Showing posts with label content. Show all posts
Showing posts with label content. Show all posts

Tuesday, 18 August 2015

Establishing trust and credibility in your marketing campaigns [speed read]

‘Credibility and trust’ are the two most important attributes that online marketers must establish in order to gain the confidence of visitors, according to a 2015 study by KO Marketing Associates.

Why content credibility matters


If the credibility of website content is called into question, it has the potential to affect the reputation of not just the online channel, but also that of the wider organisation.
Content that is credible will result in higher levels of visitor engagement. For example, users will stay on your website for longer, interact with a wider range of features, make repeat visits; and are more likely to convert from visitors into customers.

The more visitors engage with your online content, the higher the 'quality score' attributed to it by Google. This will have a direct impact on reducing the cost of any pay per click (PPC) advertising campaigns you are running.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a good online experience for visitors to your website matters in the same way that a good face-to-face experience does. It is a touch point that contributes to achieving the strategic goal of achieving and maintaining high customer satisfaction levels.
However, only 33% of people trust online reviews, and just 8% trust online advertisements - so digital marketers have a lot of work to do to establish levels of trust within their content.


Step 1: Know who you want to establish credibility with
Segment your audience. Understand who the decision making units and influencers of decisions are. [click to Tweet]
This can be achieved in a number of ways, for example by analysing your current customers and stakeholders to understand what brought them to you; what their likes and dislikes are; their demographic profiles; and so on.




Step 2: Understand what your audience(s) needs to know
Now you know who your target audience is, understand the content they are actively seeking out; the challenges they are trying to overcome; and the places where they are active online. You could get this information through:
  • social listening exercises (including sentiment analysis)
  • primary research, such as telephone interviews
  • secondary desk-based research.
Step 3: Mirror your audience’s interests with your content
It sounds obvious to make sure that your content is of interest to your audience. The key to establishing credibility with them however, is to do this without trying to sell them anything!
Trust can be gained by offering genuinely useful information that helps your target audience on their decision making journey. [click to Tweet] This may involve talking about products and services that you don’t offer! Remember, each interaction you have with them is a touch-point with your brand.

Step 4: Nurture your relationship






All relationships need to be nurtured if they are to mature - and this is true of online relationships. The more genuinely useful and transparent your content, the more likely your reader is to regard you as the go-to source of information on their topic of interest.


In order to nurture relations, it is important that your content speaks the language of your target personas - which is often different to the terminology used by internal stakeholders. The right language to use can be identified through techniques such as:
  • analysing the interviews you carried out in step 2
  • studying correspondence into your call centre
  • assessing the terminology in online forums and social networks used by your target audiences.
Step 5: Listen, learn, and react
Creating your marketing materials is the start of your process, not the end. Test content with members of your target audience to:
  • ensure the message received is the one you think has been delivered
  • understand what key messages can be recalled
  • learn about how your content made the reader feel.
Amend your content to reflect what you have learnt. Keep a record of the changes you have made, to inform future content production.

"The greatest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place" -  
George Bernard Shaw
About the author
Claire Cresswell-Lane is a UK based, CIM Chartered Marketer specialising in digital marketing strategy and communications. You can contact her via LinkedIn or Twitter.
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Tuesday, 17 February 2015

How to keep your digital estate on-track


Digital Marketing Managers are tasked with looking after an ever increasing number of online assets. 

Here are my tips for the key functions to monitor - keeping performance on track and ensuring a seamless online journey for customers.

Website Content

Content is still king, and runs through the centre of digital marketing planning. Make sure you monitor:

Titles -  optimise titles for the keywords or phrases your target audience is searching for. Remember to carry out competitor analysis as part of your keyword strategy.

H1, H2, H3 - tags should be used for page headings and sub-headings to increase on-page Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) efforts. It's a simple rule that is often overlooked. This rule should also be applied to any PDFs that will end up published to your website. Check out these tips for structuring website content before you start to write.

Font size - should be large enough to comply with accessibility guidance, and avoid the need for pinch and zoom on mobile devices. 

