Let us ask you a question first: how is your content marketing strategy working out for your business?
If your answer is a “Not very effective” or a “Not sure about that” then you are not alone. In fact, around 57% of businesses don’t analyse their content marketing strategy or unaware of how to measure its effectiveness.
The main reason for this is they have established a content marketing strategy for their brand without defining goals or objectives for their brand. You need to determine the aim of your content marketing, are you producing content for like & shares? Do you wish for it to go viral? Or do you want to amp up your search engine rankings?
In case you have any of these goals in mind then that might be a reason why your content marketing strategy is failing.
In this article, we are going to discuss how to set up real growth-related goals that will give a granular result about your content marketing performance.
Setting up growth-oriented goals for your business
The content marketing goals for your business must be growth-related and designed specifically for your entrepreneurial ambitions.
However, if you are unable to achieve them, then your approach towards those goals might be at fault. Let’s have a look at some of the content marketing goals that your brand should have.
1. SEO Rankings
Google is a great barometer to determine the success of your content. If the content that you create gets enough likes & shares and climbs in Google’s search rankings then you’re creating the right type of content
The Google search engine has content standards that are difficult to please. This means that only the best pieces will be able to reach in the top 10, top 5, and top 3 rankings. It depends on who is providing the most contextual information regarding a specific topic/keyword that the user is searching for.
If your content meets the above criteria 100%, then you’ll earn top rankings. The result being, That you’ll get a lot more qualified traffic to your business website. In case your content’s not ranking then your business is missing out on those leads who are most likely to bring their business to your brand.
2. Conversations & Engagement
Now that you’ve managed to attract qualified leads, it’s time to convert them to your business objective. This is achieved by nurturing the leads with highly personalised and contextual content.
Achieving your content marketing goals starts with great content. If you’re just pushing out content just for the sake of it, you won’t grow.
Here are A few examples of how your business can engage with the leads
For people reaching out to your sales team through channels like chat, email, etc. you can start the conversation with helpful emails regarding your products or services and how the users can avail them quickly & efficiently.
For social media, you can interact with them by sending links to similar blogs or sending messages in their inbox.
Based on these communications you can determine the lead’s interest level and how close they are towards doing business with your brand. The important thing is how effectively you apply your content to nurture those leads from the awareness stage to the next stage of consideration
3. Sales & Revenue
Let’s get down to brass tax, the actual performance of your content marketing can be ascertained by the actual sales results from the above connections and conversations? It’s time to quantify your results.
You’ve attracted qualified leads with content, analytics with giving you the metrics on the traffic and audience engagement. Match that against your sales to get the crystal clear picture of your Digital marketing performance.
Discuss with your salespeople and If you see growth in this area then your content is giving huge benefits for your business.
Few tips on Generating Growth from Content
Generating awesome content is crucial and to add the cherry on top there few things you can do to make your content marketing strategy rock solid.
Consistency is the key!!
Now great content is going to boost your Google ranking, However, you need to keep delivering quality content to stay that way.
Producing great content builds trust with your audience so keep hitting that checkpoints and you’ll get them hooked. Plus your brand reputation will be through the roof!!
Link Your Content to Services
What’s the use of delivering top-notch content if it doesn’t tie back to your product & services? The whole point of any content marketing strategy is to nurture the leads along the buyer’s journey until it’s finally time to seal the deal.
That’s where CTA’s (calls-to-action) come into the picture. There should be at least one CTA in every piece of content that gets published. These are really helpful in directing the users to the next step and also gives you insights on their interest levels.
Engage with Conversational Content
Starting off conversations with interested readers based on your content is a great way to boost your ROI. These aren’t about getting all salesey but more about building relations with the audience by providing helpful information.
Chatbots play an important role in handling a large volume of conversations during the long hours of the day. But nothing can empathetic, friendly & personable human response – having empathy to turn interests into decisions leading to a sale.
And Lastly…
We hope you’ve found our take on content marketing useful and in case you need some help in setting up growth goals for your brand than just drop us a line and we’ll get in touch with you ASAP
In today’s world, content marketing plays a major role in the success of entrepreneurial ventures. Here we present some of the most important content marketing stats that you need to know in the year 2018. It clearly focuses on empowering the prospect customer with tools to make the best choice while making a buying decision; this, in turn, helps in solidifying the relationship between the customer and your brand.
Having said that it is distressing to find a lot of marketers still plan their marketing strategies based on gut feeling, rather than formulating their marketing budgets and techniques based on concrete evidence and latest content marketing stats.
A well-defined content strategy not only builds a relationship with existing customer s but also reduces the need to improvise.
Hence, it is extremely crucial for digital marketers to analyze everything as having just great content is not enough. It is equally important to measure which piece of content actually resonates with people.
Here are some interesting content marketing stats for you to watch out in 2019.
The below content marketing stats have been curated from the best industry experts opinion and analysis.
1. “61% of consumers are influenced by custom content.” – Dragon Search Marketing
Who doesn’t like things made specifically for their needs?
custom content is created by the brands to communicate with their existing customers. Furthermore, it converts complex topics in a logical sequence so that it is easy to understand.
Although custom content can be used to convert new prospects, the main intent is to build relations with existing customers.
Based on the given content marketing stats, it’s obvious that existing customers are more likely to buy from you than new prospects.
2. “Only 55% of bloggers update old posts. Those who do are 74% more likely to get strong results” – Orbit Media
Creating a blog and making it successful is just not enough. We need to ensure that the same piece of content stays viable for as long as possible.
Any successful blogger knows that s/he would need to keep updating their blog content on a regular basis so that it does not become irrelevant with the changing trends.
This practice leaves the users wanting for more and keeps them coming to your blog for more up-to-date information.
