Content is going to be a crucial part of any digital marketer’s long-term plan. While it’s been over 20 years since Bill Gates asserted that Content is King, the statement rings true to today.

Content, both the kind you create and the kind created about you, is what informs search engines on the quality and reputation of your business. Content is what generates the context people need to make the decision to support your business. Content is online word-of-mouth at an infinitely larger scale than one-on-one.

But there’s a big difference between good content and bad content, and there’s an even greater difference between good content leveraged properly, and good content gone underused. Let’s take a look at what it means to invest in a digital content marketing strategy, and how to begin measuring the return on those investments.

What’s the Point of Content Marketing ROI?

The return on investment is one of the most basic business management principles, and it’s probably the most important formula for anyone starting a business of their own. You need to be able to determine that you’re getting more out of what you’re putting into your business to survive.

If you put $100 into a stock one year and take it out the next at a value of $154, you’ve made a substantial return on your initial investment, even after accounting for inflation and transactional fees. If you pay $500 for an ad banner and run a pay-per-click ad campaign for several weeks, and the money generated from sales created by that banner is less than what you’ve put into it, then you’ve got a poor return on investment.

However, things can get a little more complicated when we’re talking about content marketing. It can be difficult to quantify the return on investment for a blog post, press release, or article, without affiliate products or a call-to-action to a specific service. If you created a piece of content to promote the launch of a new service, then you can try to attribute at least some of the sales of that new service to the buzz generated by the content you’ve dedicated to it.

But most content is not going to revolve solely around product promotion. Good content is about proving your authority and value as a resource to readers, as well as generating leads and creating a loyal customer base. You want people to come back to you for more information, and perhaps a sale or two. And you know that, given the way most people browse the internet, they may take more than one visit to one page to become a converted lead.

So, what’s the point in quantifying the return on your investment in content marketing when not every single piece of content will track linearly to an increase in leads and clicks to products from that content?

The answer is simple: even if it’s hard to quantify the value of the content you’re putting out there, you must quantify it anyway. That’s the only way you know you’re putting out the right kind of content, or in the very least, are utilizing your content marketing budget properly.

Related: 6 Ways to Monitor Your Competition’s Content Strategy

Measuring Your Content Marketing ROI

So, we know that it’s important to get a grasp of what returns you’re receiving on your content marketing. But how do we measure those returns?

We start by identifying key metrics that either lead to direct sales, or contribute to more sales, such as improved search rankings (more traffic, more potential leads, more sales), improved domain authority and reputation (customer trust is paramount), and visitor retention (more time spent on your content is good news).

The Path to Conversion

The job of data analysis is to gleam useful information from mountains of data generated by every event, action, or use of a page. The job of an analytical tool is to make these tasks much easier. While tools like Google Analytics help you identify your most popular pieces of content and track lead generation, it doesn’t always tell you the full picture.

There are other content analysis tools that help you figure out what pages a user might have visited before they made their decision to purchase, or recognize a trend materializing in your most recent sales, one you might be able to profit off.

For example, if more people tend to access a certain type of your content during a certain season of the year, it might be a good idea to invest in producing more of that content around that time of year, as well as promoting existing content of that type.

Figure out what paths to conversion most of your leads take and what type of content tends to bring users into your lead generation funnel the most effectively.

Content Marketing, SEO, and Authority

Not all content needs to be linked directly to conversions to be a worthwhile investment. You need to consider the impact your content has on backlink generation and search optimization, as well.

For example: a certain article might not be getting the most associated leads, but it has contributed to an improvement in your overall domain authority due to being linked to by multiple other high-ranking websites. This is a valuable piece of content! Authority is important, because it’s one of these metrics that search engines like Google use to rank content on the internet for any given keyword phrase or search term. Increase your keyword reach!

Money and Time

What content does your audience engage with the most? If you have a piece of content with a great title, but the content might be outdated, you might get good traffic on it but with a high bounce rate.

People quickly realize that it isn’t what they’re looking for. Conversely, you might have another piece of content that keeps readers engaged, but doesn’t have the most effective title, causing lower visitor numbers.

Optimize and revisit your existing content to update old information, expand and improve on successful or thriving content, and make the most of something that has already started snowballing, versus just sheer quantity.

Google Analytics and Other Tools

Tools are a human’s best friend, but you need the right ones for the job. Google Analytics is an important tool in the repertoire of any online marketer, and it is vital for SEO relevant data. But when it comes to figuring out the ROI on your content marketing, it helps to broaden your horizon.

In addition to utilizing Google Analytics to track your website’s improvements in terms of traffic, keyword growth, as well as bounce rates, utilizing other tracking tools will help you form a more complete picture of how any given piece of content is helping you improve traffic, get long-term visitors, generate leads, and finally garner sales. Tested and proven tools include those developed by HubSpot, SEMrush, Buffer, Parse.ly, and Moz.

Having a team of experts to work with is an immense boon as well. An experienced team of content marketers and SEO professionals can help you utilize your full budget in pinpoint fashion, cutting your losses and improving your return on investment.

Got questions about making the most of your content marketing strategy? Give us a call.

The post How to Measure Content Marketing ROI appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.

We all know a picture tells a thousand words, but infographics are even more efficient. The right infographic can turn facts and data into arguments, turn potential leads into sure sales, and can reduce complex data points into actionable information in multiple different contexts, from product info to political activism.

But infographics are still a relatively delicate art. A poorly drafted infographic can boil down to a pretty picture without a point, and it’s easy to overburden the reader with too much information and lose them. Like an article or a professional photograph, infographics need flow, they need a central point that viewers are drawn to, and they need to be intuitive.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that infographics are best left to political campaign marketers or environmental agencies. You can use them in your own niche or industry to illustrate how your product or service differentiates itself from the rest, or to create a compelling argument for why you’re the reader’s right choice. Let’s take a look at a few reasons why infographics need to play a role in your marketing strategy.

The Value in Infographics

Infographic use has risen strongly in the last few years, with a staggering 67 percent of marketers making use of them in a B2B context alone. One in five surveyed marketers say that their strategy is “nothing without visual content”, and half admit that it’s very important.