Credibility - frequently updated content will prove to external search engines that your site is actively managed. It will also demonstrate to visitors that content is current and therefore more likely to be credible.


Blogs - what better way is there to maintain a stream of current content that will prove a long-term source of incoming traffic than through blogging? The more engagement your blog posts receive, the better your SEO results!

Lead capture - embedded into your content should be both micro- and macro- conversion opportunities (link follows, form completion, call-to-click, newsletter subscription, purchases, and so on).

Analytics - ensure you establish a baseline for your content before you implement changes, so you can see how effective they have genuinely been.

PDFs - content that doesn't need to be in PDF shouldn't be as it can disadvantage your SEO efforts in a number of ways. I talk more about this in an article I published in June 2014.

User Experience

Conducting both qualitative and quantitative analysis of how users interact with your online estate will provide you with a wealth of insight that can be used to inform continuous improvements to your digital assets. Make sure your plans include some or all of the following (depending on your size and capacity):

  • user experience testing workshops
  • content rating and review software
  • online surveys
  • mouse tracking studies.

Domain management

Effective domain management still pulls a lot of punches with search engines. It is also an important part of your branding, so deserves special consideration:

 Age - domain authority demonstrates to external search engines that your website belongs to a credible organisation with longevity. Secure domain names as soon as possible, and retain them after retirement as part of brand guardianship.


 Sub-domains - an effective way to maximise marketing efforts across a number of channels is via the use of sub-domains: http://subdomain.domain.com. This way, traffic generating activity benefits one central digital space, and both can benefit from the SEO advantages this brings.

 File structure - remember that the file structure following your domain extension provides search engines with important information about your websites content. The closer your keywords are to the root of your domain name, the better - for example:

 ...com/ladies-shoes.html

 is much stronger than

...com/our products/shoes/ladies-shoes.html

 All too often file structures focus on generic functional keywords (about us, contact us) instead of product and service offering (ladies shoes, ladies sandals, and so on).

Social media

Social signals are very important off-site search engine optimisation factors. The more engaging your content (that is, the more it is shared, bookmarked, liked, and commented upon), the more credibility it gains. Greater levels of engagement also contribute to a high landing-page quality score which will lower your Google pay-per-click costs!

 Brand guardianship - not every social media platform will suit your requirements - this depends very much on your product, service, and industry. But even if you don't plan on using a particular social media you should claim the vanity URL (before somebody does it for you). If you do this, it is a good idea to populate at least the landing-page with basic information which points back to your website.

 Integration - be sure to automate posts where it is sensible to do so. For example, you can configure Blogger to automatically post content to Google+, or post tweets to your Facebook Page. The important factor to monitor here is that you post content in a format appropriate to the platform - you will need to re-tweak your content in order to do this effectively.

 Cross-refer - most people use more than one social media platform, so remember to provide clear links to other ways that people can follow you, such as Twitter and Facebook.

 Conversation calendar - creating a conversation calendar will help to keep your content flowing and will ensure that you don't miss opportunities to capitalise on the buzz around planned events in your industry.

 Remember, there are a host of free tools out there that allow you to schedule your posts in advance (such as Hootsuite and SocialOomph).


Hootsuite - Social Relationship Platform

Compliance

Meeting statutory and best practice guidelines demonstrates to search engines, as well as your target audience that you mean business, and are safe to do business with!

 Schedule in time to review your governance policies to make sure they remain up-to-date.

 In the UK and Europe, you may want to include compliance with:
About the author
Claire Cresswell-Lane is a UK based, CIM Chartered Marketer specialising in digital marketing strategy and communications. You can contact her via LinkedIn or Twitter.
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Friday, 12 September 2014

Tips for structuring website content

When reading information from a screen, people do not start in the top left of the page and read every word. So what do they read and how can you make sure you get your key messages across?

Place keywords on the left

Special equipment can be used to detect exactly where people's eyes are focused when they look at a computer screen. This form of usability research makes it easier to understand what part of website design users are attracted to, and which parts they tend to overlook. 

