Archive for Content Creation – Page 2

Posted by DBC Digital on

March 26, 2015

Putting the Content in Content Marketing

What We’ve Learned from Creating Content Marketing Plans

By now, everyone knows that an effective content marketing plan is critical to generating leads for your business.

The challenge is that everyone does know this and that means it’s harder to stand apart and get noticed by your prospects.

Still, content marketing done well can mean more leads, more traffic and more business.

As a review, content marketing is:

Providing essential information to your readers
Establishing your company and yourself as someone who understands and can assist your audience with their questions and challenges.

Of course, like many simple concepts, content marketing is not necessarily easy.

Of those companies using content marketing to improve their marketing success, over half report that they fail at it.

While mistakes in content marketing are common, here are a few tips you can use to improve your chances of success:

1. BE CLEAR ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCE

Just as you do in your other marketing strategies, you need to be clear about who your audience is in order to target their interests

2. BUILD A SOLID FOUNDATION

If you’re new to content marketing, start by writing a few posts that can establish you as an expert. Focus on a segment in your field that you are confident with. Make sure your writing style is conversational, not preachy or “sales-y.”

3. WRITE QUALITY CONTENT

Quality isn’t about the fluidity of your writing style. Although clear writing is important, your readers want solid information about issues that concern them and their businesses.

How can you tell if you’re providing quality content?

The best sign your content is valuable is to watch how many readers stick with you, as well as by the growth in your readership. If your writing is informative, well-constructed and people-oriented, the number of your readers will rise, slowly but consistently.

4. MAKE SURE YOUR CONTENT IS FOUND

If no one finds your content, it doesn’t help you grow your business.

Here are four ways to help your content be found:

Include links to your posts in your emails.
Send a summary of your blog with links to the full article in a monthly newsletter.
Put your website address or blog address on everything available: your email signature, your business cards, letterhead, PR releases, traditional advertising and more.
Participate and Engage. Be active in the social and networking platforms your clients use. If your customers and clients are active on LinkedIn, participate in forums and answer questions posed by your groups. Leave helpful comments on other blogs that are being followed by your clients. Thank people who leave comments on your posts.

What’s your experience? What content lessons have you learned?

Categories : BLOGGING, Content Creation, INTERNET MARKETING, STRATEGY

Tags : blog, content creation, content marketing for business, post

Posted by DBC Digital on

March 19, 2015

5 Steps to a Successful Inbound Marketing Campaign

We like to think of it this way: Inbound marketing campaigns in Denver are designed to help your best prospects find your company without you having to bring them kicking and screaming to your door.

TV ads, cold calls, banner ads, and other ways of “pushing” messages onto the public are not working as well as they used to.

It’s no wonder that, in this brave new digital marketing age, an increasingly savvy prospect is becoming more wary of these approaches and is looking to better control how they acquire their information.

“Inbound” Marketing Solves These Issues

Enter inbound marketing. In the last few years, your prospect has taken charge of collecting the information he or she needs to make informed purchasing decisions.

Smart businesses need to get in on this, and now! But how?

Check out these 5 steps to a successful inbound marketing campaign:

1. Identify your best customers and prospects.

You can’t create or refine your marketing message until you know who you should really be selling to. In other words, what type of buyer is most interested in your particular products and services? Of those that are most interested, who is your most profitable buyer, and why?

One of the best ways to understand who your best prospects are is to use web analytics (Google offers a great free tool for this) and LinkedIn. Web analytics will tell you who has been visiting your site. LinkedIn can tell you who has looked at your profile.

Together, these tools will give you a better idea of who is interested in you and your business. Combine this information with your own sales records and customer profiles, and you’ll have a great handle on who your target customer should be.

Then you can begin to look at where they spend their time online and decide what type of content (articles, blogs, etc.) you should be creating for them that they’ll find valuable and informative.

2. Create content just for them.

Everything from your own blogs, guest articles from other experts, “content-rich” website pages, social media, white papers and eBooks that are focused on topics of interest to your target audience will draw their’ attention and position you as a true expert.

As you create more and more exceptional content, you will receive links back to your site from your fans and they will encourage other readers to share your message with their groups.

All this helps you gain additional exposure for your website and that increases your website’s page ranking.

Your site will come up more often in searches and you’ll see an even bigger increase in site visits.

3. Determine your “Calls-to-Action.”

What do you want your website visitors to do once they are on your site? Do you want them to download a research report you wrote? Sign up for your newsletter?

No matter what it is, well-designed Landing pages, social media content, etc. offer you opportunities to include a number of these calls-to-action that can drive both leads and sales to your company.

