Get Started With AMP to Accelerate Marketing Results

In February 2016, Google launched a project called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). The move was seen as a response to Facebook’s Instant Articles. The objective of a Google AMP is simple: to load web pages on mobile (substantially) faster. In fact, ‘AMPed’ up web pages can load up to 10 times faster than traditionally designed pages.

Why does Google care so much about this? According to a report by Starcounter, the number of mobile users on the web surpassed the number of traditional computing platforms in October 2016. Mobile users contributed over 51 percent of total web visits. Another study revealed that more than half of the respondents spent less than 15 second on a webpage.

AMP came into existence because of Google’s obsession with a better user experience. The median load time for an AMP page is 0.7 seconds—massively faster than the 22 second load time of traditional pages.

What is Google AMP?

Google AMP aims to deliver information to a mobile user as fast as possible by stripping out third-party Javascript. AMP loads text-based content first, followed by additional content when the remainder of the page has loaded.

Unlike Facebook’s Instant Articles, which has similar features, AMP is not restricted to one platform. It is an open source project, available to all publishers on the web. On mobile, AMP search results are displayed in the search “carousel” above the rest of the results, and feature the acronym tag of “AMP” along with a thunderbolt icon.

An example of how AMP enabled pages look on the “carousel” (Source)

AMP-enabled pages provide an improved user experience. This is beneficial for marketers and publishers as well. Fewer people bounce to a different website when quickly offered relevant information.

AMP Gives Businesses an SEO Advantage

AMP-ready websites display above their non-AMP counterparts in Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)—a significant SEO advantage. Google insists that being AMP ready is not the only criterion considered in their rankings. But they have made clear that for two websites with similar performance, the AMP-ready one will rank higher. For instance, consider two blogs which contain ‘how to’ guides about the same topic. Google will display the AMP-ready website higher than its competition.

This is especially beneficial for upcoming businesses trying to get themselves noticed. Featuring in the top carousel of SERPs guarantees higher visibility and click throughs. According to a study by online ad network Chitika, the top SERP result gets 33 percent of search traffic for a query. This number dips to 19 percent of traffic for the second highest result. Google reports that a brand can increase unaided brand awareness by 46 percent by simply showing up in mobile search ad results. In the same report, Google revealed that more than half of smartphone users have discovered a new brand or product while searching on their smartphones. (Check out the do’s and don’ts of SEO for content curation.)

Who is AMP Meant For?

Google has become much more than a platform where people search for products or services. It’s the place you search for answers. Google is very efficient when it comes to simple questions. For a question like, “How far is Mars from the Earth?” the results look like this:

However, when searching for something more complicated like, “Why did the US launch missiles in Syria?” you have to depend on relevant articles presented on the SERP. This is when the need for loading another page arises—which AMP makes much more convenient.

However, Google AMP is not only good for news, blogs, and articles. The Google carousel is equally effective when it comes to ecommerce websites. In fact, in June 2016 Ebay announced “about 8 million AMP-based browse nodes are available in production.” Which means they have taken the step towards AMP-ready pages for a large chunk of their webpages.

Advantages of AMP:

• Unless Google fiddles with the way it displays AMP pages, they are ranked above other results on a SERP page.
• Since Google AMP is an open source initiative, contributions are not limited to Google’s developers and can be made by everyone. This means AMP technology will be highly adaptive to future technologies and trends.
• Unlike Facebook, Google AMP is available for every publisher, across every platform on the web. This means anyone with a little drive in them can potentially expose their content to a larger audience.
• Adobe Analytics, comScore, Parse.ly, and Chartbeat will offer separate analytic tools for AMP. If you wish to develop your own analytics for AMP, the instructions are available on the official website.

Limitations of AMP:

• AMP excludes external JavaScripts. This means everything other than the website content is either absent or downgraded. So a brand has to choose between an aesthetically designed page that compliments its content (opt out of AMP), or a page that relies solely on content to bring repeat visitors.
• There is no benefit to AMP for non-publisher sites. A major reason is the absence of external JavaScripts.
• AMP content does not feature any kind of forms. This means generating leads through an “AMP-ed” page is next to impossible.
• For broad search terms such as “Mars,” AMP results appear above sponsored links. This means a decline in paid search impressions for your webpage.