Google loves newer content, anytime. Considering this, it is advisable to keep updating your old posts which are yet relevant according to market trends. Remember, old content act like an old wine. Hence, at times, if you update an old post, it can be better than writing a completely new one.
3. “76% of B2B marketers blog, and 73% publish case studies.” – Content Marketing Institute
Well, isn’t this one of the most interesting content marketing stats!
Blogging is an irreplaceable aspect in every content marketing strategy and, for the best of reasons. It not only builds awareness and domain authority but also provides a platform for businesses to promote their services and educate prospects.
Case studies, on the other hand, allow businesses to use relatable stories to move prospects through the buyer journey. Case studies are greatly helpful in removing any doubts that might be having.
By establishing the relationship between product and buyer’s intent, case studies ease the buying process and help to remove doubts the customers might have.
It’s a lot easier to trust a company whose content has demonstrated how to get something done successfully.
4. “The average blog post is now 1,142 words (up 41% since 2014)” – Orbit Media
With the ever-changing search engine’s algorithm, the competition to get ranked on the first page of Google has increased drastically.
Gone are the days where blogs with 500 words were sufficient for keyword ranking.
Post-Panda and Penguin updates, now, Google analyzes each and every piece of content in terms of depth and quality as it’s one of many parameters for the ranking. Hence, the average blog content length has increased in recent years.
A study by SerpIQ found that top-ranking content is usually just over 2,400 words. This could be due to the fact that longer blog posts get more backlinks
5. “The average reader only spends 37 seconds reading an article post.” – News Cred Insights
Majority of the users prefer to go through the content on the go using messengers and other applications. Therefore, marketers are finding innovative ways to structure detailed content into snackable components which are easy to read and assimilate at a fast rate.
Some of the techniques involve relaying the content in the form of small videos, infographics and slide shares.
You can be as creative as you want with content formats as long as it gets things done; the sky is the limit.
6. “Paid content promotion is up 5x since 2014” – Orbit Media
Fact – “98% of the searchers make their decisions from page 1 of Google”
Therefore, it has become extremely crucial for businesses to secure theirs. One of the most prominent tools for paid promotion is Google AdWords, which reaches over a billion people. A report by Google shows that businesses typically see a 200% ROI from AdWords. Having said that please keep in mind that Even if you’re relying on Google AdWords ads or social media PPC campaigns, you have to be directly involved in content creation. Web marketing is primarily powered by content and always will be.
7. “Mobile will account for 72% of US digital ad spend by 2019.” – eMarketer
As previously mentioned, today’s generation prefers to go through their content on the go and mobile is just the right medium to do that. Increase in the usage of mobile phones has to clamour to advertise on the platform.
Mobile searches outpaced desktop back in 2014, so it makes sense that mobile-centric marketing efforts will keep increasing over the coming years.
8. “Only 8% of marketers consider themselves “very successful” or “extremely successful” at tracking content marketing ROI.” – LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community
The analysis is a critical activity that needs to be applied in every stage of the marketing funnel. However, the given content marketing stats implies that tracking of ROI of the content without the right tools does not give desired results.
Looking at most page views or most liked tweets is just not enough to track the entire aspects of a buyer’s journey from start to finish.
The entire analytical KPIs should be structured in such a way that it meets the goals of your respective business.
9. “63 % of marketers create content by buyer persona; 38% by vertical; 30% by geography; and 30% by account or customer.” – Curata
Buyer persona represents the ideal buyer’s personality based on the real-world market statistics which is highly specific to one’s business. This enables marketers to understand the wants and needs of their prospects and structure their marketing tactics accordingly. This technique results in higher conversion rates as people tend to take their business to one’s who address their pain points. Marketing Sherpa found using personas increases revenue by 171%.
Content marketing using geography and customers’ accounts are also effective but all of them are contributing factors while creating a buyer persona.
10. “57% of B2B buyers have already made their purchase decision before ever speaking to a sales person.” – CEB Global
Earlier buyer’s used to be solely dependent on the salesperson who used to be their first point of contact, for making their purchase decisions.
Consumers are fed up with in-your-face With the abundance of information available on the internet, buyers do not require a salesperson to make buying decisions. Hence it has become extremely crucial for brands to educate and build trust with the target audience, helping them move through marketing and sales funnel.
11. “B2B marketers use an average of 13 content marketing tactics.”- TopRankBlog
Any smart marketer knows not to put all their eggs in one basket while formulating an effective and successful marketing strategy for their business.
Diversify while still retaining your focus on the main goal, testing which of the component work best for your business requirements.
Consistently creating and distributing blog posts, videos, infographics, whitepapers, webinars etc. over different channel will always generate targeted leads.
12. “The most common content marketing delivery mechanism is social media, used by 87% of marketers.” – CMI
Social media networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest have transformed the way we interact with the world. These social networks are so popular and easy to use. The only thing it costs to push content via social media is your time unless you decide to run a paid ad campaign.
This is where your creativity in content really shines. A lot of companies are sending the same benefits and sale information through their social media channels and that is a tactical flaw. To get the most out of your social media marketing, focus on the “social” aspect and build reputation and trust with your followers. Give them truly helpful content, then refer them to your landing pages and nurture the relationship from there through email marketing.
Let’s move on to the last but not the least content marketing stats.
“Gamification is the least common content marketing tactic, with only 10% of marketers using it.”- CMI
To put it simply, gamification is using interactive games and quizzes for the purpose of selling or promoting one’s products or services. However, this strategy has not been used much and only 10% of marketer apply gamification in the real world. This might be due to the fact that it requires a lot of resource investment.
If you have the resources, it may be worth your while investing in gamification content, helping you stand out from competitors who don’t embrace it. It all boils down to your core product or service and the stage of the buyer’s journey that your prospect customers are currently located.
