marketing. It feels like there is a big learning curve there and I have to be very efficient with the time I spend learning and testing new platforms. In spite of high engagement (some say that Instagram drives the most engagement of any social platform right now) it’s not possible (at least at this point) for to identify and target your ideal customers the way you can on Facebook beyond tracking hashtags and topics.
Enter brilliant marketer Peg Fitzpatrick. Peg seems to have figured out how to harness the power of Instagram for her business and I’m really impressed. In a post on Social Media Examiner Michael Stelzner shares Peg’s Instagram strategy - which I think has converted me. I can’t wait to get started.
Along with advice such as posting pictures of where you are and what you’re doing such as networking events or conferences, Peg reminds us that selfies are really fun here. And in keeping with getting your audience more deeply involved in your brand, post “A Day In The Life” photos of yourself and/or your team. Your fans will love seeing what it’s like “behind the scenes”.
But here’s my very favorite tip of all for Instagram:
Use Instagram to promote your webinars before they start. This helps you reach more people and give them a last chance to opt in. Peg will “…share a photo of her computer monitor with something related to the webinar on it.” Freakin’ awesome!
There’s also a handy list of apps in this article. They’re the ones that Peg uses to customize images so they are perfect for Instagram’s unique interface (and are branded for her company). They are:
Camera Awesome to crop and edit.
Over to add fonts and overlays.
Word Swag to add your logo to images.
Phhhoto to create GIFs. <what’s a gif?
And here’s some great news (at least for me!): If you use Hootsuite you can now preschedule your Instagram posts there. That could be a huge timesaver.
Instagram, here I come!
Read the full post here: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/stand-out-on-instagram-peg-fitzpatrick/
#5: A Crazy Twitter Hack That I Never Thought of – Dammit!
You know how Twitter’s 140-character text limit often makes it hard to get your message out there in a way that’s helpful and also makes sense? Well here’s a way around it…and it’s been there all the time!
From Social Media Week’s Brain Candy blog:
- Go to the tweet you would like to be the first one in the series and click reply.
- Delete your Twitter handle, which is auto-populated.
- Write out your “response”.
- Click Tweet and the vertical lines connect your tweets and nestle them right together in the news stream. Pretty cool, right?
Read the full post here: http://socialmediaweek.org/braincandy/reply-tweet-140-characters/
So, there you have it. You’ve just dedicated a perfectly good 10 minutes to digesting this post. I hope it saved you hours of reading to get these great tips (because that’s my job!).
If you test them I’d love to hear your results. I invite you to comment at the end of this post or write on my Facebook page.
Be here next month at the same time for October 2015’s best content marketing tips. If you want to submit tips that you find, go right ahead. And while you’re here, you may be interested in: Facebook Ads - What’s Working Now