How to Use AMP for Your Business

If the focus of your business is the content you develop, whether blogs or articles, optimizing for AMP should be at the top of your list. The instructions for converting webpages into Google AMP formats are freely available on the official AMP page. There is plenty of material to use as a guide to optimizing for AMP.

If you have a WordPress blog, optimizing for AMP is extremely simple.

• Search the WordPress plugins for ‘AMP.’
• Download the AMP plugin along with the PageFrog plugin.
• Once installed and enabled, the WordPress AMP plugin will optimize your content to AMP.
• PageFrog can customize the design of the website. It has several design element options including, but not limited to colors, layout, logos, and fonts.
• PageFrog settings also allow to you select pages for optimization, instead of optimizing every page.
• Your new AMP pages can also be connected to Google Analytics using PageFrog. It also lets you enable ads on AMP Pages.

If you plan to use Google Analytics with AMP, set up a separate property for AMP pages. AMP analytics are limited; they work very differently to traditional pages. (To really understand analytics for content marketing, read The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics.)

Conclusion

If your website deals in written content and does not involve selling products, or other ecommerce activities, you should immediately make the move to Google AMP. Adopting AMP now will boost the visibility of your content, and the resulting impressions.

AMP analytics are currently limited, but Google expects to increase AMP tracking functionality. The right time to make the shift is passing as more businesses migrate towards AMP. Get ahead of the curve—make the move now. For further actionable SEO insights, read WordStream founder Larry Kim’s 8 Mind Blowing SEO Experiments That Will Forever Change Your Approach to SEO.

The post Get Started With AMP to Accelerate Marketing Results appeared first on Curata Blog.

10 Best Examples of Companies that Get B2B Content Marketing

Content marketing works for B2B businesses. Ninety three percent of B2B companies say content marketing generates more leads than traditional marketing strategies. Meanwhile, 74 percent of companies indicate content marketing is increasing their marketing teams’ lead quality and quantity. But what about content marketing examples of companies doing it right?

Knowing that something works, and knowing how to do it are two different things. Instead of us telling you how content marketing works for B2B companies, we decided to show you examples of 10 companies achieving excellent results with it.

10 Best Content Marketing Examples

1. LeadPages

LeadPages designs customizable, mobile-friendly landing page templates and testing services to help businesses increase their reach.

Founder and CEO Clay Collins knew they had to be scrappy to be able to compete against VC-funded giants like Hubspot and Infusionsoft, given LeadPages were a bootstrapped company since inception. Instead of spending $10,000 on customer acquisition as some of their competitors did, Collins developed a growth hypothesis based on the idea that “a content team of four people could outperform an 80+ person sales team at most companies.”

Based on this hypothesis, LeadPages developed the following content marketing assets:

• A popular marketing blog which covers lead generation, A/B testing, and all sort of related topics.
• A set of marketing resources, including seven marketing courses, two eBooks, 10 case studies, and eight infographics, all of which are free.
• ConversionCast, a highly popular marketing podcast run by Tim Paige, a world-class podcaster.
• Weekly webinars on different topics related to online marketing.

Clay Collins’ hypothesis was correct. Thanks to his content marketing strategy, LeadPages ended up with an extremely high lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratios. This helped them grow on a massive scale, acquiring 35,000 customers in under three years, hitting over $16 million in revenue in 2015, and in 2016 becoming the #148 fastest growing company in America. LeadPages success makes them one of the great content marketing examples.

2. WP Engine

Web hosting is one of the most competitive sectors in the technology industry. There are hundreds of companies trying to reach the same customers, many of whom aren’t that tech-savvy. Not only that, many compete on price, rather than features or quality. Competing on price lowers the margins of the industry as a whole and makes the competition play hard in acquiring each customer.

WP Engine, a managed hosting platform focused only on WordPress, knew they had a big challenge to overcome. Given they exclusively target WordPress users, it made sense for them to focus on content marketing targeting bloggers and other WordPress users.

Following the vision of WP Engine’s CMO, they segmented their content marketing strategy into five buckets:

1. Product: Focused on product and content information about their new features, and other related company news.
2. Industry: Focused on how marketers and agencies use WordPress to build their digital presence online.
3. Business impact: Focused on how people use their online presence to drive growth, including leads and sales.
4. Torque: Focused on the WordPress open source community. They don’t brand this kind of content as much so they can create a community feeling around it.
5. Support: Focused on solving their customers’ problems through written and video content.