The main ways in which an infographic immediately brings value to a brand or product is by:

• Improving shareability
• Creating better backlinks for you
• Building up traffic and search ranking
• Increasing brand credibility
• Providing an easy measurement for brand and product engagement
• Allowing the reuse of old material
• Turning complicated material into highly readable content

When used well, infographics help you produce shareable content that customers can easily understand and help drive better traffic to your pages, build backlinks for your long-term SEO, and bring in an amazing ROI in terms of both leads and sales.

[smgquote author=”Chris Rice, SEO Manager”]
Infographics can help increase the reach of your content and the visibility of your brand.
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Provided you’re doing infographics justice by utilizing them the right way. Let’s see what that might look like.

The Dos and Don’ts of Infographic Use

A good picture gets people to stop and think, a mediocre picture is immemorable, but a bad picture can even inspire disgust. The quality of your infographic says a lot about the care you put into your marketing materials, which is why you need to pay equal parts of attention to the contents of the material, as well as its style.

Poor sourcing, lack of facts, and outdated statistics are just as egregious as mismatched fonts, a bad layout, and visual clutter. Thankfully, the dos and don’ts for good infographic use are simple.

Use Infographics for Supplementary Content

One of the easiest ways to implement infographics into your marketing material is to use them to drive home the point of a larger blog post, status message, or article. An infographic can be used to summarize the points or facts outlined in your blog post and explain why your product or service is important in your given niche.

Take an example from pool companies utilizing infographics to represent the amount of money lost and subsequently saved between neglecting and refurbishing a swimming pool multiple times per year, versus weekly and monthly maintenance, or a pool supplies company weighing the pros and cons between different pool detergents, such as chlorine and bromine.

These posts are often filled with chemical facts about maintaining an equilibrium between mineral contents, alkalinity, and chlorine levels – representing this information visually helps readers better understand the main points of comparison and can help them make a better decision based on their location, pump type, or pool lining material.

Don’t Overcomplicate

Infographics should always strive to ultimately present whatever point the article or post is making in a simplified and concrete manner. In other words, it should be clear at first glance what’s going on in the visuals of an infographic.

However, we can sometimes get caught up with what we’re making and forget to see things from the perspective of some fresh eyes. Always make sure to test your graphic on a few different people in the office before publishing it, to make sure your point gets across. If you want a layperson’s insight, forward it to a friend or family member, too.

Visualize the Numbers

Infographics usually represent a lot of information in the form of numbers and fractions. It helps to visualize those numbers rather than leave them whole. Not only does that help readers quickly skim the facts and still get the point, but visual representation will often have a much greater impact than a flat number.

Don’t Post Huge Infographics on Limited Spaces

If you’re planning to create an infographic for Instagram, remember the limitations of the average Instagram post, and more specifically, the limitations of the average mobile phone. Similarly, if you plan to create an infographic to reuse across multiple different platforms, always double check to see what it might look like on those platforms.

Do Create Multiple Versions

You can take a single infographic idea and create at least three different successful versions as part of your content marketing strategy – one of the on-site content it’s paired with, one for your weekly newsletter or email, and one for an Instagram carousel post.

It is a little bit of extra work, but you do end up with thrice the amount of reward for the same level of research and basic drafting. Change the layout, keep the colors and theming, cut down on the data to present only the basic facts, and voila.

In Summary

At the end of the day, good infographics can inspire audiences much more than any form of written content – whether that’s an inspiration to donate to a cause, spread a message, or consider an important purchase for themselves or their company. Mastery of visual content in your marketing plan can turn the tide and put you ahead of the competition. Including different types of content within your content strategy can yield higher results than exclusively text-based content.

It doesn’t hurt to get help in that regard. Let us work with you to develop an eye-catching and interesting marketing campaign that helps viewers better understand your product or service.

The post Incorporating Infographics in Your Marketing Strategy appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.

Statistics show that readers are 80 percent more likely to read your content when it’s paired with an image. Good and relevant image choices are also incredibly useful for SEO purposes, helping you boost your ranking significantly, provided they’re set up correctly. And no, stock images don’t hurt your chances of getting on Google’s great side, because if they counted as non-original content for ranking purposes, most websites wouldn’t rank.

But there are other issues with stock photos, particularly overused ones. Cliché, unfitting, or plain boring stock images might not hurt your SEO, but it can hurt your reader’s interest, and cause you to lose out on an opportunity to do something creative with the visual medium on your content.

Use Original Material Whenever You Can

This point is important, and not always an option for some companies. But if you are in the process of gathering material for video content, press releases, company publicity, and visuals for the office and team, consider making an investment in some homegrown stock photography.

Prop your own staff and location to produce some evergreen office and coworker images, or industry-specific photos to use for your own needs, time and time again. Not only does it supplant the need for a stock image budget, but you can save the time spent looking for the kind of visual content you need by making it yourself.

Create a Story with a Character

One way of conveying a deeper interest in utilizing stock photos to tell a story throughout your content is to try and purchase multiple stock photos with the same model. Most stock photography companies and studios hire stock photo models to pose for hundreds of different disjointed shots.

Sometimes, when strung together, these shots tell a humorous or nonsensical story. Consider the wild tale of the Distracted Boyfriend meme stock photo, wherein the couple eventually goes through a messy breakup, and it’s implied that the jealous girlfriend ends up together with the very woman her ex was distracted by. A surprising twist!

But by cherry-picking images that suit your needs, you can potentially make use of a single model as the “character” you’re using to illustrate an example in your content.

Be Cheeky with Your Choices

While it depends on the industry and the audience you are catering to, there’s usually no harm in taking the opportunity to be a little cheeky with your stock photo choices.

For example, instead of the typical image of two angry people on a couch, you might preface an article on family counselling with an image of a wolf gently biting their annoyed sibling.

Unconventional, interesting stock photo choices that get a light chuckle or moment of pause out of a reader can help your article or content stick in the reader’s mind for longer than usual. And that is ultimately what you want – a good first impression.

