EXPLOSIVE tips and tools to improve your content marketing in 2017
I always flip between them for whom should be first place, but I can certainly state that the two best forms of online marketing are great content and social media – Get the two partnered correctly and you can sell ice to Eskimos… I mean who would have known that being a marketer would one day prove more important in business success than actually being an expert in your business field?
As we move ahead with an ever improving and diversifying world of internet tech, it is important to grab whatever tools we can to both stay ahead of our competitors and increase our audiences and our desired on-line conversions. More and more companies, it is said upto 50% of major corporations, will have a dedicated head of content marketing so we really must be fully aware of the best tips and tools to help us both deliver content that gives ROI and to give us the results from our efforts in order than we can look to improve and target audiences better.
Below are some tips and recommendations of tools that will help you to perform better with your content and social media in 2017:
Buzzsumo: A useful website to remember who offer out a neat software that will return the most shared posts on the social media with keywords or websites that you search. Buzzsumo neatly ranks your search results on the social shares each has received which gives you an insight it to both how well pages on your website are doing socially and how effective other people are on keywords relating to your business.
Video Marketing: A film nowadays can be a hit even before it reaches the cinemas especially thanks to the internet and the likes of video streaming channels and TV add-ons such as Kodi. The quality of video content as risen also from the speed of the internet to enable fast downloading and viewing of videos, from the improving appliances to watch the videos on and also the video recording devices advancement to include 360 and drones. Look out for the ability to live stream 360 with Periscope for 2017 that is currently being tested (I received an invite to test having expressed my initial interest). Live 360 will be a great marketing tool and will give you incredible unrivalled content to increase your engagement online.
Print has hit the lows and can now make an impact: This is my very own phrase and prediction which may very well get many challengers, but I do believe that printing as a marketing / content marketing option can now see tables being turned as there is much less competition and some bigger brands / names are leaning towards it. I recently saw big news re Airbnb releasing printed magazines with rich content which shows that we could see an increase in popularity for print.
Simplifying Data: As the internet becomes ever increasingly more complex in that more channels of communications are opening and the size of users is growing then the way we study our data is highly important so that we can find out what results our efforts are achieving and how we can use the results we achieve. More and more new softwares are being created that help us to understand our data better and deliver it in a way that even some of us less than tech savvy people can understand and work from – An example is Sisense though there are many other options out there also.
Call To Action (CTA): As we are looking at content marketing then we really must visit the CTA from the content we share. I still see so much content with very little thought towards CTA – In my mind, if someone has taken the time to watch your video in full, read all of your blog etc then you really must take full advantage and have some kind of call to action as the viewer will undoubtedly have found your content of interest. This about live links back to your website, polls, free eBooks and more for each piece of content marketing you share, even if it is a simple ‘follow me on Twitter’ as it helps to build your database.
Content performance: It will soon not be just enough that you have content to share and are using the platforms to share this content on, you need to understand better what works the best and when. Yes, many of the social media channels will give you useful tips as to how your posts are performing and allow you to see which content you share performs the best and what times during the day. What you really need to also understand is also outside of this performance data where you study the industry as a whole such as knowing best times to share content for keywords or which posts that are working the best for you that should be shared out again. Looking at content, especially the type you have created fully yourself, you really need to be finding the best areas and times it should be shared in order to deliver the best ROI – I found PostPlanner as good tool for this which can save small businesses lots of time and increase content performance.