WP Engine’s content marketing strategy has driven significant results. These include acquiring 300,000 sites, applications in 128 countries, and raising five rounds of funding worth over $40 million.

3. STR Software

The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software industry is full of companies like STR Software working to attract large businesses with big budgets and long, complex sales cycles. So instead of investing thousands of dollars to acquire each customer, STR Software decided to to set themselves apart by developing a content marketing strategy.

They put all their content and into a centralized hub they called “BI Publisher University.” They gated each piece of content with a form that captured relevant data for lead nurturing. Then, using Pardot’s email automation system, they created email autoresponders that included further content.

STR Software promoted their “University” extensively throughout their site, including on their homepage, sidebar, and other articles. They also used email marketing to promote it to their audience.

Some of their results made a big impact on their bottom line:

• The campaign had the highest performance of any they developed.
• Increased the quality of their lead generation initiatives.
• Attracted high-quality inbound links, which helped increase their organic traffic.
• Averaged a 10 percent conversion rate on forms, up from 1-2 percent on other forms.
• Saw a 54 percent increase in website traffic, and a 67 percent increase in pageviews—while increasing average time on site.

4. Simply Business

Industries like insurance aren’t famous for being popular and exciting. In many cases, businesses deal with insurance not because they want to, but because the law says they have to. Even if they wanted to, the process tends to be boring and complex.

Simply Business, the UK’s largest insurance broker, aimed to attract leads with content marketing. Since they cater to small business owners, they decided to create content that helped that audience, even if it didn’t have anything to do with insurance. Some of the guides they created include these content marketing examples:

• An email productivity guide
• A Google AdWords guide for small businesses
• WordPress for small business guide
• A guide to business blogging
• Social media success road map

The results were magnificent. Simply Business increased their ranking for their main keywords, including reaching first place in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for “professional indemnity,” “public liability insurance,” and “employer’s liability.” Even though they launched some guides before Google’s Penguin algorithm change, they significantly increased weekly organic traffic, meaning their link building practices were white-hat and high-quality.

5. Single Grain

There are thousands of digital marketing agencies in the US, many of which focus on small businesses or Fortune 500 companies. Single Grain however, focuses on tech startups. One of the key ways they attracted companies such as Amazon, Salesforce, and Uber was thanks to their content marketing strategy.

Single Grain’s content marketing strategy can be split into three sections:

1. Their blog, which focuses on all sorts of topics around online marketing.
2. The wildly popular Marketing School podcast, run by CEO Eric Siu, and marketing legend Neil Patel.
3. Their resource section, which features courses, guides, infographics, and webinars.

Some of their articles have gotten thousands of shares and links, attracting both social and organic traffic to their site. Their podcast is one of the most popular in the industry, helping them create a lot of buzz and awareness. Finally, they focus their resources around two goals:

1. Convert visitors into subscribers; and
2. Start a conversation around their services.

6. HubSpot

The inbound marketing software industry is flooded with companies, including behemoths like Marketo, Pardot, and Infusionsoft, amongst others. The king of the bunch, however, is HubSpot, whose CEO actually coined the phrase “inbound marketing.” The main reason HubSpot has grown so fast is because of their content marketing strategy.

Their blogs are central to their content strategy: one focused on marketing, the other on sales. The goal of these blogs is to help HubSpot acquire traffic to their funnel. Since HubSpot caters to small businesses, their focus is to teach everything there is to know about inbound marketing, including SEO, blogging, and social media.

That’s the top of the funnel covered. The resources section then, features all sorts of mid to bottom-of-funnel content focused on converting people into leads, including eBooks, webinars, a marketing kit, case studies, and even a quiz. Each of these are excellent content marketing examples.

Content marketing has been one of HubSpot’s main growth drivers. It helped the company go from being funded in 2006 to a $75 million run rate public company worth over a billion dollars in 2016.

7. Scripted

Content marketing is one of the most important acquisition channels for any business. Given the high demand for content marketing, Scripted developed a marketplace for companies to find and hire writers for their content marketing efforts.

Scripted competes with other, more popular marketplaces, such as Upwork and Fiverr. So they needed to differentiate themselves from being “just” a marketplace, to being the best place to find writers.