Make Sure Your Photo’s Point is Clear

We’re not trying to restrict your creative freedom – but we do want to point out that if there’s anything you should really, desperately avoid, it’s visual clutter. A picture of a bunch of things isn’t going to be doing you any favors.

The same goes for any other form of visual clutter or lack of clarity. Don’t be too busy with your image. Don’t use something far too colorful, where the message or point of the photo gets lost in the aesthetic. Unless, of course, the aesthetic is the point.

You want stock photography with a purpose that is instantly recognizable. Something where pretty much everyone at the office, when polled on what the image is supposed to show, gives the exact same answer. An apple. Paper with slipped ink. A smiling coworker. Two friends embracing. If it’s clear that multiple people are misinterpreting the image, then it may be time to pick something else.

Choose Images That Make Immediate Sense

The specific subject matter you opt for is almost irrelevant. Picture quality and composition is what really matters. A lot of clever photo choices rely on metaphor and tongue-in-cheek humor – but the key behind creating visual comedy like that is that it must be obvious. Everybody should be in on the joke!

But this lesson doesn’t just apply to cheeky images. A lot of stock photos have an unnatural air of cheesiness that doesn’t make much sense after the first glance, like people rejoicing in front of a brick wall, or the classic girl laughing with salad. There’s an entire page on the Internet dedicated to exposing stock photo cliches – and it’s a good opportunity to familiarize yourself with a few common pitfalls to avoid.

Good stock photo options are a lot like good written content. Relevance matters, and originality can go a long way.

Less is More

At the end of the day, don’t be afraid to work with very little to do a lot. You don’t need a new stock photo for every third sentence – hell, you can probably get away with one or two images per post, tops, and no more than three per webpage. You can cut it down even more if you commit to a clean, minimalist aesthetic with your web design, or incorporate other in-house visuals into your content.

Thinking about the visual experience of your pages is just as important as the quality of your written word, if not more so. People’s eyes are drawn to color and visuals, and a well-placed, comedic, and effective stock photo can do more to help an article or product stick in a reader’s mind than five overused cliches, or a thousand words.

Need help working high-quality visuals into your online content? No worries. Get in touch with us, and we’ll help you translate your brand and ideas into great visual and written content.

The post Improve Your Content by Avoiding Overused Stock Photos appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.

As we’re ringing in the new year, it’s becoming clearer what 2022 will have in store for us.

Content marketing is ever-changing, with new trends constantly emerging on the horizon, some closer than others.

While we’re likely still years away from fully matured content marketing via AR and VR (through the likes of Instagram and Metaverse), the following content marketing trends are sure to play a vital role in the coming months, and can be implemented right now.

Capitalize on Your Data

Data security and privacy will continue to be hot topics as privacy watchdogs argue for stronger and stronger user protection, while advertising tech giants like Google and Facebook come up with new ways to target users without infringing on their privacy.

The future will require businesses to rely more heavily than ever on data that their own users willingly divulge, also known as first-party data.

Things like consumer surveys, sign-up details, and additional profile information can help you track and understand who your audience is, what they want, what they’re looking for, and what they care about. It will help you shape your ad campaigns, figure out the right messaging for your target audience, and make the most of every cent spent on your content.

Important steps to take include consolidating, organizing, and analyzing first-party data, while making use of the new ways in which advertisers are being accommodated following the eventual removal of third-party cookies from the web’s largest browser.

Continue Improving Your SEO

Another important avenue for improvement continues to be search engine optimization. While SEO is decades old at this point, the proper guidelines and requirements for “good” SEO change every few months. The basics largely remain the same: good content, keywords matter, and topic relevance.

But this year, and in the months to come, Google and other search engines are making a greater effort of focusing on user experience and readability, while punishing sites that hinder users, are awkward to read or navigate on mobile devices, or inundate visitors with advertisements and useless pop-ups.

Continue to invest in better SEO by partnering with a firm that keeps on top of these things. Google alone utilizes thousands of different factors when ranking websites against each other, and its algorithm goes through over a thousand different changes and dozens of major changes per year. While the basic principles matter the most, the nitty-gritty details can spell the difference between ranking first and appearing at the bottom of the page – especially in competitive markets.

Branch Into New Content Avenues

Page content, engagement on social media, and the occasional YouTube video can all prove vital in bringing in more traffic, generating leads, and turning visitors into potential customers. But 2022 calls for an even greater diversification in content, especially if you want to keep up with the competition.

Evaluate the usefulness and potential of short-form video content, influencer marketing, and podcasts. These three have exploded in size and impact over the last few years, especially during the pandemic.

Not every business is cut out for short-form video marketing, or a podcast. But many companies are already successfully leveraging these growing content niches and making the most of their new audience. Don’t be left behind.

Market and Sell Directly Through Social Media

E-commerce was undoubtedly the biggest winner in 2020 and 2021, and there’s no sign that that growth is stopping anytime soon. That’s part of the reason why tech giants Meta, Google, and even Twitter have continued investing in the ability to buy and sell on their respective platforms.

Users will be encouraged to shop via search engine results (both Bing and Google partnered with Shopify and other e-commerce platforms to entice retailers), social media platforms like Instagram, and even browse catalogues and ask product-related questions directly through instant messaging apps like WhatsApp and Messenger.

If you’ve been falling behind on your social media presence, now is the time to play catchup. These platforms might become major sources of revenue for small-to-medium businesses selling their products online. If you’re a retailer who hasn’t capitalized on e-commerce growth, it’s time to take advantage of its ease of access and current profitability

Improve Your Chat Service

With more online shopping comes the need for more online chatting. Meta’s popular messaging products, including Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram’s direct messages, have integrated customer-facing chat options and product information in the past year, making it easier for businesses to answer customer questions, and for customers to ask questions.

Work on your customer-facing chat options on WhatsApp by improving your product catalogue, adding frequently asked and answered questions, and engaging with customers in a friendly and timely manner.