Conclusion:
Believe it or not – not all the marketers are aware of all these content marketing stats.
Businesses need to transform their marketing tactics in accordance with the changing trends if they wish to thrive. In order to achieve this, they would need to embrace inbound content marketing strategy wholly and solely. Publishing the content adaptable to mobiles, using the trendiest themes to inspire users, aligning the marketing strategies as per the researched buyer’s persona and so on and so forth. Following these strategies will place you on top of the content marketing game.
It’s just not enough to approach prospects willy-nilly. Marketers need to create enough awareness and goodwill about their product so that the prospects should feel the need to buy all by their own volition.
Would you like to add anything here? Do drop in your thoughts in the comments box. We’d love to hear from you.
Content marketing – it isn’t as easy as it sounds. While creating content, you should know what you are talking about. If the content sounds generic, emotionless, or too salesy, it is your very first content marketing mistake.
“We basically decline 70% of the content being submitted to us because it is being too salesy…”
Outbrain Australia, Ayal Steiner
If your content is focused on selling rather than engaging, you are not the alone making this common misstep. According to Neil Patel, the focus of content marketing is to educate first and sell second.
Another generic content marketing mistake is viewing your content marketing strategy as a short-term activity to achieve a short-term goal.
Most commonly made terrible content marketing mistakes:
1. Ignorance of the content planning stage
Content marketing is a practice to create and promote engaging content that provides value and knowledge to your customers. And hence, your content marketing strategy should be more than perfect. Prior to executing your strategy, first of all, have a proper plan in place. Your plan should be in line with your vision and goal. Figure out your goal, set your priorities, and know your audience for better content planning.
Most of the marketers jump upon campaigns without foreseeing its probable pros and cons. If your campaign isn’t targeted to the right audience, hardly there are any chances of getting the desired success.
QL Tech Tip: Create a content back and ensure at least a blog database of three months in advance.
2. Complete ignorance to Buyer Persona
In digital marketing, initially, you don’t know who would be your actual customers. Hence, it may happen that the entire content you write goes in vain because it is not reaching to the audience who needs it. And this is also one of the most common content marketing mistakes done by start-ups. To avoid this pitfall, do audience analysis and prepare buyer persona for each of your products and services.
QL Tech Tip: For a successful content marketing, start with creating buyer persona. Define and develop a buyer persona for your products and services. Accordingly, create content and share in front of your target audience.
3. Incorrect mapping of content with the buyer’s journey
Is it you who creates a lot of relevant and engaging content, but each time fail at the point of conversion? Well, it’s not just you! There are many content marketers who create killer copies but still can’t convert. This happens when you fail to map your content with the buyer’s journey. According to HubSpot, a buyer’s journey is the process buyers go through to become aware of, evaluate, and purchase a new product or service.
You need to know under which stage of marketing funnel your prospective buyer falls. Accordingly, create content they want and dish it out in front of them.
4. Using content marketing as a tool to link building
A digital marketer often confuses content marketing with link building strategy. Of course, quality content builds backlinks. But, don’t just churn out tons of content so that it can be promoted haywire to generate backlinks. To be honest, it will never work.
Healthy link building is a costly and time-consuming process. Your content strategy is a two-edged sword. It can either make or break your entire SEO campaign. Rather than the quantity i.e. amount of backlinks, you need to work on acquiring quality backlinks. For this, your content should sound great and provide value without losing its uniqueness.
QL Tech Tip:
Ensure that your great content passes through below checkpoints: – Original, unique, and actionable – Provide value to visitors – Focus on solutions to users’ problems – Updated regularly to keep it fresh and relevant – Cited from trusted sources
5. Lack of storytelling
According to some studies, brains are always hungry for good stories that can connect them emotionally to the context. Most of the content marketers are aware of the importance of storytelling. However, they fail when it comes to delivery. A prime content marketing mistake that is noticed consistently is lack of storytelling art.
According to Sophie Elizabeth Smith, 45% of a brand’s image can be attributed to what it says and how it says it.
A story is nothing but just a narrative constitution that describes either an event or sequence of events. It should involve a two-way interaction between you (as a storyteller) and your audience (as listeners).
QL Tech Tip: For effective storytelling, create a scenario having issues/concerns or problems in the start of your content and over the course of a narrative, end it with a logical and actionable solution.
6. Ignorance to quantity, consistency, and frequency
Content marketers are often unsure about the quantity, consistency, and frequency of content to be published and promoted. This ignorance leads them to commit a content marketing mistake.
If you get rigid about publishing timelines, you might lose focus on the overall quality of the content to be created. Further, it is not always right that the more pieces of content you produce, the more results you can achieve.
Rather than just producing content, its promotion is also important. Your valuable content should reach to the eyes of your prospects on a consistent and frequent basis.
Consistency is posting on a regular (aka consistent) schedule. Frequency, on the other hand, is posting repeatedly during a period of time.
This difference matters a lot in content marketing. Posting (or publishing) on a consistent schedule sets expectations and hence it is a big deal. On the other hand, the frequency of posting (or promoting) content just ensures that it reaches all audiences, all time zones.
QL Tech Tip: Prepare a content calendar, preferably for posting schedules, that takes care of your consistency and frequency both.
7. Zero focus on Headlines
Imagine you have received an email in your Inbox with a subject line that sounds tacky and spammy, will you click on it? Probably not! The first thing a prospective reader notice is a headline. Craft a compelling headline; it is your very first prospect to mark a positive impression on your reader.
Basically, headlines aren’t only important in content marketing; they, in fact, rule the world of content marketing. According to David Lomas, your headlines, in effect, are your first real point of connection with your prospective customer, so you need to get them right.