To achieve this, Scripted developed a full-fledged content marketing strategy focused on touching on each of a buyer’s steps along their journey:

• Top of the funnel: In this stage, Scripted uses their blog and podcast to talk about common problems their visitors have.
• Middle of the funnel: In this stage, Scripted focuses on making people sign up to their email list, and creating awareness of their solution through white papers and webinars.
• Bottom of the funnel: In the final stage, Scripted uses case studies to convince subscribers about their services.

As you might surmise from these content marketing examples, their strategy has provided amazing results:

• Forty six percent of visitors were driven by their blog posts and other content marketing methods, outperforming other traffic sources by at least three times.
• Their bounce rate from content was almost three times lower than any other source.
• People that entered their site through one of their content hubs visited 4.06 pages per visit on average, the second-highest of all traffic sources.

8. Salesforce

The CRM space is one of the largest and most competitive industries in the IT sector. Despite being the world’s largest vendor, Salesforce has had some problems maintaining steady traffic and leads. This was the case for Salesforce UK, which could have been a cautionary tale in content marketing examples. They had to drastically change their content marketing strategy to increase their search and paid traffic sources.

In a short period, Salesforce UK launched a new set of content marketing tactics, including:

• Fun videos on sales and marketing.
• The world’s first stop-motion slideshare.
• A Prezi presentation on a customer success story.

Thanks to their renewed content strategy, in a three-month period Salesforce UK got amazing results, including:

• An 80 percent increase in traffic YoY.
• 2500 percent more traffic from social media sites.
• 10,000 eBook downloads.
• 6,500 email newsletter sign-ups.

9. SAP

SAP is one of the world’s largest and most powerful enterprise software vendors, serving over a dozen industries around the world. With this diverse set of customers, running a content marketing strategy that fits each customer’s needs is hard.

Despite this challenge, SAP developed a customized content marketing strategy for 19 customer segments, while still maintaining a consistent look and feel.

SAP tailored the messaging for each industry around a popular topic, such as digital transformation. This enabled them to appeal to each customer’s audience, while demonstrating the benefits of their solutions with examples.

To make content easier to digest for each persona, their campaigns feature content types as diverse as:

• Email
• Tweets
• Blogs posts
• LinkedIn status updates
• Posts on the SAP Community Network
• Radio ads
• Virtual events
• In-person events
• Outbound and responder follow-up calls
• Account Based Marketing
• Individual account meetings

The results from SAP’s marketing strategy have been impressive:

• Marketing generated opportunities (MGO) equaled $3,675,000. MGO’s are new opportunities created from marketing leads that have been accepted by sales and converted into opportunities.
• The marketing touched pipeline (MTP) equaled $50,037,709 in this campaign. MTP comprises all open opportunities that have at least one qualifying marketing activity after the opportunity creation date.

10. SecureWorks

Cybersecurity is a key concern of any company that takes their online presence seriously. The key is to detect potential sources of attack before they happen—and to respond rapidly once they do. SecureWorks helps companies achieve this.

One of the keys to SecureWorks’ content marketing success has been developing clear personas for each target customer. This allowed them to create content focused on solving customers’ problems, which includes executives and VPs of security in large corporations.

SecureWorks segmented their content marketing strategy in two ways. First focusing on attracting traffic, then on converting that traffic into leads:

1. Their blog answers common questions people have about information security and compliance.
2. Their resources feature webinars, white papers, reports, case studies, solution briefs, data sheets, and videos.

SecureWorks thorough content marketing strategy allowed them to streamline their marketing and sales teams, making one out of every two qualified leads that marketing sends to sales becomes an opportunity. They also doubled their conversion rate, thanks to the increased efficacy of their marketing initiatives.

Conclusion: 10 Best Content Marketing Examples

These content marketing examples show how B2B content marketing works in real life and the results you can expect from it.

What results have you seen from your content marketing strategy?

The post 10 Best Examples of Companies that Get B2B Content Marketing appeared first on Curata Blog.

Content Promotion, Distribution, and You: A Marketer’s Guide

In 2017, marketing teams require content creation skills more than any other—and they’re investing in them. In 2016, 75 percent of marketers increased their content marketing spend. But better content is a waste of money if nobody knows it exists. Which makes a holistic content strategy from ideation to content promotion even more important.

Distribute this.