A study involving 232 people found that website users spend 69% of their time viewing the left half of the page (regardless of the layout). Their eyes scan the page in an F pattern.

Follow the F pattern

If you focus on the red areas of the pictures below, you will see what is known as the F shape - this is where users tend to focus their attention when scanning a website. 


Source www.useit.com

·        The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. This is the most likely to be read.

·      Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behaviour.

In summary

 Users won't read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner - especially when conducting initial research. People are scanning content headings, sub headings and opening paragraphs for keywords to decide if the webpage they have opened is what they are looking for. If it isn’t, they will hit the back button in their browser and open the next search result listing!

Do you think these rules apply to websites optimised for mobile? Please add your comments.
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Friday, 11 July 2014

Content marketing tips #3 – keyword positioning


Careful keyword positioning helps to get your online content found by search engines.

Competing for that all important front page position on Google can seem like an impossible task. However, a few simple steps can make a huge difference to your search engine rankings.


Free Keyword position tools

 

Research which keyword(s) or phrase to compete for using free tools such as Google Keyword Planner:  https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner

Keyword-Position.Com offers you a free tool to check the position of keywords in major search engines Google, Yahoo & MSN: http://www.keyword-position.com

Location, location, location

You can convince search engines that your content is dedicated to the keyword(s) or phrase chosen by including it in strategic places such as the heading,  sub-headings, and opening paragraphs.


 Less is more


 Make sure keywords and phrases don’t make up more than 3% of your overall content by using this free keyword density tool: www.keyworddensity.com

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Wednesday, 2 July 2014

Content marketing tips - #1 - The inverted pyramid


What is the inverted pyramid style of writing?

Think of a newspaper article. By reading the first paragraph you can decide whether or not to read on. It tells you the who, what, when, where, and why. Read on and you will get the more granular detail. This is known as the inverted pyramid.

Why is the inverted pyramid important in content marketing


When it comes to content marketing, that opening paragraph of text is all important.


Eye tracking studies have shown that the part of online content most likely to be read by visitors is the opening paragraph.


The opening paragraph of content appears as the description text under the link to your site in search engine results pages (SERPS). It may be the only interaction you have your potential audience, unless the copy is compelling enough for them to click.



Applying the inverted pyramid  style of writing

A good example of the inverted pyramid is an opening paragraph which effectively provides the reader with a summary or conclusion. Without reading any other information, they understand what the rest of the article is about. Here is a great example – consider this opening paragraph from The Independent:


“Track runner Alysia Montano ran the 800m at the US Track and Field Championships on Thursday, even though she is due to give birth to her first child in seven weeks.”

Lets break that down and see all the information this one sentence provides us with:

Who?: “Track runner Alysia Montano”
What?: “ran the 800m”
Where?: “at the US Track and Field Championships”
When?: “on Thursday”
Why is this newsworthy?: “even though she is due to give birth to her first child in seven weeks”.

A word on keywords

Don't forget to include the carefully researched keywords or phrases that you are optimising your content for in the heading, opening paragraph, and sub-headings. 

 If you have found this article useful, please show thanks with a share, follow, or like.
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Thursday, 12 June 2014

Writing structures

Conveying complex written information in an easy to understand format is an
essential everyday skill for communications professionals. Here are 9 persuasive writing structures to consider when constructing your text:
 1.       Order of importance
You may want to structure your messages in order of importance. For example, if you are writing instructions on how to change a lawn mower blade, you would tell the reader to turn off the electricity supply first!
 2.       Chronological order
Arranging information into chronological order can help the reader to gain a sense of where they are in series of events, and help them to prepare for what is coming next. Examples of writing in chronological order would be: a day in the life of x; a historical account of events; a process that you are guiding the reader through.