Content marketers not paying attention to headlines greatly lose on the conversion opportunities. Your headlines should be interesting, relevant, creative, conversational, and insightful. Use a various headline analyzer online tools to check the score, readability, and sensitivity of your headline. According to a study published in The Guardian, headlines with 8 words do 21% better than average and using a hyphen or colon will add 9% to your CTR.
QL Tech Tip: Create more than one headline for each of your content and share it with the different headlines at different timings on different social media network to generate high blog traffic.
8. Promotion in front of the wrong audience
Not promoting the right content, at the right time, in front of the right audience is another common content marketing mistake. As a rule of thumb, don’t promote all the content that you produce. Poor content hurts you more than good content benefits you. It will not only affect your conversion rate but also negatively impacts your brand credibility. According to CoSchedule, consumers don’t take action when you want them to take action; they take action when they are ready.
Therefore, it is imperative for you to promote your content in front of the right audience. Create a content to which your audience can relate too. Use the words your user use to search their answers and accordingly provide solutions to their queries through your content.
QL Tech Tip: Not just do content marketing, rather do actionable content marketing. It is the backbone of your SEO.
Signing off!
These are not the exhaustive list of content marketing mistakes. However, we have covered the most common slips done by most of the content marketers. Take an honest look at the content marketing mistakes you are presently making, and try to fix them. Once you fix the existing issues, you will start noticing a tremendous transformation in your conversions.
If you need assistance on fixing any of the content marketing mistakes or want to highlight anything here, feel free to drop in your words in the comments section. We’d love to hear from you!
Looking at the present scenario, online life has become more dynamic than ever before. News, articles, blogs go viral this moment and a few hours later fade away into oblivion. There is a big roar on social media sites about one news, and soon after that some other news comes up and breaks the echo of the previous one.
Well, all this traction is because of one thing, i.e. – CONTENT. Content is the core of all the buzz which is there on various social media sites. Nowadays, businesses give more emphasis on content to market their products or services. They consider quality-content as the important key in achieving digital marketing success. Therefore, digital marketers plan to invest more in their content marketing programs.
If you are also looking to embark upon a content marketing campaign, you must know what will stimulate your online growth. Text-based content is an integral part of marketing. But to bring a hustle in your efforts, try to add visuals to your content.
We would like to share with you the types of visual content that you can use in your content. This will give a boost to your visual content marketing campaign.
Types of visual content to Boost Visual Content Marketing
1. Images – Visualization of ideas
If you spice up your text with some appealing and relatable images, your overall content becomes more readable. It will increase the probability of your readers reading your content until the end.
As we know with the growing usage of mobile phones, the attention spans have become shorter over large chunks of content. Therefore, it is preferable to use images in order to seek the much-needed attention of your audience.
Further, it will be an add-on if you use original images or the ones taken by you; as this adds a personal touch to your campaign. Images that are captivating are either expensive or time-consuming to create. You can take help of resources such as Canva where you can create images for free. Also, there are excellent quality photos available on Flickr and Morguefile for free.
Adding quality images to your text content will enhance your visual content marketing efforts; also in the appropriate direction.
2. Videos- 3D visualization of ideas
Videos are the best way to present the whole idea in a fantastic way. If the video gets combined with audio, it adds value to the content. It gives a positive impression that you can also walk that extra mile for the quality. This will be an add-on to your basic visual content marketing strategy as it will put a better impact on your audience.
Also, videos prove to be very useful in describing the product and services that your brand offers. You can add any type of video to your content. For instance, you can add explainer videos, demonstrations, testimonials or how-to videos. Whatever be your choice, keep in mind that your videos are congruent with the ethos of your brand.
According to a study by Moz, posts with videos receive nearly 300% more inbound links.
3. Infographic- Information in the form of Graphics
Indubitably, infographics are a wonderful tool to represent your data in a visual format. It comprises of text in the image. In your infographic, you can include your promotional endeavours like your networks of key influencers, social media etc. an infographic can become an integral part of your visual content marketing strategy.
You have to keep in mind that your design and layout should be as impactful as it could be. Your data has to be conveyed in a design which is a combination of good shapes, colours, and fonts. Also, you should try to include accurate and relevant information. Many a time it happens that mundane statistics can be brought to life when conveyed as stunning visuals.
This will reap you quick and true rewards for your infographic.
4. Memes- visuals with a humorous caption
We all find memes really humorous and they are quite popular in the realm of digital media. Nobody has ever thought that memes would play a role in visual content marketing; when they first started to be used as a form of entertainment among college students. But now they represent a quirky form of visual content.
You can also create your own meme and set yourself apart from your competitors. But before creating, ensure the type of audience. Another plus point of using memes is that they give you the luxury of creating in-house jokes about your industry. This could benefit you in establishing a community around your brand.
5. Presentations- ideas Presented smartly
They serve the almost same function as an infographic but focus more on appealing designs, colour and lengthy content. Some-time before, presentations were restricted to only board rooms. But now, with the help of SlideShare, you can share your presentation with the world; thereby expanding your business reach. A good representation allows you to communicate with your audience irrespective of the device they are using.
How to create an appealing presentation? You can just take an idea from Rand Fishkin’s presentation on Content Marketing Mistakes. The presentation has complex information presented in a humorous, easily digestible manner. Keep in mind that you follow the consistency throughout your presentation. Proofread your content for spelling and grammar mistakes.
6. Screenshots- screen captured an image
With the help of screenshots, you can provide your audience with the actual working of your product or service. Along with screenshot, you can combine a marketing copy or a testimonial to boost your credibility. This will give a jolt to your visual content marketing, thereby increasing your profits.
Further, screenshots can be very useful in backing up the claims that you make in your sales content. You can also annotate your screenshots if you wish to draw attention to a particular part of the image.