4. Share your message.

Social networking offers many great ways to help you spread your brand message. And, it’s also a great way to engage with your target buyers by “hanging out” where they do.

Find the social networks that your customers are most active in and become an active member of their communities. Follow their company on LinkedIn, connect with them on their personal LinkedIn page, “Like” their company page on Facebook, “follow” them on Twitter; connect with them on Google+.

Share great content regularly with your current and future clients, answer their questions and help them find solutions to their biggest problems.

5. Analyze the results.

Inbound marketing offers agility for companies that want to react quickly to their customers’ needs. Constantly analyze your efforts and adjust your daily actions as necessary. Make sure you are checking your social media feeds and your web analytics to see what’s working and what’s not.

Consider using “A/B” testing for your site, or have a Denver marketing service like DBC Digital help you stay on top of your campaign’s performance.

A really effective inbound marketing campaign can help you substantially grow your business!

Just make sure you’re prepared for an increase in leads and sales, and the kind of traffic you just can’t get with cold calls–no matter how good your phone skills are.

Categories : Content Creation, INTERNET MARKETING

Tags : content creation, inbound, marketing

Posted by DBC Digital on

February 23, 2015

No time for Social Media Business Marketing? Think again.

So you’re a busy business owner or inbound marketing professional?

Are you using that as an excuse to skip social media marketing?

You may have heard that maintaining accounts, creating content and posting on a regular basis is time-consuming and difficult. Well, the fact is—it can be. But it doesn’t have to be.

Use these tips for more efficient marketing with social media, and you’ll see it’s easier than you may think to make social media work for you:

Request user-generated content

Your fans, connections, groups and followers are a great source of content. Since content creation is a major part of the time spent on social media marketing, soliciting content from others makes the job a whole lot easier. Not only that—it offers readers different perspectives and the expertise of a wider range of people.

Ask those connected to you on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn to contribute guest blogs to your site. Are any of them professional writers? Hire them to write posts and tweets. Start discussions. This is all user-generated content that populates your accounts and attracts attention—with very little effort on your part.

Crowdsource

Social media is one of the best crowdsourcing tools out there, so use your accounts to solicit ideas and solutions from your fans and followers. Get discussions going and ask for opinions. Encourage them to send you links to helpful resources. Most people are happy to do the work for you, provided they get to participate—and maybe get the chance to win a promotional offer?

Repurpose Material for Your Social Media Marketing

Inbound marketing pros have heard this one before. Repurposing involves taking content already created once, and then repackaging it into different forms for your audience. It’s a smart way to squeeze more out of your valuable content and spend less time on the content creation process, to boot.

For example, several blog posts could be combined into a “white paper” and linked to your social media accounts. Send your followers to a call-to-action that allows them to opt-in to an email list to access the white paper. Voila! For the time it took to write a few blog posts, you have a white paper downloaded by (perhaps) hundreds of social media fans and followers—and your subscriber list just got a big shot in the arm, as well.

Link Your Social Media accounts

Linking your social media accounts gives you the ability to have all content post automatically to all of them. This saves a lot of time over manually posting separately to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus.

Along these lines, don’t forget that you can cross-pollinate with social media, to get maximum exposure for your content for minimum effort. An example of this would be to take a video you posted to YouTube and re-post it on your Facebook page, and/or link to it on Twitter.

Use images

Don’t forget—images are “content” if labeled properly, and they are powerful. Simply by adding a few compelling images, you can keep text to a minimum and still make a big impact (they don’t say a picture is worth a thousand words for nothing!). So take advantage of this! If you come across images that tell your story and reinforce your point, post them—and frequently. Interesting images always have people coming back for more, and it doesn’t take a lot of time or effort to share them.

A note regarding images: Search engines for the most part can’t “read” images, so be sure to make the file name of the image descriptive of the topic you are writing about. If you are familiar with alt-tags, be sure to use them to detail the image’s topic as well. This will ensure you are also receiving credit from Google for your images.

Whether you’re new to inbound and social media marketing or not, try these tips for more efficient social media marketing. You’ll see how easily social media can fit into your schedule. It can be fun, rewarding and profitable—if you follow the tips above.

Categories : Content Creation, SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Tags : social media for business, social media marketing, social media tips

Posted by Plumb Marketing on

February 12, 2015

8 COMMON WEB DESIGN MISTAKES

A Good Website Design is Essential for a Business Site

The Importance of Web Design

In business, your website’s design is a key component of your brand’s online presence. For this reason, it needs to be functional, practical and appealing to users. To get the most benefit from your website, avoid these common web design mistakes.