This is harder than it might seem. Marketing influencer Mark Schaefer coined the idea of “content shock” in 2014. He argued that content production will:

… increase exponentially as more and more brands pile in on the action, the rate of increase in content consumption will only increase slightly and then inevitably plateau. This is because we only have so much time with which to consume content. Therefor content marketing will become a victim of its own success, and brands will find that the same techniques become less and less effective each year.— SmartInsights

The point of “content shock” is upon us. Over four million blog posts are published on the Internet every day, while 50 percent of content created gets eight shares or less according to BuzzSumo. This says two things. First, that most content is created without being read or interacted with. Second, that many content creators fail to properly distribute their content. For content to succeed requires strategic content distribution.

Source: BuzzSumo

The real value of content marketing is in the distribution channels.
— Jayson DeMers, founder of AudienceBloom

If you build it, they will come no longer holds true, if it ever did. Marketers now need to build it, share it, talk about it, optimize keywords, email it, and share it again. Then maybe you’ll start getting people to come to your website.

Some people may argue that if you create really amazing content, your job is done. People will find it and love it and share it and come back for more. This is sort of true. If you own a bakery, you need to put your freshly baked triple fudge cake out front in the glass window in order for people to know they want to buy it. If not, they’d probably pick something else in the glass window, even if it’s not as good. That cake won’t create value for your bakery no matter how delicious it is. The same goes for content: it needs to be out front in the glass window.

REBECCA LIEB
Analyst, Author, Speaker. @lieblink
If you build it they will come.
Maybe. Maybe not. That’s why a plan to promote and distribute content is as critical as having great ideas for content creation. The most brilliant content in the world is the proverbial tree falling in the woods if it’s not seen or found.There’s not a single best way to approach promotion and distribution. Instead, there’s a series of questions to answer: who is the intended audience? Where do they go online? Who are their influencers? Is paid promotion a good option? If so, on what channels or media? There are many, many dependencies to promotion and distribution that can only be addressed with a solid content strategy.

This article explains different content distribution methods, how to develop a content promotion strategy, tips for optimizing, and offers tools to make planning and scheduling easier.

Things to Consider

Before developing a content promotion strategy, consider the following:

• Content distribution should just be one section in your overarching content strategy. And there is no one size fits all option to content distribution. Your strategy should be unique to your company.
• Consider the goal of your content. Are you hoping your audience will buy your product, interact with more content, or sign up for your newsletter? This will dictate the way you’re sharing, where you’re sharing, and the frequency.
• Who’s your audience? Determine your target audience and figure out where they are and at what time to optimize your online promotion strategy.
• The digital and content marketing landscape is constantly evolving. Best practices for sharing on Facebook are nothing like what they were five years ago. Be aware of promotional tactics that are no longer effective.

Distribution Options

After defining your content audience and goals, examine content distribution methods to determine which ones are ideal for your organization. Here are the most common content distribution methods in marketing today, and how they can be used in a distribution strategy.

Paid Promotion

Paid is a four letter word to a lot of content marketers. If my content is good enough, why do I have to pay people to read it? The simple answer is, you’re not paying people to read it. You’re paying people to see your content, the same way magazines pay for prime placement on newsstands.

CARLA JOHNSON
Type A Communications, Author of Experiences: The 7^th Era of Marketing. @CarlaJohnson

Marketers need to take inspiration for content promotion from ideas and places outside their industry. What makes you read your favorite magazine? What makes you take a brand up on a promotional offer? It may seem far-fetched for what you do or sell, but if you can take the essence of the creativity behind those great promotions and transplant them into your work, you’ll begin promoting it in ways that feel fresh and vibrant to your audience.

Paid content can help:

• Pre-existing content work harder
• Get a solid base of eyes on your content
• Jump-start sharing of your content

DOUG KESSLER
Creative Director & Co-founder of Velocity, @dougkessler
Everybody talks about earned, owned, and paid media. But it’s important to add employed media. All the people who work for you add up to a really powerful distribution channel—but only if they know the content exists.

When paying for eyeballs, metrics other than pageviews become more salient. While you can count on those numbers, you’re paying for them. “Paid” is an umbrella term that can include anything from paid social to banner ads to pay per click (PPC).

Email Marketing

Email should be the foundation of any content strategy. While not as glamorous as social, email remains the most effective marketing channel there is. Email allows you to send content to people who already have a relationship with your brand. You have more information about them, and more control over how your content is packaged when they first see it.