Screenshots might not be that appealing to you but they can be hugely used as a trust-building tool for your audience. Capture customer reviews or testimonials that are there on industry forums or social media. Those screenshots can be used in infographics or SlideShare presentation as they will bring meaning to the stats or information you are presenting.
Skitch is a nice tool to create graphics and text on images. It’s free and simple to use.
Wrapping up
Visual content taps to the visceral psyche of your audience. That’s why it is very important to present high-quality visual content. It will truly resonate with people, subsequently skyrocketing your brand promotion.
Well, if your content is badly designed, you will end up doing more harm than good. Always try to consider the needs of your audience. With content the substance counts the most, but a good representation style is always appreciated.
We have tried our best to highlight the important points about each type of visual content. We hope those will help you in planning your “Visual Content Marketing” strategy to get the maximum gains. If you would like to add your smart ideas, feel free to comment below.
When it comes to your SEO practices, along with link building, keywords, and on-page elements, content is also one of the most significant elements. Are you wondering content is still the king of SEO? Well, as per Lee Odden, Content isn’t king, its kingdom. Content curation strengthens your content marketing strategy.
According to Content Marketing Institute, content curation assembles, selects, categorizes, comments on, and presents the most relevant, highest quality information to meet your audience’s needs on a specific subject.
According to Curata, 42% of companies have an executive responsible for content marketing, reaching 49% in 2017
Basically, content curation is not about creating new content. However, to a certain extent, it is about discovering and compiling existing content written by industry experts and sharing it with your online followers.
Why content curation matters?
The reason why a content curation matters are simple; content curation boosts your target audience reach. Content curation also has a role in your SEO. Of course, duplication of content will be penalized by search engines and your rankings will get hampered. But, a correct approach of content curation will augment your SEO, as mentioned below:
Furthermore, content curation will help you establish as a thought leader in your industry. The good thing about content curation is it is not restricted to sharing others’ content. You can curate your own content and share it again and again, which is called repurposing of content. Last but not the least, content curation does matter a lot for you because in this exercise you are going to learn a more about our content and your industry since there will be extensive research and reading of similar other content.
In short, to preserve booming online presence, it’s vital for you to adopt content curation as a digital marketing tactic.
How content curation helps on social media?
Content curation is more like an art rather than science. There isn’t any particular technique to be followed for any particular social media platform. In the case of twitter, curating quality content from industry influencers and sharing it on your feed will send them a notification. In turn, there are high chances that they’ll follow back you and your brand. This way you can engage with others while connecting your content with their audiences.
The most important thing for a digital marketer is to understand that content curation helps you build invaluable relationships while providing value to your audience. That is why your social media page should not be snowed under only curated content. Your social media page should strike an ideal balance between curated content and your own created content.
Most of the acquainted content marketers prefer a content mix in their content marketing strategy as:
If content curation is done right, it assists you to build valuable relationships while providing value to your audience on varied social media platforms.
What are the most preferred content curation tools?
Till now, we talked about why content curation is important. Now let us move to the main point, how to curate the content. For content marketers, content curation is integral to online strategy. Effective content curation helps position you as a thought leader in your domain. Moreover, it is an affordable way to retain a consistent publishing schedule of quality content.
“Content curation is the process of both creating and linking to pertinent content on a B2B website”
Content curation process can be graphically represented as:
However, don’t you agree, manually attempting to search for the most relevant content in a given industry and then publishing it across multiple channels can be time-consuming?
Yes, it is not only time consuming but it is also less effective. For perfect content curation, you need to take help of automation.
Here, we present the most preferred and ultimate list of content curation tools.
As we discussed in the above paragraphs, content curation is a grand manner to support a created content strategy, consistently publish content, and keep a track of your desired information sources. Let us know each content curation tool in a deeper way to understand how it can boost your overall content marketing strategy.
1. Curata
Curata is the leading provider of business-grade content curation software (CCS). Curata’s content curation software will ease you if you are struggling to scale your content marketing due to a lack of content. Curata’s CCS enables content marketers to discover fresh content, create new content, curate content from various sources, refine content flow, and publish & promote the most relevant and highest quality content as part of a successful content marketing strategy.
As a part of content curation, Curata’s CCS easily organize, interpret, and contextualize the content. Curata digs content from hundreds and thousands of relevant sources, keeping your content engine buzzing without a requirement of constant creation of your own content. It provides great support on content marketing platform by adding your own unique perspective to curated content and filtering content by relevancy & timing. CCS is best for planning, developing, and evaluating your content marketing.
According to several resources, Curata services start from $1,500 on a month-to-month basis.
2. Pinterest
Reading at first sight you might be surprised how can a social media platform act as content curation, right? But yes, it is indeed a content curation tool.
According to Julia McCoy, Pinterest is also fantastic for collecting useful “hacks”, tricks and tips you can build your content around
It is often called as an online pinboard. Pinterest is a visual discovery platform since it works on images, video clips, and infographics. Open your business account on Pinterest and follow people in your industry and pop culture icons to catch access to millions of great content ideas. You need to save these content ideas to interactive boards on your account and pin them. Apply these pins to curate exceptional videos, podcasts, and images content for you and for your clients.
Furthermore, the content you pin can easily comprise an image and a link that drives back to the source. The source can be either a blog or infographic. With the help of Pinterest search, you can reveal great content that is probably interesting to your audience. It is a great platform to search and share content by domain to various social platforms.
The icing on the cake is Pinterest is a free means for content marketers to discover great content.