Make the Most of Short Video Content

With the staggering success of TikTok and the birth and rise of YouTube Shorts, it’s clear the video content is continuing to push towards bite-sized pieces of information and entertainment.

Can you leverage that success and translate it into more sales for your business? That depends on your industry and product. Unlike longer-form YouTube content, where a lot of the value lies in ad money, YouTube Shorts pay next to nothing because of their length.

However, they do rake in far more views because they’re incredibly digestible, and people go through so many of them at a time. This makes them more valuable for their indirect value, leading customers to your product or concept, or showcasing your business and service. The same can be said for other short-form video content, whether on your own page or on platforms like TikTok.

Contrast and Compare

Regardless of what content marketing strategy you implement in 2022, nothing you do will truly be worth your time if you don’t try to contrast and compare.

Prepare to spend weeks to months analyzing the effectiveness of a certain type of content before you abandon it or invest more heavily in it. Wait for SEO changes to have an effect on your traffic before you re-evaluate your content strategy. Give your business’s shot at YouTube or TikTok some time before you judge its efficacy.

While seeing anecdotal evidence and exploring use cases can help give you ideas, it’s important not to draw one-to-one parallels between what other businesses experienced, and what might happen in your case. Experimentation is important, especially if you want the greatest return on investment over a long period.

The post Content Marketing Trends to Watch For in 2022 appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.

The results are in! For at least one kind of race, that is. Content management systems, or CMSs, play a vital role in making it easier and easier for companies and individuals to develop compelling, responsive, and easily navigable websites on the Internet.

We’ve made leaps and bounds in website design and convention since the inception of the World Wide Web, and innovations in web development are showing no real signs of slowing any time soon.

Yet that doesn’t mean that a fair share of the Internet’s content, even some of the most popular content, is hosted on websites that are generally subpar when it comes to the standards of the modern user.

To incentivize pushing away from poor accessibility and towards a new age of web convenience, Google has reiterated and solidified its Core Web Vitals, a series of user experience and interfacing criteria that can affect ranking in Google search results.

Recent data taken from a Core Web Vitals Technology Report shows which content management system (or web publishing platform) offers the best in performance and user experience, on a generalized level. The four competitors on the market are WordPress, Drupal, Duda, and Wix. So, let’s look at which performed the best.

What are the Core Web Vitals?

Before we begin, it’s important to summarize what Google’s Core Web Vitals actually are. They are three basic criteria that serve as metrics for website performance, in the field of user experience. These are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The speed at which the majority of a page’s content is loaded. Ideally 2.5 seconds or less.
• First Input Delay (FID): The responsiveness of a website when interacted with. Ideally, the website should provide feedback on the first user action after 100 milliseconds or less.
• Cumultive Layout Shift (CLS): A measurement of visual stability, of common website errors or inconveniences such as content shifting around as it’s being loaded in, and visual consistency. Aside from inconvenience, this can lead to users clicking things they didn’t mean to – causing serious damage.

Results of the Core Web Vitals Technology Report

The Core Web Vitals Technology Report is compiled from the CRuX and HTTPArchive Lab Web Technology Detections datasets of CWV performance across CMS services. The report took a look at how the four largest web publishing services generally handled CWV criteria, by analyzing eligible websites and sorting out ones with a passing score.

The final rankings after a year of compiling data stand at:

• Duda (69.3 percent)
• Wix (55.3 percent)
• Drupal (50.2 percent)
• WordPress (31 percent)

You can review each platform’s individual metrics here and here.

WordPress interestingly started ahead of the competition, but quickly lagged behind once commercial alternatives (and open-source rival Drupal) started making concerted efforts to invest in responsiveness and CWV.

Does this mean WordPress is a bad CMS, or that any of the others are a much better option in every way? As always, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Each of these web publishing platforms offers a unique value proposition and caters to a different audience.

While there is significant overlap, Duda (for example) is more focused on providing a website building platform for professionals, versus the wider offering and customization behind WordPress.

A lot of these changes are also rather dramatic. Commercial platforms like Duda and Wix were known for being behind WordPress on SEO and page speed, but picked up considerably in the last year.

Will WordPress Stay Behind?

Another important core argument to consider is whether or not these findings will be true in a year or two. Can you afford to go through the work it takes to completely change the platform your website is built around for what might be transient gains? While WordPress is the largest and most uncoordinated CMS service among the ones tested in the CWV data collection effort, it’s also important to note that they are well aware of this.

We’ve established that being open source is not a hindrance for good overall performance and consistent performance gains when observing Drupal, so the fact of the matter remains that WordPress simply hasn’t made a coordinated effort to focus on CWV at the time, unlike many of its competitors. It’s probably unfair to judge a platform on a single metric like performance, especially given that it isn’t as though your entire ranking on Google hinges solely on how fast your website loads, or how responsive it is.

But that doesn’t make it irrelevant, either. And WordPress are aware of that, too. They’ve responded by hinting at the potential for a coordinated performance improvement effort in the near future, as per a comment by WordPress core contributor and software engineering manager at Google, Thierry Muller.

He goes on to say that: “to better understand which area are hurting most WordPress sites, we* have conducted analysis on the 100 most popular themes and various real WordPress sites (from small to large).

“The results of our analysis are that the largest offenders are Modern image formats, Responsive images followed by JavaScript execution time, Unused JavaScript, Render-blocking resources, Redirects, Long cache TTL. This analysis (or further analysis based on other criteria) may inform well inform our roadmap.

“Depending on the number of contributors we will be able to work on multiple projects simultaneously. By “we”, I mean my team at Google.”

Can You Afford to Get Hung Up on the Details?

There’s a great argument to be made against losing the forest for the trees. This information might be great for someone trying to get a new website off the ground in 2021.

But ultimately, obsessing over the average core web vital scores for websites built on your CMS or platform of choice does not necessarily translate to actionable data for your project’s own performance, or more importantly, for the quality of your content and the quantity of your traffic.

There’s more that goes into making a good pie than baking it well. You still need the right ingredients for an amazing pie dough, ripe fruit, and a great recipe. Do not let core web vitals distract you from creating value for your existing customers and potential leads, as well as readers everywhere.