Source: MarketingCharts.com

For this reason, email should be a primary method of content distribution. Segment lists to prevent your audience from fatiguing with emails, and to ensure you only deliver content each audience member finds interesting. 

• Email is best for: Acquiring customers. Email is 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined. — McKinsey
• Email is worst for: Growing your email lists. Because, well, you already have their emails.

Social Distribution

Over 80 percent of the US population has a social network profile. And 94 percent of B2B marketers distribute content on LinkedIn. Social is necessary for content marketing to succeed, and marketers know it.

Social distribution works best when shared both organically and via paid options. There are plenty of tools like BuzzSumo or Hootsuite that can determine the best time to share content, where to share, and what kind of messaging is most effective.

• Social is best for: Increasing engagement, buzz, and brand awareness.
• Social is worst for: Bottom of the funnel content meant to sell.

Tips: Social distribution can be overwhelming. Not only are there several big players to advertise on, but the pay to play options are extensive. Don’t advertise on social sites your audience isn’t on.

Make sure the content you’re sharing matches the preferences of the audience on the platform. Advertising on Instagram or Pinterest requires sharing visual content rather than text-heavy content.

PAM DIDNER
GCM Strategist, Speaker, Author. @PamDidner
Understand how your customers use each social media channel. Customized your copywriting and image as necessary. COPE: “create once, publish everywhere” doesn’t work well in the increasingly personalized communications.

PPC (Pay Per Click)

There are two types of pay per click: search engine PPC and content PPC. Search PPC involves paying to rank for keywords on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) like Google. Content PPC operates similarly. You pay for your content to show up in the recommended or related articles section of content discovery networks.

• PPC is best for: Serving content to a new audience and helping your company be found.
• PPC is worst for: Sustained, high-value traffic, unless you want to continue paying for it.

Tips: Strong copy and calls to action are vital. Your content will be served up against similar competitor content.

SEO

Is SEO a distribution method? Not really. But ensuring people can organically find your content is. This is about as close as we can get to the idea of someone asking for your cake without finding it from the front glass case. Good SEO means anyone who asks for a chocolate cake is offered a slice of yours. While SEO is a ‘free’ way to get eyes on your content, it’s difficult to do effectively. To start, focus on key phrase research, go in depth in your articles, and create high-quality content. Integrate SEO into your content strategy.

Republish Elsewhere

In addition to the company blog, publish your content on sites such as Buzzfeed, Medium, Slideshare, Reddit, and other third-party websites. (Make sure to link back to your website on these other platforms.) This helps your content gain more visibility, and to drive more traffic to your website.

JOE CHERNOV
VP of Marketing, InsightSquared, startup advisor. @jchernov

Don’t forget that your sales team is unquestionably your most important distribution channel.

Influencer Marketing

Search Trends “Influencer Marketing”

While influencer marketing needs its own strategy, your influencer connections can aid in distributing your content. Tactics such as including influencer quotes in your content incentivize influencers to distribute your content to their followers, increasing your content’s reach.

Native Advertising

Another way to distribute your content is via paid posts on other media sites. This is a good option for outlets you haven’t been able to get published in.

Customer Advocacy

Many brands ask customers for case studies and testimonials. If you’re creating a tiered customer advocacy program, try social sharing and interaction as one of the tiers with low incentives. Or ask customer success to encourage your clientele to share your content.

Edelman Trust Barometer, 2017

Tips for Optimizing Distribution

• Repurpose content so it’s in different forms for different distribution channels.
• Keep testing; there’s no “best practices” for content promotion.
• Company employees are an asset. Your email lists and social accounts aren’t the only ways to share content with your audience. Ask employees to participate in your content promotion strategy to grow your audience and social engagement for free.
• Create a community engagement strategy that aligns with your distribution strategy. By consistently interacting with your audience to form deeper connections with them, you increase the likelihood they’ll interact with and share your content.

