The goal of content marketing is to grow your audience, build trust, and establish relationships with prospective customers. Statistics reveal the importance of content in modern marketing - according to the CMO Council, 78% of consumers believe that a brand offering content desires to establish a relationship with them. Marketing Profs further points out that after reading a brand's content, 70% of consumers feel closer to that brand. Given such data, the importance of content in a robust marketing strategy cannot be denied.
Unfortunately, many brands still experience difficulties in establishing a content marketing campaign. Regardless of how many challenges your brand faces, the fact remains that you can no longer afford to ignore the importance of content marketing.
One of the most common and biggest challenges faced by brands when it comes to developing a content marketing program is simply not knowing where to begin. Whether it's trying to figure out which platforms to focus on or what to include, many brands remain unsure about how to get their content marketing strategies off the ground. Facing a blank sheet of paper is intimidating, but it's important to get started on planning your strategy. Prior to that, do your research to determine who you want to target.
Along with identifying your target audience, you also need to know where to find your target audience. Today's online world can be dispersed across a broad spectrum of platforms, including various social media networks. Rather than trying to target everyone, everywhere, it's important to drill down your metrics to determine the best places to find the customers most likely to be interested in your content.
Developing a list of the content that you wish to create and a publication calendar can also be a good way to get started launching your content marketing campaign. This method will also help to keep you accountable for ensuring your content is published on time. If you need more assistance in publishing your content, consider making use of the many tools available today, such as TweetDeck, SocialOomph, or Crowdbooster, all of which will allow you to schedule and streamline your content publishing schedule.
Content marketing is a great way to drive business, but it's not necessarily free of cost. You'll need to either outsource the work or invest the time and skills required to handle it on your own. This naturally comes at some cost, which can put a strain on your budget, especially if you are just launching your business. The reality, however, is that you can't afford not to invest in content marketing. By not doing so, you're giving your competitors an edge.
When your budget is tight, yet you know you need to implement a strong content marketing strategy, one of the best ways to stretch your resources is to focus on quality rather than quantity. Many new companies fall into the trap of thinking that the more content they produce, the better. While more may be better in some areas of life, that's not necessarily the case with content marketing. By focusing on producing a few great topics in a consistent manner, rather than churning out a lot of inferior content, you'll be able to save money and do a better job of promoting your brand.
As challenging as it may be to get started with a content marketing program, overcoming those obstacles is essential to succeeding in today's competitive market.
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Original source: How to Overcome Your Biggest Challenges in Content Marketing.
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Given the increases in engagement figures, it's no surprise that Facebook has put a major emphasis on video content over the last six months. Back in April, The Social Network reported that it's now serving, on average, four billion video views per day, with 75% of them on mobile. This was up from the three billion views they reported at the end of 2014. The introduction of autoplay video and embeddable Facebook video content has changed the Facebook landscape, making it increasingly more of a video platform and putting in direct competition with long-time online video title holder YouTube. But one element that's held Facebook's video dominance back has been the lack of specific metrics for video content or issues with data accuracy in Facebook's video tracking data. Zuckerberg and Co have moved to fix this, introducing a new video analytics dashboard within Page Insights.
This is great and valuable insight, and will go a long way to helping pages better understand and manage their video content on Facebook. There have been reported issues in recent times with Facebook video metrics not showing up accurate data, particularly when exporting data from extended periods of time. But Facebook has attributed those reports to system glitches which have been alleviated as part of this overhaul of video metrics.
Welcome to our weekly edition of what's hot in social media news.
In the coming weeks, "people will be able to learn about a product or service and then take action directly from an ad to sign up on a website, buy a product, or download an app."
"Twitter Official Partners have been recognized by Twitter because of their high-quality products or expert-level services and proven success on Twitter."
"When you spot a Pin with a blue price, you'll know you can buy it right from the app."
Music Insights give you "a full picture of how fans are engaging with music on YouTube."
"Simple and powerful, Splice is the best video editor for your iPhone!"
"Simply update campaigns at Sigstr.com, and the new campaigns are appended to the email signatures of each user."
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About the Author, Cindy King
Fiverr–so called for the meager price you pay to get started with the site ($5) is a "marketplace for creative and professional services." Among freelancers looking to make your next video animation project, there are folks offering to give you 10,000 Twitter followers for just five bucks. The followers will be fake, though, and the idea is that they make you look more legitimate than you are, which does happen to lure in true blue fans of your business.There are risks with this, of course. If discovered–and more people are hip to services like Fiverr these days–it looks kind of sad, not to mention ethically dubious, according to some. And once you do have all those fake followers in the mix, your chances of measuring real ROI will be pretty much shot for a while.But if buying 10,000 fake followers helps you find 500 true, engaged followers, perhaps there's an upside.?.png)
To put it simply: ManageFlitter helps you find users you should follow, as well as tells you which users to unfollow. It shows you who you've followed who hasn't followed back (sniff), people who still look like eggs, and who could help you gain traction as predicted by the "golden ratio" of followers to following to tweets. (If a person has more followers than following, they probably have some pretty good clout worth tapping into).For businesses trying to grow quickly, using ManageFlitter would go something like this: Wake up, follow 100 users (that's the max per day). Go to bed, wake up, remove any users who have not followed you back, follow 100 more users. Repeat.
Great content is one, sure-fire way to gain loyal followers on Twitter. To that end, tools like Twibble help you link your web feed directly to your Twitter account, and let you schedule tweets to ensure you're giving your followers a healthy diet of good content. var _comscore = _comscore || []; _comscore.push({ c1: "2″, c2: "19915597″ }); (function() { var s = document.createElement("script"), el = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; s.async = true; s.src = (document.location.protocol == "https:" ? "https://sb" : "http://b") + ".scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js"; el.parentNode.insertBefore(s, el); })(); ![[blushes]](/sites/default/files/aweiner/files/shutterstock_252410236.jpg)
Some of the tweets were mean, but witty:
Some were silly or absurd:
But most dug directly into the criticisms of the Grey series that should have convinced the author's publicist to keep James the hell away from an open platform like Twitter:
It did not help that whoever was running the Q&A felt the need to block a lot of those participating. This is fine for those who were just being jerks (albeit funny jerks):.jpg)