If you’re having trouble allocating resources and prioritizing development for your website and digital marketing efforts, let us help you out. We can go over your performance metrics together, review past campaigns and draft new ones, and bring you better results through a data-driven effort.

The post Core Web Vitals: WordPress, Drupal, Duda or Wix? appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.

What is the true key to creating high-quality content? Is it word count? Keyword density? Or, even, originality? The answer is no, no, and surprisingly, still no. High-quality content is many things, but most importantly, it’s incredibly difficult to quantify.

Google generally promotes content on the basis of a few important factors that count towards search engine optimization, or SEO.

As with most things in life, there are about a dozen tips and techniques that can be considered low-hanging fruit, and thousands of factors that improve your ranking in miniscule ways.

Creating high-quality content is somewhere in between, on one of the branches that might be higher up on the tree yet are still within reach.

The importance behind content quality goes beyond what Google’s algorithm thinks of your site. There’s the human factor, too – high quality may be subjective, but there are a few objective ways of distinguishing between different sources of information, and it’s in these objective ways that we begin to see why some people are more likely to use one page or site as a resource over another. Here are a few of them.

What Are People Looking For?

Reader interest is important when quantifying quality. While a piece of content can be good, its usefulness to others is what makes it a high-quality resource. To that end, try to figure out where the Internet might be lacking.

It could be that there isn’t a concise guide to raising a specific type of succulents in subtropical weather. Or, if there is, then there isn’t a good long-form guide to the topic instead.

Figure out what topics of relevance to your business are inadequately explored or explained online and create your own resource for them.

Focus on Readability

It’s not enough to compile an infodump for unsuspecting readers. There needs to be structure, intent, and even rhythm. Good typography matters too. Keep sentences short. Don’t ramble on for too long and soliloquy. Use stories, parables, or examples to help reiterate something or provide a break from dry information but avoid getting lost in analogies.

Yes, grammar and formatting are important as well. But while most readers won’t be professional literary critics, people can tell the difference between something that’s informative, and something that’s both informative and pleasant to read. They’ll probably remember the latter.

Keep a Finger on the Pulse

In other words: research, research, research. Once you’ve figured out what people are looking for, it’s time to find out what else they might be looking for.

Search and trend analytics are immensely useful here, as they help you figure out what people who searched for any given term are most likely to search for in addition to that first search.

Don’t Worry About Being Completely Original

It’s nearly impossible to be “completely original” on the Internet. That does not mean you should plagiarize other content wholesale.

But think of content online as more of an exercise in creating a kaleidoscope of information from existing resources and references and providing your own unique input to bring in a touch of something new.

Even if that touch is something as simple as taking information from a number of disparate sources and formatting it in a way that’s easy to navigate and understand and provides a single page for people to use as reference in the future.

Do More Than Just Write

We aren’t talking about video content or infographics, although those are important topics in their own right. We’re talking about breaking text up with multimedia, from short clips used as reference, to GIFs and images for humor or visual information.

On one hand, the use of multimedia can help improve readability and provide a break for readers of a post. On the other hand, it allows you to represent a point made in text through an image, and reinforce an important tip or quote. This is especially important in information-dense or difficult-to-understand topics such as medicine and research.

Review and Improve Older Posts

As your website matures and your content begins to take on a certain style or flair that sets you apart from the competition, it’s worth taking the time to rehash old topics, revisit old posts, and renew old information.

While you can’t go back and drastically edit an old video on YouTube, you can take the time to edit and improve old blog entries, articles, or other forms of content on your own site.

Note that Google tends to rank pages that are older and have a considerable history of traffic quite a bit higher – leveraging this and improving on the information on your older and most successful content can help you retain new visitors and improve the trustworthiness of your site.

Don’t Ignore the Data

One of the worst things you can do is continuously put out content without taking the time to examine how certain editing and production trends are affecting your metrics. Toy around with different formatting styles and ideas.

Figure out what’s reaching people the most. Use impressions, views, clicks, and leads to gauge whether your new approach is successful or a step backwards – whether it’s a change in editing, a different tone in your videos, a different writing style, a different topic, less or more text, less or more pictures, and so on. You can even do this in real time through A/B testing.

Find Your Niche

At the end of the day, there’s a lot more you can do to make your content better. But is it what people want out of your site? Identify what brings you the most interest from your readers or viewers and invest in that idea.

Don’t think of it as something banal as chasing eyeballs – at the end of the day, you’re putting your time and energy into producing content that people want and are looking for, whether just for entertainment, information, or both.

It’s worth repeating that you should take the time to revisit old content at least once a year, if only to figure out what exactly made some posts much more successful than others.

Is it the editing? Is it the use of multimedia? Is it formatted differently? Is it the topic, the content itself, the references, the research, the readability? Some videos, posts, blogs, or images are a bit like catching lightning in the bottle – and trying to force it a second time might not go as well. But we can still learn a lot from our successes.

The post 8 Tips on Creating High-Quality Content appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.

Does your child spend the better part of their free time on YouTube? Have you ever seen someone spending more time watching streamers on Twitch than shows on Netflix? Do you have a TikTok account?

If your question to any of these questions is yes, then you’re already aware of the macro-to-micro revolution in digital content. People are tuning in to individual creators and channels at a far greater pace than any company, brand, or group.

This doesn’t mean that luxury brands and established household names are necessarily losing power – but it does mean that media and content consumption is shifting towards a personalized experience.

Purchasing decisions, interests, and to a degree even political ideas are being molded by a growing class of talented content producers. And try as they might, a lot of brands that have tried to pick up on the trend haven’t reached the same level of authenticity or one-on-one engagement that individual content creators have.

The ability to make viewers feel almost like friends – to the point that some people have begun voicing concerns over a growing parasocial phenomenon – reveals an incredible potential for a brand-new type of content engagement for digital marketers and online brands. The personalized kind.

Explaining Personalized Content

Does this mean your brand needs an influencer? Well, no. Influencers and content creators have their own important place in any niche or industry, be it gaming, tech, fitness, engineering, beauty, lifestyle, cooking, and so on.