Tools

As with anything in the marketing sphere, there are many tools and platforms to optimize a content distribution strategy. Here are some of the essentials:

• WiseStamp: Automatically share your latest piece of content in your email signature.
• ClicktoTweet: Help your audience evangelize your content. Share tweetable quotes at the click of a button.
• Medium: All brands should have a Medium account. It allows you to republish existing posts to reach a new audience.
• GaggleAmp: Create messages for your company’s employees that are sent out automatically on social channels.
• Hootsuite: One of many social scheduling tools that helps you optimize the time and frequency that you publish.
• Quora: According to Quora’s website, “Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organized by its community of users.” Quora enables you to establish your company as an expert in your field, and lets you link back to your content from a high domain authority site.
• Slideshare: This presentation sharing platform gives you another opportunity to distribute eBooks, webinars, and event presentations. With 80 percent of traffic coming from search, over 159 million monthly page views, and less than one in five B2B marketers using it, it’s without a doubt a platform you should be on.
• PR Newswire: Having a platform that reaches journalists and other news outlets is important for sharing company updates and company news.

Create a Content Promotion Action Plan

Now you know the options for content promotion and the best ways to use them, create a content promotion strategy for your company by:

1. Implementing a set of rules for content distribution. For example, if content’s goal is to generate x pageviews, share x times on social media and send x emails over x weeks.
2. Create a distribution calendar in conjunction with, or on top of your editorial calendar.
3. Establish KPIs and allocate time to analyze performance once a month or every other week. Adjust and optimize according to these metrics.

ARDATH ALBEE
CEO & B2B Marketing Strategist, @ardath421
My number one tip for content promotion and distribution is that it’s most successful when it’s part of the content planning process, rather than an afterthought when you hit publish.

As part of all the content briefs I help my clients create, I coach them to include the requirements for promotion and identify distribution channels up front. This way you (or your writer) can create the snippets for social media along with any additional graphics.

You can also map out distribution scenarios so that momentum is built along with reach and exposure. Planning for content promotion and distribution also helps to ensure that your messaging is consistent across channels, producing better experiences for your audience.

Once you have a content promotion strategy, it’s time to put it all into action. For more on creating a comprehensive content strategy, download Curata’s eBook: The Content Marketing Pyramid: A Framework to Develop & Execute Your Content Marketing Strategy.

The post Content Promotion, Distribution, and You: A Marketer’s Guide appeared first on Curata Blog.

Boost Engagement and Traffic to Accelerate Lead Generation

Unlike the latest summer Hollywood blockbuster, a blog or website’s success is not as much a matter of fate or the fickleness of your audience. It’s a fairly clearly defined science that any good content marketer should be able to implement as a concise, data-driven exercise. I’m the co-founder of a company—Lucep—that offers a B2B tool that accelerates website lead generation. So we have the data to find out exactly what makes one website more successful than the rest.

To this end, we sifted through analytics data to map traffic sources, page views, and leads generated online by clients using our website widget and mobile app.

The chart above is divided (from left to right) into sets of websites, with those enjoying the most lead generation on the left, and increasingly less leads as you move right. On the vertical axes, you have pageviews and uniques.

No Engagement, No Lead Generation

The pink line shows average pageviews by visitors who did not convert into leads. These are visitors uninterested in the content, which in turn leads to lackluster engagement and low pageviews. Note that this doesn’t mean all of them aren’t potential leads. It just means that the content you have was not able to engage them. It could be because of a fault in your audience targeting, your content plan, or both.

Uniques vs Engagement

The set of websites on the right with the most lead generation have the highest number of unique visitors. That’s the best sign of a good, healthy website. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s optimized to maximize conversions. This is why you want to see the blue line, indicating average pageviews by lead generating visitors.

It’s important because you can get more leads from existing traffic by increasing engagement. As you can see in the chart above, the set of sites in the middle have a sky-high level of engagement that has boosted lead generation compared to the set next to them. Those are getting more traffic, but with lower engagement. This means you can get more leads and sales than competitors who get more traffic—if you can better engage your visitors.

Best Practices for Driving Higher Engagement

Ok, so now you want to drive higher engagement. One thing that works better than almost anything else is to create a content plan based on buyer personas. However, most people want to write about what they know about and want to talk about. So a sales manager wants to talk about how to generate more sales and revenue, building and managing sales teams, etc. That’s fine if your buyers are also sales managers interested in the same thing. But everyone else will just glance at this content and move on.

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To identify who your buyers are, create buyer personas to identify and flesh out each target group you want as customers. Each persona will have its own set of pain points. These are the customer needs that you must address in your content. Generate keywords from the pain points, and write about content focused on these keywords. It may not be what you do, and may even have no direct bearing on your company or product. But it will be what your buyers want to read about. This is what drives higher engagement.