3. Scoop.it
A tool called Scoop.it is fantastic for content curation since it builds your relationship with other content curators. Scoop.it helps individuals and businesses to publish their content in a proficient and impacting way. This tool uses big-data semantic technology to assist you in promptly finding relevant content. Scoop.it displays the content curated by other users and offers similar topics shared. This allows you to get insight from influencers and industry leaders regarding a specific topic. It also gives you an opportunity to share your information with others and help them curate their own content.
Its top features include choosing specific keywords with the help of Boolean research, adding own sources with RSS feeds, suggesting content based on big data, and filtering content based on various criteria.
Scoop.it is a free tool; however, its paid options come with a more robust search.
4. Storify
Storify is a wonderful visual content curation tool that creates ‘stories’ or ‘timelines’ by gathering and publishing your content from social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It is intended for organizations of any size, looking for integrating curated content into their own website or their social media page. Either you can create the content and offer people to curate the content, or you can glance through the storyboards and curate content from others.
Storify helped one woman raise $650,000 when her Storify story went viral and had 1.5 million hits
Jeff Bullas
In addition, Storify enables you to research and pool content from multiple sources, merge that content with original content, and then share the mixed content as a unique story. Once can use Storify to search blog posts, comments, and videos that others have shared online.
Storify is a free tool and it also has options of paid versions.
5. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo believes that there is ample content on internet and web pages, no shortage at all. But what matters most is to search the relevant content and use it on a timely basis. BuzzSumo gets content research to a new level using social search. The key to getting relevant content is to search using filters. You can make out the total number of shares on a particular content resource and even can identify content by author. Buzzsumo masters the art of filtering out the content that resounds with audiences, the content that is currently trending, and the content about to trend.
Buzzsumo was a go-to resource of mine to find the most shareable content that resonated with the largest audience
Margot da Cunha
It is a highly popular content curation tool which is FREE till limited searches and then offers some advanced features underpaid options. Their plan starts from $79/month and goes beyond that based on the package you opt for.
6. Triberr
Basically, Triberr is a marketing platform for influencers. However, it also acts as a content curation tool by providing the ability to discover great content. Triberr is a community where tribes curate their own content and promote others’ content.
Either you can create an account or can log in with your twitter, facebook or LinkedIn ID to join as a tribe and follow relevant people.
Triberr has various plans as follows:
7. Post Planner
According to Ian Cleary, The content engine in Postplanner is a great way to find content.
For smarter content, better posts, and mind blogging results – reach out to only one social media destination called Post Planner. It aids you to find the best and the right content for your audience and post it. Furthermore, it delivers content based on users’ keywords, provides status ideas, and assists users to search blogs and experts in their forte.
Post planner plans start from $9/month.
8. Feedly
Feedly is known for its user-friendly design. It delivers fast, mobile-optimized content using RSS feeds. Feedly enables you to browse and share content from your favourite news sites, blogs, feeds, and YouTube channels. Feedly displays the latest content being shared on a particular website or using a precise keyword on top of the entire content.
Cas McCullough : I use Feedly to categorize content for my own social platforms, as well as my clients’ platforms
Up to 100 feeds, services of Feedly are FREE, and its paid plans start from $5.41 or $18 for a team.
9. Pocket
Pocket, as the name suggests, works like a pocket where you can save your content and view it later when required. Pocket provides service for saving web pages and articles. There you can view later when you want. Pocket, as a content curation tool, enables content discovery as well as arms you with the skill to search for content on specific topics. It displays the most trending and ‘must read’ sort of posts and articles.
Pocket is a great place to get into the habit of accruing content to save and share later.
Pocket is user-friendly, can work in your browser, as well as from apps such as Twitter, Flipboard, and others. If the content is stored in Pocket, (your phone, tablet or computer), you don’t even need an Internet connection to view it again and again.
The pocket can be used for FREE; it’s paid plan starts from $44.99/yr for an ad-free experience…
10. Trap.it
Trap.it is a content curation tool and a social selling service. It is considered as the best social media management solution too. It assists you to manage employee advocacy. With the help of Trap.it, you can search relevant and new content within minutes, which can be shared via email, LinkedIn or other social media platforms. Its top features include salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics Integration and Artificial Intelligence for content curation.
11. Curation Suite
Curation Suite is the renewed version of Curation Traffic. To discover, curate, publish and share multiple types of content, curation suite is the most popular platform. Curation Suite is a robust WordPress plugin that works right within your WordPress dashboard. It works with any theme and any plugin you have, to search content in the form of posts, articles, videos, infographics, and others.
Curation Suite plans start from $97 which is a one-time payment and then you can go for a top-up according to your content curation needs.
12. Quora
Quora is yet another underestimated but most important content curation tool. It is a great place to share your knowledge and ideas and engage with similar interests people. It is a forum where questions are asked and pertaining replies are given by the varied users.
You can set up an account, and then search your keywords to find outstanding content for future use. In addition, you can turn on notifications about specified topics pertaining to your field. By doing so, you can get access to more and more relevant articles and interesting ideas in your inbox.
Quora platform is FREE and can be accessed for multiple times a day
Closing thoughts
The list does not end here, there are much more content curation tools available in the market which can help you boost your content marketing strategy. Over and above these 12 tools, 39 more tools have been listed here for you as additional reading.
Sr No
Content Curation Tool
Description
13.
Addict-o-Matic
· Search the best LIVE sites across the web. · Dig the latest and trending news, blog posts, videos and images
14.
BagTheWeb
· Search, create and share ‘bags’ of web content on varied topics
15.
Bundlepost
· Aggregate and plan social media content · Find, edit, and schedule with the browser plugin or social media dashboard
16.
Channel kit
· Enables you to tag and organize all sorts of information in one place · Includes articles, websites, contacts, PDF files or various format images—all showcased as neat cards in channels
· Mechanically integrates real-time social content beside editorial content to raise engagement and boost revenue
19.