 3.       Groups
It may help your reader if you group information under key headings. Remember, people are unlikely to read online information at the top left of the page and read every word. They will scan headings and sub-headings to find information relevant to them. For example, if you are writing copy for a recruitment webpage you might split the copy under the headings of ‘Graduates’, ‘Experienced professionals’, and ‘Interns’. This allows the reader to skip to the section relevant to them straight away.

 4.       Location
Can your copy be structured by reader location? This is especially important if your information contains calls to action that differ depending on where they are based.
5.       Benefit-costs
The benefit-cost structure allows you to spell out the pros and cons of a situation. This can be particularly useful in change management situations, because it can help to demonstrate that a number of view-points have been listened to and understood, even if the outcome is not what the reader wants to hear.
 6.       Problem-solution
Think about a trouble-shooting guide and you understand how this writing technique works. If for example, I have a problem with my washing machine, I want to be able to scan down a list of headings that describe my potential problem, and read the one or two paragraphs containing the solution underneath.
 7.       HW5
What, Who, When, Where, Why, How. With this technique, you are likely to be detailing the facts around a particular event. For example, if you are organising a conference, you will list what the event is about, who should attend, when it is happening, and so on.
 8.       Simple to complex
You may be aware that some members of your target audience will be more knowledgeable about your subject area than others. This technique ensures you explain key messages in a simple to understand manner at the start, and lead on to more complex detail for those readers that require it. If your audience only read the first two paragraphs of your text, they should go away with the key messages you needed to deliver.

9.       General to specific
Think about the opening paragraph to a newspaper article – generally, this will summarise the issue in very broad terms, and then go on to provide the specific details of the case.
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Friday, 30 May 2014

What is Content Marketing, and why does it work?



Content marketing is sometimes referred to by other names (digital marketing, internet marketing, online marketing, custom publishing). In this article, I explain what content marketing is; why it works; and how to do it well.

What is content marketing? 

Content marketing involves providing information that is of real use to (potential) customers, without trying to directly sell them a product or a service.
The idea of content marketing is that by providing this value, users develop a trust and respect for your brand, and are more likely become customers of their own free will –rather than via a hard sell on your part.

 
Content marketing is not just about creating great copy, it is also about distributing it; acquiring followers by capturing genuine subject interest; reminding existing customers about the value your products / services offer, and ultimately engaging your audience (which will in turn improve your search engine optimization).

Why does content marketing work?

Perhaps the question should be why have traditional forms of marketing stopped working?
  • TV commercials have become a source of annoyance for people who flick channels or reach for the iPad during the three minute break. 
  • Internet advertising is largely ignored, as browsers continue to the content they originally searched for (Research shows that less than 1% of web user actually click through to a webpage from an advert).
  • Magazine and newspaper adverts are easily flicked past as they compete for attention of the busy reader.

Content marketing works for a number of reasons:


People appreciate that they are genuinely getting something for free - information. This enriches their experience of interacting with your brand, and you start to build a positive relationship with them. 
 
Your audience are more likely to trust the information you provide to them if they feel that you are not trying to directly sell them something.

It’s easy for people to share the information you provide via content marketing with their family and friends at the click of a button. Research confirms that word of mouth and word of web are both highly credible, and amongst the most trusted sources of information.

Customers are much more savvy now and are likely to research products online before making a purchase – content marketing can help you to get your brand into the mind of potential consumers at the start of their purchase making decisions.

How to do content marketing well – 5 top tips

  1. Research what people actually want to know about the product or service you are selling. Address those questions in your online information.
  2. Use free tools such as Google Keyword Tool to research the keywords that people are searching for and include these in your article headings, sub-headings, and opening paragraphs.
  3. Don’t hold information back unnecessarily – put it all out there – content marketing is about providing information that is of real value.
  4. Make your content easy to share – add social network buttons so people can like / follow / pin you, and so on.
  5. Encourage real engagement by allowing people to comment on your posts. Be prepared to take the rough with the smooth and take the opportunity to correct any misgivings people may post about your product or service – it’s a chance to set the record straight. That said, avoid getting into lengthy debates with individuals online. 
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