Part of their authenticity is that their relationships with brands is always one at arm’s length. Viewers understand that their favorite content producers need sponsorships and partnerships to continue to finance their passions, but that at the end of the day, they can still trust them to speak their mind.

But in the growth of the influencer, we see something completely new unfold – the potential for one-on-one conversations between brands and consumers.

Personalized content leverages growing advances in video editing and video production to help brands develop templates for their video marketing campaigns that utilize costumer data to create a unique video pitch.

What does that mean?

It means that your bank might give you an end-of-the-year thank you video, detailing in summary what you bought that year, the financial decisions you made, how your business has helped the company reach new milestones, and how you can continue to help them via personalized credit based on their purchasing and banking history.

It means that a school campus can give a mock tour of its facilities, including a quick peek at what a student’s dorm might look like with their name on it. It means content that changes based on who is watching – like an ad for a tourist agency promoting a hotel, but omitting the hotel and focusing on other amenities if the customer has already got a reservation.

We already have real life examples of this from Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, University of Waterloo, and Facebook – you might have already seen some kind of Facebook retrospective in the past, where Facebook takes your new and old friends, your posts and pictures, and helps you celebrate your year, or a special milestone.

How Does Personalized Content Work?

The future for this kind of content is looking very bright. We can already mix and match different scripts based on whether certain customer information is missing or available. We can use or omit certain images and visual keynotes, or use images provided by the customer – ala Facebook – to create a personalized video experience.

But so far, a lot of these techniques – the kind that sift through massive amounts of customer data – rely on two things:

1. Very, very sophisticated machine learning.
2. A mountain of customer data that has been willingly supplied to you.

Most companies have neither. However, that might not be the case in a few years. Even so, you don’t need a lot of data to create a personalized video.

Taking note of a few key customer choices during the registration and purchasing experience, for example, allows you to change your pitch to adjust to how a customer behaves, and what they did and didn’t do – based on what they have or haven’t bought, or what they did and didn’t favorite.

If you’re running an online storefront, for example, you will be able to create unique, personalized video ads for customers based on what they bought, and what other users with similar shopping patterns also looked at.

We already have something like this in most e-commerce platforms – it’s just a matter of taking the existing data and putting into an attractive and personalized video format.

Of course, clean and accurate data is incredibly important for this kind of near-future and present marketing. If your business is already in the excellent position to store and analyze user data – especially if you have a storefront, allow users to register, send out newsletters, pose questions through surveys, and analyze their purchasing decisions and user activity on your site – then you will have what it takes to start taking advantage of personalized content soon.

How soon? The tools to do it already exist. However, a lot of the most sophisticated stuff is coming out of proprietary systems developed by marketing teams for larger companies trying to explore the potential for this kind of new content (its potential is great, if you’re curious).

Creating and Using Personalized Content

We’ve already discussed YouTube’s (and Google’s) expanded video building tools in the past, and other tools like Vidyard further specialize in personalized video content. While rudimentary, the tools for this kind of content will continue to develop and mature rapidly in the coming years – until you can start to connect to these services and feed them your data via API, and automatically begin importing and incorporating user data into your video marketing material.

While it’s still ostensibly the future of video marketing, there is a lot you can do to gear up for the next step in digital advertising. It all starts with sensibly gathering user data, incorporating personalization tools into every step of the sales process, and making the most of good data.

The post Personalization: The Future of Content Marketing appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.

If you find that your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts are lacking, it may be time to conduct a content gap analysis. This helps you find missed opportunities for your SEO strategy – and if you hire us to handle it for you – is something we’ll do on your behalf.

One of the most common questions we get from our clients is, “How do I figure out what to write about?” While we’ll also handle your content needs if you want, we understand that many people want to write their own blog posts, but still want to make sure the content serves their overall goals.

Of course, turning to SEO keyword research can help you determine the topics to cover on your website, but there are always other, potentially more lucrative opportunities out there. And that’s what the content gap analysis does – helps you find the “gaps” in your content so you can develop ideas that bring more traffic to your website, provide value to your audience, and ultimately, convert more visitors to paying customers.

What is a Content Gap Analysis?

If you’ve ever gone through a process to find holes in your current content, then you’ve likely performed some kind of gap analysis. This process involves finding missing pieces of content that could align with the stages of your target’s buyer’s journey.

It starts with your existing content, which allows you to see places where you may lack valuable assets that could guide users through their journey to purchase your product or service.

Chances are, you’ll also find new keywords to target that you’re not already using with your existing content.

To do a full content gap analysis, you’ll audit:

• All pages of your website, including landing pages
• Blog posts
• Social media content
• Any downloadables and other content assets like ebooks.

Step One: Mapping Your Content to the Buyer’s Journey

Not every visitor who comes to your website will be ready to make a purchase. Most of the time, they will simply be looking for information, Price shopping for their best solution, or looking to compare their options.

So that you’re ready for every visitor regardless of where they are in the buyer’s journey, you need to create content for each stage – whether they are just now figuring out their need, looking at their various decisions, or ready to make a purchase from you.

Lots of brands focus on creating informative content that draws into the audience and then money pages to convert the users into buyers. Though this approach works, it does create gaps for people who are considering their options may fall through the cracks.

Conducting your content analysis requires you to identify whether you have content for all stages of your buyer’s journey including awareness, consideration, decision, and success.

Awareness content targets keywords that are related to a particular problem your audience faces. The content serves to address the problem while providing valuable information. However, the goal is not to immediately convert the visitor into a customer.

During the consideration stage, people are comparing various solutions for their problem. They may read reviews, “best of” posts, or comparison guides. At this stage, you can create content that compares your product or service to your competition or present your brand as one of many solutions in a Round-Up post.

At the decision stage, you’ll find your money pages including your service pages, sales pages, and more. It is the final checkpoint before someone contacts you or makes a purchase from you. These pages are more branded than your consideration and awareness content.