CurationSoft
· Helps establish brands as a reliable voice, and a “not to miss” source of information
20.
DrumUp
· Mines web content in real-time to suggest to your audience · Reduces your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter management time
21.
elink
· Offers a swift way to transform a bunch of links into content · Enables to curate, publish, and share content online in a visually appealing manner
22.
Flipboard
· Create your own personalized magazines and brochures · Catch up on news, read stories across the globe, and browse articles,videos,and photos your friends are sharing across the web
23.
Flockler
· Combine all your content, including what your fans and followers say about you, into one social hub. ·Create your own social hub or bring social content into your existing websites, applications, eCommerce sites, and other services
24.
Folloze
· A great B2B platform to create content experiences that dynamically adapt to a visitor’s profile, company, industry, and stage of the deal
25.
HeadSlinger
· Saves your research time by 50%, find all your news in half the time · Scan your favourite sites’ headlines in a matter of seconds and store your favourite news sources in a swift and simple manner to find folders
26.
Huzzaz
· Video curation platform that enables you to search, mine, collect and showcase YouTube and Vimeo videos · Analyze user’s viewing behaviour and figure out which videos matter most to your viewers and to enhance the site engagement
27.
Juxtapost
· Swift, simple and FREE way to bookmark online images · Gather and handle categorized post boards
28.
Kbucket
· Being it a user indexed search site, here, skilled “content curators” categorize, comment, tag, and publish their research to support their content marketing strategy
29.
Curator
· Persistently publish fresh and new content on websites or blogs in minutes a day to keep up readers engagement
30.
LinkHubb
· Curate and share multiple links from around the web in one organized page, upload documents and files to the cloud, and use affiliate technology to generate ad-based revenue
31.
List.ly
· Curate, crowdsource and engage readers via LIVE rooted list content inside blog posts
32.
Newsle
· Track users’ Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, and email contacts in the news. By no means miss a key story about a follower, professional contact, or public figure
33.
papaly
· Bookmark management and discovery tool
34.
Paper.li
· Publish ‘newspapers’ comprised of content from anywhere on the web to treat your readers to fresh news daily
35.
Pearltrees
· Visual and collaborative curation tool. Allows you to collect, organize, and share any URL, and upload personal images and notes
36.
Pluggio
· Secure web-based system that helps individuals, businesses, organizations and marketers easily grow and manage their social media profiles
37.
RebelMouse
· Create a blog, website, or social page in seconds. Simply connect your social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+ or LinkedIn.
38.
RockTheDeadline
· Simplifies for brands, agencies, and publishers to create and manage compelling content ·Curate timely and trending news and promote that content over multiple channels
39.
Roojoom
· Create Smart MiniSites, online magazines, and e-newsletters · Content can be personalized to increase engagement and improve conversions across the customer life-cycle
40.
Shareist
· Capture bookmarks and ideas, share them on social media and save them for building and publishing pages to blogs
41.
Sharpr
· Segregate information silos, advance collaboration, and share what matters most with the users who matter most to your business
42.
Spredfast
· Helps brands, media, and agencies involve and connect with audience integrating social media into their marketing and advertising efforts
43.
sprinklr
· Helps brands and organizations distribute curated social media content to support their content strategy. Platforms include websites, event displays, retail signage, and mobile apps.
44.
Storyful
· Helps newsrooms find the most valuable content on the social web. Uses a “human algorithm” to sort through verified curated news from various mediums.
45.
Sutori
· Create and share visual stories, collaboratively
46.
symbaloo
· A personal Startpage that allows you to easily navigate the web. Compile your favourite sites into one visual interface. Save your bookmarks in the cloud and access them from anywhere with any device.
47.
TagBoard
· Social media hub for hashtags · Collect, moderate, and follow hashtags, as well as create and follow your own hashtag conversations
48.
The Tweeted Times
· Comprehends news in your Twitter flow every hour · Ranks each section by its popularity amid your friends
49.
UpContent
· Content mining and content curation tool that crawls the web to draw news, articles, and blog posts · Sorts by parameters such as the social influence · Reduces browsing needs of surfing 1000s of page results
50.
Vidinterest
· A platform to discover social videos that enables you to bookmark videos and create private or public playlists of videos · Allows surfing any website featuring videos from Vimeo, YouTube, and Daily Motion.
51.
Waywire
· Video curation tool that embeds hundreds of top-quality sources from trusted media makers to improve your site with current, timely, trending and contextually-relevant videos
Again, this is not an exhaustive list of content curation tools. Feel free to drop in the comments section if you use any of the other tools and how is your content curation experience with that content curation tool. We are excited to hear from you regarding your insights on content curation tools!
Content marketing is considered as one of the most influential things when it comes to SEO trends for 2017. Until recent past, it was probably underestimated parameter, but now marketers are paying special attention to their content marketing. Content writing has now become the most vital portion of digital marketing. Day-by-day, the quality standard of content is getting versatile and competitive. Quite a few search marketers attempt to attract their target audience with their content development skills, along with other social media skills and engagement tactics.
It emphasizes that in order to sustain competition you are in a constant need to boost the quality of your content. Most of the audience is engrossed in reading good content over the web while searching for something that is similar to your content.
You would have read a lot many articles and blogs on the tools for search engine optimization and social media marketing. Here, we present the top 11 content marketing tools which you need to explore in 2017 to stay ahead in the digital marketing race. These are regarded as the best content creation tools.
These tools will not only help you write your content but also assist you in the optimization of your content. They act as a polish for your quality content which is ready for publishing.
Content marketing tools
1. Co- schedule Headline Analyzer
According to HubSpot, only 60% of people who click into an article end up reading past the headline. This explains how important your headline is for your marketing.