Creating Buyers Personas

How do you actually do this? Let me give you an example. We did an exercise creating buyer personas for CEOs, sales managers, and marketing heads. One of the marketing heads is a digital marketing manager. We identified two key pain points for this particular persona that they wanted to know:

1. What makes a good website?
2. How to increase online lead conversion rates?

One of the keywords we came up with to address both these concerns was “engaging content,” and then wrote an article for this keyword. That’s what you’re reading right now!

Case Study Number One

Let’s examine a few sites we looked at among our clients for examples of how targeted content drives huge engagement. Take a look at Paul Hype Page & Co chartered accountants. This site has massive engagement, resulting in leads flowing in from all over the world.

Paul Hype Page & Co provide company incorporation and related services in Singapore. They’ve created a content repository in which each piece of content specifically targets every single need their customers have. The homepage workflow is so clear, any visitor landing on it knows exactly where to click and read an article telling them what they want to know. The only call to action (CTA) after reading the content is the visitor either calls or asks for a callback. Both of which happen frequently. The content is extremely targeted and engaging, and positions the company as an expert in the services a visitor is looking for.

Case Study Number Two

Another example is The Indian Handwritten Letter Co (TIHLC). It’s a startup that writes and sends handwritten letters on behalf of individuals and business users. The Indian Handwritten Letter Co. was doing pretty nicely as a three year old startup, but their traffic recently smashed through the roof when they got coverage in startup media portal Your Story. Suddenly everyone was talking about how TIHLC was reviving the lost art of handwritten letters. The lead generation from callback requests via their website widget increased massively. This is the kind of engagement good content creates, even if it’s not on your own site. All content you create should be optimized to maximize engagement: social media snippets, videos, infographics, media coverage—everything.

Four Simple Tips

What more can you to do drive higher engagement? Follow these best practices.

1. Create useful and relevant content based on buyer personas.
2. Track the engagement metrics. This means examining which pages have lower bounce rates, higher session durations, more backlinks, comments, and social shares, etc.
3. Start using more videos. According to Cisco, a full 82 percent of consumer web traffic is projected to be video by 2020.
4. Offer a click to call feature on your website. Over 50 percent of website visitors who call you to talk are qualified leads. Only two to three percent of those who don’t call will convert (conversion rates may vary by industry). According to Lucep research, adding a click to call tool drives engagement with website visitors, and can increase conversion rates by over 72 percent. It’s especially effective in converting website visitors who access your site using a mobile device.

Target the Right Traffic Sources

You can create the most engaging content possible, but it won’t be useful if your traffic is coming from the wrong sources. Here’s the traffic source chart for the same set of websites examined in the engagement chart.

You probably don’t need to look at the chart to know search traffic from Google converts into more leads than traffic from other sources. Google sends more than half (57 percent) of the lead generating traffic Lucep clients get.

Direct traffic from bookmarks and people typing in the website URL accounts for 23 percent of lead sources for Lucep clients. This is usually from repeat visitors, people who know the company, and/or leads advised to check out the website by someone in marketing or sales.

Only the remaining one-fifth (20 percent) of lead sources is website traffic from social media, referrals, email marketing, etc.

So we should focus on the primary lead sources sending us actual customers. Not visitors who are just passing through. This means Google, referrals, and one or two other key sources where you know your buyers can be found.

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Lucep is a B2B SaaS platform. We get a relatively higher number of visitors from Facebook, but they don’t convert half as well as the fewer visitors clicking through from LinkedIn. Again, you don’t need to look at a chart to understand this.

LinkedIn is a B2B networking platform primarily used by decision makers. I.e. CEOs, startup founders, business owners, managers, and executives. These are the same decision makers who make up the bulk of Lucep’s ideal buyer personas. If you focus your marketing efforts on channels where your buyers are, the traffic you get will generate more leads.

Conclusion

You need to create engaging content, and ensure it gets distributed through the channels which lead straight to your buyers. That’s all it takes. You can plan it and implement it in a clear and scientific way that leaves nothing to chance. Use a documented content strategy to systematically achieve this lead generation. Download The Content Marketing Pyramid: A Framework to Develop & Execute Your Content Marketing Strategy eBook for efficient, effective content strategy.

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