But the journey is not over once a customer makes a purchase. You’ll need to add success content to reassure customers that they will reach their desired outcome. This may be as simple as a thank you page or as complex as a sequence of follow-up emails to connect them with ongoing support or ask for a review.

Your content gap analysis helps to identify whether you have content at each one of these stages for each one of your website’s offerings whether that is services, products, downloads, form fills, or something else entirely. The goal is to prevent users from having an opportunity to fall through.

That means you need to take a look at all of your existing content and map out which stage of the process that goes to. If you find that you have a lot of content in one area, it will help you focus your efforts on flushing out the content in the other stages of the funnel….but first, make sure you know what your customer does to arrive at the buying decision. Mapping the journey helps.

Step Two: Market Research

One of the best ways to come up with content ideas that are in line with what your audience wants is to ask them. Reach out to people in your target audience and conduct a market research survey. You can use Google Forms to create a quick and easy anonymous survey to send.

Ask things like:

1. What questions do you have about [topic/keyword]?
2. What are your biggest struggles related to [topic/keyword]?
3. What solutions have you tried in the past?
4. Why did these not work for you?
5. What are the top three things you are looking for in [product or service]?
6. Where do you go to look for solutions like [product or service]?
7. What deciding factors do you use to choose between solutions?

The survey answers provide you with a lot of content ideas, all of which address the real needs and concerns of potential customers.

Step Three: Analyze Current Content

Your brand likely shares content across a variety of platforms but you want to be sure the content on your website aligns with the buyer’s journey and doesn’t leave gaps. Check all URLs on your website and determine how or if they align with each stage.

Then, you can determine whether you are missing content to bridge the gap between stages where needed and make adjustments to current content to make them better match one stage or another.

For instance, if you are a business coach and you have an article titled “How to Start a Business” and your immediate call to action is to “hire me” with a link that directs them to your contact page, you may be deterring people who aren’t sure they need a business coach yet.

Instead, you may want to link to an article like “Consider This Before Hiring a Business Coach” or “Finding the Best Business Coach for Your Needs” Nurture them before you hit them with your pitch.

You can also find gaps on your site using SEO tools to see what keywords your site currently ranks four. Then, search for those keywords so you can find related keywords that you may not be targeting with your existing content.

Step Four: Look at the Competition

Looking at what your competition is doing and considering how your site measures up is a great way to find more gaps. If your competitor uses a funnel that is more or less the same as yours, take a look at the content they’ve created to lead users through the funnel.

• Is the content immediately directing readers to a contact page?
• is there other content that nurtures the users before they buy?

It goes without saying that what works for one site doesn’t always work for another so you don’t want to copy your competitor’s strategy. You want to see where you may have issues within your own strategies that you can come up with something better than the competition.

SEO tools make it possible to see what keywords your competitors are ranking for so you can align these with new content ideas.

As a small business owner, it is common to make the mistake of focusing more on your money pages to push the sale or the informative blog posts to draw in readers.

While you need both, you do also need content to bridge the gap between each step of the buyer’s journey from where they are first aware of their problem to the point where they are making a purchase decision.

The content gap analysis is the key to finding those holes in your current content strategy so you can create new content assets that generate traffic and funnel users through to purchase.

It also provides an opportunity to find new keywords to target based on what your competitors are or aren’t targeting.

After you complete your content gap analysis and create the necessary content based on its results, you’ll have valuable content that nurtures everyone from your cold first-time visitor to someone who is eagerly ready to work with you.

The post What is a Content Gap Analysis? appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.

Research from the Content Marketing Institute shows that 91% of B2B businesses use content marketing to reach their customers. And when it comes to the b2c sector, 86% of those marketers think using content marketing is crucial to their overall digital marketing strategy.

The Content Marketing Institute also shows that 72% of marketers say their content marketing efforts increase engagement and that it has increased the number of leads.

Your content is worth optimizing because 95% of people only look at the first page of search results so if your content appears on the second page or after, the majority of people will not see it.

Most of the content marketing advice out there is general and does not give you actionable tips you can use to see a return on your investment. This list gives you a solid place to start.

1.    A New Spin on Gated Content

Gated content requires a subscription or an email address to access. You can grow your email list with these kinds of posts by creating a small selection of normal blog posts that only your email subscribers can get access to. When someone clicks on one of these posts, a pop-up should appear that asks for their email.

This approach can help you grow your email list while playing up the “exclusivity” part of some of your content, without having to charge people to read it.

2.    Attack Content Decay

If you’ve produced content for a while, chances are you’re losing traffic as a result of content decay. Simply updating and relaunching your old post can dramatically improve your traffic. If you’ve been blogging for some time though, it may be hard to tell where to begin with updating your old posts. That’s where the Animalz Revive tool comes in. It’s a completely free tool that will analyze your Google Analytics data and provide a list of posts that you should refresh.

It’s up to you whether to relaunch the post like it’s brand new or if you want to quietly update the content. Either way, you should see an increase in traffic to the post. The more posts you revamp, the more traffic you can capture.

3.    Use Templates to Mimic Past Successes

Templates are helpful when it comes to scaling up your content marketing. Whenever you start a new post, avoid opening up a blank Google Doc. Instead, work from one of your proven blog post templates. When you sit down to write a blog post, use the template to help you get all of the important parts down on paper.

After you’ve done that, transfer it to a Google Doc and start writing. Working from a set of templates Makes it easier to scale up your publishing schedule. Where you used to publish a new post once a month, with this approach, you can publish a post every two weeks.

You’re not sure where to start with creating templates, take a look at the most popular posts you have and determine if they are of the same type. For example, if you noticed that your most popular posts are case studies, you’ll definitely want to create a case study template to use in the future.

4.    Create Stats Pages

Creating a stats page is a wonderful way to build backlinks without needing to do a lot of outreach. Those pages are optimized around your “topic + stats” keywords and the people who tend to search for those kinds of keywords are journalists and bloggers.

Typically speaking, when they use one of your stats in their article, they’ll link back to your stats page.

