Month: August 2019

Categories
Content Marketing

Content vs. Content Marketing

Believe it or not, there are still some people who think content and content marketing are the same thing. Going beyond the definition, the difference lies in the difference between content creation and the practice of content marketing. White papers, webinars, and e-books are not content marketing. Ads aren’t content marketing. Your social media posts aren’t content marketing. Marketing with content isn’t content marketing.

The Difference Between Content and Content Marketing

Content marketing relies on the publisher destination and the frequency of high quality content to attract and build an audience. On social platforms, you don’t own the audience. And publishing one ebook doesn’t provide the consistency people need and expect to build trust. Content marketing is meant to attract an audience to an experience or destination you own. You build it and optimize it in order to help you achieve your marketing goals. Content itself is everywhere. You have sales content, advertising content, marketing campaign content, event content, customer service content, user-generated content, and more. Content marketing on the other hand attracts an audience to a platform you own rather than buying an audience or interrupting them on someone else’s platform.

Making Content Marketing Work for You

Build Your Content Marketing Mission Statement

Your content marketing mission statement should support your brand mission and put your customers brought in center. Make sure to define who your target audience is and what topic or topics you support along with the value you provide to your audience.

Choose a URL

Decide whether your content marketing destination should be your company’s domain or on an unbranded website. For instance, BigCommerce, an e-commerce solution provider displays their content marketing solutions for small businesses looking to learn about digital marketing and customer experience on the same domain with a blog URL. On the other hand, we see that CMO.com is a domain that’s independent of its parent company, Adobe.

Determine How Branded the Site Will Be

Content marketing is different in terms of branding. If you place your content site on your domain, it needs to contain at least a few elements of your corporate brands. If you opt for an off-domain content site the creative direction you take needs to support whatever topic you are trying to become an authority .

Make Sure to Include All the Components of an Effective Content Marketing Destination

Your site must include all of the components that are typically found on any publisher website such as:

  • Categories that show the topics you cover
  • Articles that are frequently published with visible publication dates and authors
  • Strong focus on growing your audience by including calls to subscribe in your updates
  • Calls to action, a contact us page, or an offer for anyone who wants to read you directly
  • Visuals to support your topics and break up text
  • Highways of the top performing content so readers can easily find your best content
  • Social sharing options to allow your readers to easily promote your content

Develop a Plan to Support Visual Content

Getting everything done to this point can be challenging. Once it’s done however you will find that creating visual content is a challenge. The good news is you don’t have to ruin your budget to include visuals. You can use other people’s visual content by embedding it with your own. You can create SlideShare presentations with little to no budget. And you could tell stories with your visuals.

Build Site to Focus on Subscriptions

Subscribers are an important measure of engagement, conversion, and reach. They are representation of the audience of readers that invite you into their email box. As such, you should optimize your website and the content for them to build your list. As you build your list, build trust by consistently providing them with great content they can only get in their email box. This is a crucial step in educating your customers that is especially important for B2B companies or professional service providers.

Publish New Content Consistently

If you’re covering just one topic, publish new content at least once a week. If you’re covering two topics,  publish at least twice  weekly. If possible, publish every day on various categories of content that will attract the right audience. Research from Hubspot shows that increasing the frequency of quality content delivers a predictable and in some cases, exponential ROI.

Define the Metrics You’ll Measure

It may be tempting to select a large number of metrics to track. Thankfully, you don’t have to pick them all. By focusing just on your traffic (page views and visitors), your engagement (social shares, comments, and time on site) and conversions (number of subscribers and contact form submissions) you have everything you need to further inform your strategy. If you struggle to find the time and resources to get all of this done, there are plenty of marketing automation tools available to help you plan your editorial calendar, schedule the content to your website, and handle social promotion. If you’re not a great writer, you can always outsource the content creation. And if your budget allows, you can always hire an agency like mine, Sachs Marketing Group, to handle all your content creation and content marketing needs.

Categories
SEO

All About Backlink Hotspots

Learning about backlink hotspots can help you expand on your content strategy to support content. It’s something that’s existed for a while, but we don’t hear many people talking about.

What is a Link Hotspot?