1. Too much text.

When visitors are confronted with large amounts of text, they become overwhelmed and frustrated, and they are unlikely to read all of it. In fact, too much text can even cause some users to leave the page altogether.

Instead of covering the pages of your website with unbroken blocks of writing, keep your design scannable by using bullets, headings and fonts that are easy to read. To keep the amount of text to a minimum, don’t include “fluff” or nonessential information.

2. Lagging load times.

Life in today’s world is fast-paced, and no one wants to wait for a webpage to load. In fact, Econsultancy reports that up to 40 percent of users will leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Test your load times regularly to keep them as low as possible, and make changes immediately if you notice load times approaching three seconds.

3. Blatant advertising.

Visitors will notice blatant advertisements in your web design immediately, and they will quickly leave a web design that contains a lot of them. If you must advertise on your site, limit the amount of promotional material that you place on each page, and check your site activity to be sure your ads are not impacting your website traffic or any other key metrics.

4. Cluttered pages.

Pages cluttered with images, videos, graphics and text are confusing to users. When designing your site, avoid the temptation to fill every empty space, and keep the layout as neat and clean as possible. “White space” is good.

5. Confusing navigation.

If users can’t find where they need to go quickly and easily, they’ll become frustrated and leave your site in favor of a competitor. Keep your web design navigation simple and intuitive to prevent traffic loss.

6. No search function.

In some cases, a user simply wants to find something specific without browsing through page-after-page. To accommodate these needs, you need to offer a search function that can be accessed easily from all pages of your website.

7. No marketing strategy.

It doesn’t matter how impressive your web design is if consumers don’t know where to find it. In addition to designing and launching an excellent website for your business, you also need to have an effective marketing strategy in place in order to drive traffic to your site and maximize results.

8. Lack of a mobile-friendly site.

With so many users accessing the internet from mobile devices, a mobile-friendly version of your website is more important than ever before. Failing to offer this option may end up costing you a significant amount of business.

If you want to build a successful online presence for your brand, a properly designed website is essential. As you design or redesign your site, make sure that you avoid the pitfalls listed above. In addition, remember to test your site regularly for problems and resolve them quickly when they occur.

Categories : Content Creation, MESSAGING AND DESIGN, WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT

Tags : web design, website design, website graphic design, website graphic layout

Posted by DBC Digital on

January 15, 2015

Marketing Strategies – Six Simple Tips to Leverage Your Old Blog Posts

Brands and business leaders spend a great deal of time and energy developing and promoting new blog posts. Although this is an essential activity and an important use of resources, creating new posts can also take up a substantial part of your limited time and keep you from posting anything at all.

When leveraged properly, re-promoting some of your previous blog posts can bring in new traffic, engage consumers and help your audience grow. As marketing strategies go, this rates as “easy but effective”. Here are some tips and strategies you can use to pull these posts off the shelf and put them back to work for your brand.

1. Choose your best posts.

Promoting posts that flopped the first time will get you nowhere. Although these posts may continue to draw in a small amount of traffic, focus your attention on those blogs that were most popular with readers in the past.

2. Make sure the content is still relevant.

Your post from last Valentine’s Day may have drawn in record numbers of readers at the time, but promoting it at Christmas may not be the best plan. Before you begin promoting any older post, make sure that its content is still relevant and useful for your audience.

3. Use social media.

One of the easiest ways to direct readers’ attention to your previous posts is to share these posts on various social media websites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and any other channels your brand utilizes. Each time you share a post, be sure to entice readers with a teaser or short explanation of why the post is relevant.

4. Include internal links in new posts.

Another excellent way to direct readers to your older blog posts is to link back to them from within your newer entries. When using this strategy, it’s important to link only to older entries that are relevant to your current post. Likewise, don’t include too many backlinks , as this can overwhelm your readers.

5. Don’t re-date old posts.

Linking back to previous posts is fine, but pretending they are new posts isn’t a good idea. Even if you change the date on the posts, at least some of your readers are sure to recognize that they have seen the content before. This makes your brand appear dishonest, which can drive your readers away.

6. Don’t go overboard.

Although referring readers to old posts can be a useful strategy for your brand, it can be overdone. If you share or link back to older posts too frequently, your readers may think that your brand is out of new ideas or has become lazy. Instead, spread your links to older posts throughout your newer content.

As you put these ideas into practice, pay careful attention to the results. Evaluate the number of views your older entries are receiving before and after you promote them in order to measure the success of your efforts. This will help you determine which promotion methods are most effective, as well as which old posts are most likely to draw new readers.

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Categories : BLOGGING, BRANDING, Content Creation, SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING, STRATEGY

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