5.    Reverse Engineer the Competition

When it comes to digital marketing, there is certainly a place for originality and creative thinking. But, it’s okay to copy what your competitors are doing and you don’t need the Google analytics password to do it. There are a number of tools that show you what is already working for someone else.

For example, if your main focus is link building, Detailed.com provides you with a list of where the top blogs in nearly every niche get their links from. Knowing this, you can craft a strategy that helps you earn links from those places to making it easier for you to compete.

Not sure what to write about? You can use BuzzSumo to see a specific site’s most shared content, to give you an idea of what resonates with their audience so that you can develop your topics accordingly.

6.    Use the PBC Formula

Backlinko says the PBC formula is when you quickly preview what your post is all about. Then, follow it with a list of benefits that someone gets from reading your post. And finally, you finish the introduction with a brief call to action. Why does this approach work? your blog post introductions are important because they are the first thing people see when they land on your post. However, the majority of blogpost intros are way too long. Using the PBC approach keeps your intros lean and gives the user exactly what they want or need to keep reading the post.

7.    Focus on Trending Topics

Trending topics are those that are popular, yet haven’t reached a super competitive point. If you’re tired of using tools like Google Trends, there’s a free tool, Exploding Topics, that’s helpful. In the last six months, covering the business and marketing categories, the “exploding” topics include local SEO, regenerative agriculture, YouTube hashtags, customer persona, and UX writing.

What’s cool about this tool is that you can set it for a wide variety of time frames – starting with one month and going all the way to 15 years. You’ll find that some topics are brand names, but if they are your competition, you can do an X vs. Y post to make use of the branded keyword and topic while still reaching your goals.

Let’s talk about other things you can do to improve your content marketing. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

The post Actionable Content Marketing Tips to Build More Traffic appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.

Content syndication, or publishing and promoting your original content on third party websites, is a crucial part of building authority and increasing your visibility. Whether you’re promoting articles, videos, or other kinds of content, content syndication networks are a valuable resource. They generally have large established audiences with high domain authority.

Content syndication can also help improve your SEO. It can drive traffic to your website much the same way SEO and paid search do. It can increase your product or service’s user base, help your linkbuilding efforts, and may even improve your own domain authority.  To get the most benefit, though, you need to be doing it correctly. Mistakes could backfire and negatively impact your search engine ranking.

The key to leveraging content syndication is to start with high-quality content. Whether you write it yourself, hire a freelance writer to craft it for you, or decide to let AI handle it for you, you can use any content syndication tool to promote it.

Content Syndication Options for Written Content

Medium

Medium is a free platform that lets you publish content, photos, videos, and audio directly. Users can comment and discuss the content directly on the platform. There’s also a monetization option.

Quora

Quora is a question and answer site that can help you build your personal and professional brand. By becoming an active member of the community, you can use your existing content to answer questions when and where relevant. You can include a link to the text of a full blog post, or a video that answers the question.

Reddit

Reddit is becoming a larger part of popular culture because it’s possible to reach tens of thousands of people every day. There is something for everyone on the platform, and anonymity is more possible there than anywhere else online – even though nothing online is every truly anonymous. It’s a community first and foremost, so it pays to become an active member in the various subreddits before you post your own content.

Mix

Once known as StumbleUpon, Mix is a content discovery tool that allows users to submit your favorite pages, share content with friends and follow people and interests. You’ll be able to look at popular articles, videos, and photos. You also have the option to pay for advertising, if desired.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a blogging platform. There’s a dashboard with a live feed of blogs people are tracking. The posts are automatically displayed, and users can interact with then any time. There is space for all activities, so it’s easy to filter and manage according to your needs.

RSS Feeds

Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, is a way to compile a custom feed of content from your favorite websites, podcasts, and more. With an RSS feed reader, you can get headlines, update notices, and links back to content on your favorite websites.

LinkedIn (Freemium)

For those in the B2B space, LinkedIn offers a way to syndicate content with free and paid options. Paid syndication options include sponsored content, inMail, and display ads.

Facebook (Freemium)

Using Facebook Pages, Groups, and Ads, you can share your content with your current audience, while also drawing in new followers.

Outbrain (Premium)

Outbrain is a paid content marketing platform. You’ll be able to advertise your content on major media platforms like People, ESPN, and CNN. The platform has a global audience of more than 550 million people every month, so you’ll definitely be able to reach your target audience.

Quuu Promote (Premium)

WIth this paid content syndication option, all you have to do is submit your RSS feed and the platform handles the rest. The partner service, Quuu.co, has users who subscribe to various interest categories, where they’ll have content (that comes from Promote) to share on their social media channels. It integrates with Buffer, so people can completely automate their social media content – using real people to promote real content.

Taboola (Premium)

Taboola is a paid content discovery platform that provides placement on top websites. THe platform gives personalized content to 1 billion users every month.

Content Syndication for Video

Many platforms I covered above will also work for video, but if you want platforms that offer nothing but video, you’ll want to look at these two.

YouTube

Owned by Google, YouTube is one of the most popular websites online today. Because of the sheer volume of content on the platform, you’ll need to make sure it’s well optimized, so you can ensure it gets more views.

Vimeo

Vimeo is another video hosting platform like YouTube. It can help you reach more people, especially if you take the time to optimize it.

Content Syndication for Audio

For musicians and podcasters, these are popular syndication networks for your audio content. Even if audio content isn’t your main form, you can easily pay to have your blog content recorded, and then distribute it in audio format.

SoundCloud

SoundCloud lets you host your podcast on their platform, but if you don’t host it there, you can syndicate it so that people who prefer to use it for their podcasts can find it. Musicians can use it to share their tracks and connect with listeners and fellow artists alike.

Leveraging these platforms, you’ll expand your reach and grow your brand. To get the most out of syndication, use a mix of platforms and content formats.

Are you using any of these already? Did I miss any of the great ones? Let me know in the comments.

iTunes

If you’ve got audio content to share with the world, you can list it in iTunes, for free or for purchase.

Spotify

Spotify makes it easy to share your music and podcasts with hundreds of thousands of users every month.

The post Content Syndication 101 appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.