Link hotspots are pages on a site that gets links in larger volumes and consistent rates than others. For most websites, this is the homepage, but in some cases, it can also be a resource page. On the majority of websites, the difference between the home page and the next largest page on their website isn’t typically proportionate.

The good thing is that most successful websites have more than one hotspot.

Comparing Hotspots and Assets

Assets are linkable, and not all linkable assets are considered hotspots. However, all hotspots are linkable assets.

For instance, an infographic is likely to earn you some links when you promote it – and from time to time it will gain links without promotion after the fact. A hotspot on the other hand will continue to gain links until it becomes a link hotspot on your website.

Use a search tool like Ahrefs or Serpstat to see which pages on your site have the most links, and you’ll see where you have potential hotspots building.

How Hotspots are Formed

Ahrefs published a study about the number of new backlinks top ranking pages get over time. What the study tells us is that pages that rank well will continue to get links, and this is something that needs to be considered as we discuss building our own and how they benefit us.

Some link hotspots will form simply because they rank well. If how long they rank well has a direct affect on the number of links they acquire, it’s important to factor that in. This can be a good and bad thing when trying to build your own link hotspots because not all ranking pages are hotspots, and not all hotspots will rank. Not all link hotspots are organic, and not all of them are supporting content. That’s why it’s best to build one that can also rank.

Supporting content can rank so that won’t disqualify a page from being supporting. There are some people out there who say that supporting content can even have commercial intent. Though in general, it seems informational content seems to provide the best link spots.

Though they don’t always rank, they do gain links with extreme easy when it comes to doing certain types of outreach. Because of this, they are more likely to rank and as such are more likely to do well when you continue to build backlinks to the hotspot.

Building Your Own Hotspot

It’s easier than you may think to build your own hotspot. The key is to provide value and accuracy because people want to make sure they are linking to quality content that supports what they are talking about. They want to provide their audience with a good source to go for more information. Your content must be comprehensive, and friendly for the user experience.

Common Types of Hotspots and Examples

Some of the most widely used hotspots are:

  • Fact pages/resource pages
  • Calculators: Use a tool like Calconic to create your own free calculator from a number of templates, such as: car loan, price calculators, expense calculators, BMI calculators, commission calculators, and more.
  • Deals/Coupons pages

If you want to build one on your own site, the simplest way to do this is to conduct some research – but instead of keyword research, focus your efforts on topic research with a tool like Ubersuggest. There you can search in the Content Ideas section, and use the results to come up with ideas for hotspots.

After you’ve created the hotspot, it’s time to promote it. Share it on social media. Use influencers to push the message further on social. Run an outreach campaign at some point, and try guest blogging.

If you see that your outreach efforts fall fault and you cannot get any social virality to the content, then it’s safe to say it’s not a link hotspot.

How Hotspots Help Your SEO Efforts

Each new link to your site will add more trust and authority to your site. But beyond that, you’re getting a new entry point for link juice. Even more importantly, designing and using link hotspots as supporting pages on your site ensures that the most link juice will go to contextual links.

Hotspots work two-fold because when you build links to these pages, it’s because you’re using them as supporting content for the rest of your site. Then, it’s typical to link out to at least five other key pages on the site, and the relevance, combined with the power of these pages helps rank the more commercial pages on my site. This is all done without risking using exact match anchor text from external domains, which is a huge risk.

The great thing about this approach is that there are a number of ways you can implement it, and you’re ultimately already familiar with the strategy. By focusing the supporting content that naturally forms on your websites – you’re on your way. Websites are nothing more than information ecosystems anyway.

Categories
Social Media

Building a Behavioral Design Social Media Strategy

Behavioral design is marketing that gets people to take action. You use neurological and behavioral insights to develop customer interactions and psychologically influence or change their behavior. Here are some tips you can use to incorporate behavioral design into your social media strategy.

Market to a State of Mind

Behavioral design aims to influence behavior and to do that you must examine your customers feelings. If you’re asking yourself whether you should look at  what someone is thinking to influence their decision making. It’s worth noting that we are not always influenced by reason. Humans are innately emotional beings and our emotional responses affect our decision making.

This means the first step to making a sale is understanding your target audience’s emotional state of mind. A state of mind is a temporary state when you are under high emotional arousal and relying on your subconscious emotional factors. This makes you more susceptible to influence.

