Archive for category Marketing
5 Easy Steps for Content Curation: Increasing Your SEO Rankings
Content Curation is the act of finding articles, blogs, videos and other information relevant to your brand and customers and distributing it via online and social media. With today’s focus on inbound marketing, it is a critical part of both your brand and marketing strategy.
For branding, providing relevant content sets you up as a thought leader and industry expert. It easily shows your customers that you keep up-to-date with news and ideas to help reach their goals, and helps to gain their trust.
For marketing, it is at the crux of increasing your search engine rankings. Both quantity and quality are important, as Google ranks based on relevancy, but also takes into consideration the number of relevant hits. Content curation increases keyword richness.
There are many tools and programs for automated content curation, but make sure you have a solid marketing strategy before getting started. Here are 5 easy steps to make sure you get the most out of your efforts.
STEP 1 | KNOW YOUR BRAND
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, no marketing strategy, plan or implementation should happen before you’re clear about your brand. Consistency of messaging is important in building trust with your customers, and that starts with brand consistency. As I always say, “You can’t be all things to all people” so focus on your niche and be outstanding.
For instance, the previous agency handling social media for one of my clients posted random “facts” unrelated to his industry. Sure, this is fun and interesting but doesn’t benefit my client’s brand as he strives to prove himself as an expert. My recommendation was to stick to information relevant to his brand.
STEP 2 | KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS
Content curation isn’t about just sharing information. That information has to mean something to your customers and be useful. Keeping your customers engaged and getting them to continuously come back to you as a source is the goal.
I grew my gourmet food client’s Facebook Fan count to 800 in under a month (70% by organic growth e.g. friends of friends) by understanding their customers’ demographics and psychographics. Knowing your customer likes, dislikes, needs, wants and what they enjoy is critical to any successful company, especially when it comes to marketing.
STEP 3 | MAKE SURE THE CONTENT CONNECTS BACK TO YOUR BUSINESS
This may seem like a no-brainer but it’s easy to get carried away and miss the mark. At the end of the day content curation, and social media in general, is a marketing tool. The goal is to market your business. Why talk about something that ultimately won’t benefit your business and help reach your goals? Don’t forget to include keywords in your posts.
To use my client in the retail gourmet food industry again, the content I post all relates back to products sold by the store, either directly or indirectly. For instance, I may post an article about Italian holiday food traditions, but she sells a lot of Italian gourmet food products, so that information is relevant. It’s also interesting to her Facebook Fans because, by virtue of being a Fan, travel and gourmet foods interest them.
STEP 4 | DON’T BE AFRAID TO USE AN AUTOMATED SYSTEM FOR DISTRIBUTION
Hoot Suite is one of the best distribution systems I’ve found so far. You can schedule posts days and weeks in advance, as well as track performance. It’s easy to use and you’re able to see your scheduled posts by day, to help stay organized.
I really like this system, because you don’t have to duplicate efforts. By being able to see your daily scheduled posts, you can make sure you have the right mix of product sell and useful information. After all, content curation is a social marketing tool so it’s important to stay “social”.
STEP 5 | ANALYZE AND OPTIMIZE YOUR CONTENT
Make sure to track what posts perform the best, so you can fine-tune your efforts. Retweets, Post Likes and Comments, and Click Throughs tell you what your customers find most interesting. This is the stuff you should provide more of.
The more your customers share content you’ve provided, the better your search engine ranking becomes. And once you’ve secured Page 1 rankings, it’s difficult to lose your spot; so putting effort into optimizing your content has long-term benefits.
How to Select Partnership Marketing Opportunities
Partnership marketing is an invaluable tool when it comes to increasing market reach, entering new markets and at driving new mutually co-operative ventures. Partnership marketing strategies and opportunities can vary widely and we need to ensure that we select the best match in partner that we can. With that in mind we decided to examine the criteria required to choose strong partnerships and how best we can evaluate them.
The first, and perhaps most important, criteria we should use to evaluate potential partners is market synergy. Market synergy determines the likelihood that a partnership will provide us with the leads and increase in exposure that we require. If we have market synergy with a potential partner then our interests and markets should co-align successfully providing a relationship of value to both parties. If they don’t then our partnership is likely to be unfruitful and whilst brand exposure may increase sales won’t.
Secondly, and in essence similar to our first criteria, is that we need to share demographics to an extent with our partner. We can ignore this to some extent if we are launching a new campaign aimed at the specific market our partner targets but generally if our brand identities don’t co-align then we will be wasting a partnership opportunity. The reasons for this are fairly self-evident as people generally will not buy a product recommended by a company if the identity of that product does not tally with their demographic wants and needs. By understanding the similarities between our identity and our potential partnership’s identity then we can ensure a mutually beneficial co-operation.
Thirdly we need to analyse the company’s performance, financial records and their ethical record. In strategic partnerships we generally want to partner with company’s at or above our own level in terms of growth, market share and profits. This ensures that we can strike a balanced approach to marketing endeavours and that the reach and benefits are relatively the same for both sides of the co-operation. However, we also want to analyse the overall stability of the company and the shape of their market. If the company is likely to suffer problems in the near future then a partnership may detrimentally effect our own image. If their market is fluctuating or unstable then we may find that our benefits become lessened throughout the course of the partnership. Finally the ethical record of a company and any bad PR it has or will face also have a direct impact on our own image and need to be considered strongly before we engage in a partnership.
Finally, when choosing a partnership we need to clearly define the goals, extent and platforms of co-operation that the partnership will entail. Having mutual goals and platforms for sharing data will ensure that the partnership remains beneficial and that it remains effective. We need to ensure that there is a balance of benefits to some extent and that the exposure we will receive is going to produce results and that these results will be traceable. Ensuring proper data handling and sharing on both sides prior to engaging in a partnership ensures that this will happen.