Identifying Emotional Mindstates

To identify your customers emotional mindstates, ask two questions:  Which of the eight mindsets best explains your customers desires and what path do they take to maximize their gains or minimize their losses when they are chasing those desires?

The Mindsets

These come from the Values, Addititudes, and Lifestyles segmentation, (VALS), which is a system for grouping consumers according to various psychological factors and demographics in an attempt to predict their behavior and purchasing decision process, by looking at resources and motivations. They fall into high resources or low resources, and consider ideals, achievement, and self-expression..

Innovators: Innovators typically exhibit all three primary motivations in varying degrees. Members who fall in this group are confident enough to experiment, makes the highest number of financial transactions yet remain skeptical of advertising. They’re always taking in information are future-oriented, are self-directed consumers, and believe that science as well as research and development are credible. People who fall in this group are also the most receptive to new ideas and Technologies and have the widest variety of interests and activities.

Thinkers: Thinkers have high resources and are motivated by ideals. They are financially established and aren’t influenced by trends. They plan, research, and consider their options before they act and as such have a tendency toward analysis paralysis. They gravitate towards traditional intellectual pursuits and use technology and functional ways, and purchase proven products.

Believers: Believers have low resources but are also motivated by ideals. They believe in basic rights and wrongs to lead a good life. They value stability and constancy. They watch TV and read novels to find an escape and often rely on faith and spirituality to provide inspiration. they have little to no tolerance for ambiguity; they want to know where things stand.

Achievers: People who fall into this category have both high resources and achievement motivation. They are private, professional people who have a me first and my family first attitude. They believe money is the source of authority and are committed to their family and job. They tend to be moderate, goal-oriented, fully scheduled, and hard-working. They value any technology that helps them increase productivity.

Strivers: Strivers are a group of people who are motivated by achievement but have low resources. They tend to wear their wealth, rely heavily on public transportation, have revolving employment with high levels of temporary unemployment. They rely on video games and video as a form of fantasy and ultimately desire to better their lives but have difficulty in realizing that desire.

Experiencers: Experiencers are a group of people with high resources focused on self-expression motivation. People in this group typically want everything and find themselves to be the first in and first out of trend adoption. They aim to go against the current mainstream, stay up-to-date with the latest fashions, love physical activity because they are  sensation-seeking, believe friends are extremely important, consider themselves incredibly social and are spontaneous.

Makers: Makers have low resources and a self-expression motivation. People in this group generally have a strong interest in everything related to Automotive, tend to be distrustful of the government, have strong outdoor interest such as hunting and fishing, believed in strong gender roles,  Want to own land, see themselves as straightforward but appear to be anti-intellectual to others and have a strong desire to protect what they perceived to be theirs.

Survivors: As a consumer group, survivors have the lowest resources but they do not exhibit a primary motivation. They are the oldest consumers and are thrifty. They tend to be cautious and risk-averse. They watch a lot of TV and are loyal to products and brands. People in this group are the least likely to use the internet and are the most likely to have a landline only household. They spend a lot of their time alone and are not concerned about appearing trendy or traditional. They find comfort in routine, familiar places and people,

Other than using VALS, you can also use the nine enneagram personality types to help you learn more about your target audience and their mindset.

Developing Your Strategy

When it comes to your overall marketing strategy, social media is likely to be a major part of it. If you want to sell a product or service you must have said less yourself as a thought leader in your industry and social media is a great tool for accomplishing that goal.

In addition to behavioral design, you should consider building your social media strategy with mental shortcuts or key cognitive heuristics because these can make engagement with your posts both easier and quicker.

Mental Shortcuts to Use in Social Media

 

  • Reciprocity: This is the idea that by giving something away people will feel inclined to reciprocate.
  • In-group bias: This is the idea of building a group of people around a shared belief or cause.
  • Bizarreness effect: The idea that people are more likely to share bizarre posts.

As you work on building your social media presence and community, it’s important that you not rely solely on reciprocity and bizarreness. Using bizarreness may get you the engagement in the form of likes and comments, but they may not make an impact on behaviors. Many people say that if you provide value, your effort will be rewarded. It is possible however that your efforts will be a bust with your audience and you won’t get them to take the desired action.

It’s worth taking the time to look into other kinds of cognitive biases that you can use in your social media efforts. You may find other options that are better suited to your audience and industry that you can use in your efforts.

Focus on Genuine Connections

By also focusing on your in-group bias to build genuine connections with your community, this is where you will likely get the most bang for your buck with your behavioral design. The in group are more likely to get an engagement from your audience compared to other strategies simply because you’re using openness and honesty to relate to your audience. This kind of content helps cut through humblebrag posts and creates a genuine connection with your followers.

It’s okay to use the bizarreness posts for shock factor and the reciprocity posts to focus on the transaction, to build your initial audience, but without the in-group aspect, you will not be able to create the strong connections you need to convert people from followers to customers.

Ultimately building a behavioral design social media strategy means remaining consistent with your posting efforts and experimenting until you find what works for you and your audience.

Categories
Digital Marketing

Changes to the Wayback Machine

If you’ve ever wanted to see what a website used to look like or what a domain used to have on it before you buy, you can use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

What is the Wayback Machine?

The Wayback Machine, first launched in 2001, is a highly useful archive of the World Wide Web. It works by frequently crawling and caching pages for the archive. As of June 2016, it had gathered more than 330 billion web pages, 20 million books and texts (some of which are available for borrowing from the Open Library, 200,000 software programs, 4.5 million audio recordings, 3 million images, and 4 million videos. The audio recordings include live concerts, and the videos include millions of television news programs. It is a project of the Internet Archive, a San Francisco based non-profit organization. Anyone can create a free account and upload media Internet Archive.

Recently, the Wayback Machine added a new feature. The Changes feature is currently in beta so while the experience isn’t perfect, it’s easy to see its potential. It’s worth noting that some queries won’t display as intended, and you may need to try multiple times over a period of days or weeks to be able to compare two screenshots side by side.

Before the introduction of this feature, the only way to look back on when and how a page was changed was to manually click through all the screenshots available on the Wayback Machine. This feature now makes it possible to enter a URL and the Wayback machine analyzes every screenshot it has taken since the page was published.

From there the Wayback Machine displays a color-coded calendar to demonstrate the degree of relative change from one archived photo to another. It ranges from gray which is a low degree of change to Blue to indicate a high degree of change.

At that point you can select two different dates to compare the changes with screenshots that are highlighted in blue and yellow.

When I went to test this tool, I couldn’t get the most recent screenshots of my agency website, Sachs Marketing Group, to load in the side by side view. I suspect that’s because of the beta, but you can open each screenshot you want to compare in a new window.

Wayback Machine has 215 screenshots for my website, dating back to the launch in 2011 and running through July 2019. Here is the first one and the most recent one.

Looking at these screenshots, you can definitely see how much we’ve changed over the years to keep up with the latest technology and trends, along with our branding in general.

Though you can’t see it in my example because of the tool’s malfunction, in the side-by-side view yellow content indicates content deletion and blue indicates the addition of content.

The tool indicates changes in written content as well as changes in visual elements such as the header and navigation buttons.

For SEOs, there’s a great deal of potential to diagnose any number of issues. For instance, if you notice a gradual decline or gradual rise in rankings or traffic for a page, you can see how it’s changed over a period of time.

On the other hand, if the page has never changed since publication, you can find out immediately rather than having to manually compare various screenshots.

Other Helpful Ways to Use the Changes Tool

Aside from seeing how a website has changed for SEO purposes, here are some other ways you can make use of the tool.

  • Track changes in privacy policies over time, as shown here with Facebook. Comparing the two from two years apart shows the privacy policy has undergone some rather significant changes. Or comparing the changes in Apple’s privacy policy, as shown here. (Note that one person was able to get the Facebook privacy policy changes to show, but couldn’t get Apple’s to show. I had the opposite experience.)
  • Track changes to a news story, to see if it has been updated with new information over time, as shown here.
  • Track changes to a company’s About Us information, or staff pages to keep apprised of major changes in the board or new hires.

Are you excited about the potential of this tool? Have you been able to successfully use it for SEO purposes? Share your comments below. I’d love to hear from you!

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