Co- schedule Headline Analyzer is a free tool, widely used in the field of digital marketing. This tool calculates the score for your overall headline quality and rates its ability to result in social shares, increased traffic, and SEO value. It is very simple to operate. The scoring format is also informative. An overall score of your headline is judged on the basis of four parameters; common words, uncommon words, emotional words, and power words. You should definitely use this tool to improve your article or blog headlines.
2. Content Ideator
An easy to operate the tool. Content Ideator helps you find good topics to write about e.g. blogs, articles, and others. It lets you generate content ideas that your audience reads and shares. This tool is also popularly known as a Content Forest tool. The beauty of this tool is it allows you to generate a number of blog topics and ideas in a little amount of time. Once you enter a single keyword or a phrase, it will come up with a long list of ideas out of which some may be helpful and some may not be.
3. Grammarly
Grammar is of utmost importance to avoid confusions when it comes to oral or written communication. Incorrect usage of grammar and spelling mistakes can actually slow down the overall flow of communication. Grammarly is yet another powerful tool that helps you correct your content. It highlights the most possible grammatical slipups, wordiness, and suggests better articles/prepositions strengthen your content. It also provides apt synonyms for the words that you double-click. This content tool helps you with the correction part of your content. Moreover, it also helps with the correct sentence formation part of your content if you are mistaken at any of the sentences.
4. HubSpot
This specific tool promotes inbound marketing platforms. It consists of various tools to monitor and devise effective blog posts, personalized landing pages, and other compelling content along with excellent consumer support. It also includes effective content-marketing campaign activities. HubSpot also helps social media analytics and message-scheduling so that you can advertise your content easily to your social carriers.
5. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a great and invaluable content creation tool. The first five searches of Buzzsumo are absolutely free. If you would like to identify which online outlets or influencers are getting the most traction in your space, you should definitely look to Buzzsumo for analytics-driven insights.
Based on your search, Buzzsumo will colonize the trending content, which is most social, highest ranking, and most influential. This will give you a perfect idea of how to title your content. In addition, it will help you find out where to advertise your content based on relevant audience reach.
6. Copify
Everyone wish to create quality content. As a business, you need content for everything, from the website pages that drive sales to the blog posts that engage customers on social media. It does require a good amount of relevant research. Based on the research, you can come up with the draft content. Post that proofreading, copy editing, substantive editing, and designing finally shapes your final output. As you can see, it’s a lengthy process and a challenging job!
Imagine neither you are a professional writer nor you have an in-house writer. No need to worry, a simple solution is just a click away, Copify. As an entrepreneur, you can easily access quality copywriters through Copify. Copify helps businesses to source quality content from a network of approved writers, promptly and hassle-free. They do take responsibility for proofreading and formatting and deliver mostly within 48 hours.
Outbrain is the best option to solve the problems in the distribution of your content. Even though it is a paid tool, it will broaden your audience to a huge extent.
With Outbrain, you can easily increase your audience engagement with your videos, articles, blogs, articles, and infographics. Your posts will be advertised as suggested posts besides other articles.
8. Canva
Struggling and juggling with the creation of images? Then you should use a tool called Canva. This is considered as one of the most preferred content marketing tools. Canva offers ready-to-use templates, custom image sizes for all social media channels. It provides a drag-and-drop interface, cool fonts, and many user-friendly features. The images created by Canva are absolutely original and exclusive that you witness on the web.
9. Hemingway editor
Hemingway Editor is yet another important tool, which you should not miss. It points out the general concerns pertaining to complex words, vague phrases, lengthy sentences, too many adverbs, too many nouns, and others. Precisely, it helps you to eliminate your language-related errors and make your content simple and easy to understand. While highlighting errors, it also gives a description that why it is an error. The only limitation is that it just points out issues, doesn’t provide solutions or alternatives.
10. ClearVoice
ClearVoice allows you great flexibility and competence; it is a complete content marketing network. You will get an inbuilt market through ClearVoice. It helps in promoting your content and brand. It allows you to create your content and get connected with the brands in order to produce quality content. The studio of ClearVoice enables the brands to recognize the influencing factors and their competitors so that they can produce the content which is both relevant and valuable.
11. Pocket
If you are looking for a perfect content curation tool, the pocket is an apt solution. This content marketing tool includes the search, arrangement, and share the function of the most relevant and high-quality digital content.
Pocket safeguards all of your articles, images, charts, and videos at a single place for reference. It aids you to bookmark your content, ranging from blogs and articles to images and posts.
Conclusion
With the growing competition of quality content, it has become necessary that you publish your posts with accuracy and efficiency. There are lots of content marketing tools available on the web that will help you optimize your content and make it perfect to be published on social channels.
Content marketing is of utmost importance because it serves you in generating leads and building a vast community. In addition, it will not make you look like a salesperson. Ignorance of the content is ignorance of the sales.
According to Content Marketing Institute, 70% of B2B marketers plan to create more content in 2017 compared to 2016.
The below-mentioned tips do not follow any particular order, but they all are a package that will give you success in your digital marketing campaign.
Use these tips to inflate your content marketing to boost your web traffic.
1. Use various interactive platforms like Quora
Content marketing has a lot to do with social media and especially interactive platforms. There are multiple platforms where questions and queries are openly shared and millions of people truly attempt them to satisfy the query. Such platforms include Yahoo, StackExchange, Quora, and others. To boost your content knowledge and thereby raising content marketing results try to contribute to such sites and interact with people. Such platforms are growing rapidly and they can very well help you find a new audience. In addition, these sites will also help your target audience reach your website.
You can promote your content across these sites by following the simple course of action.
It is best to follow influencers. Read their posts and try to analyze the way they have written. At times, they serve as the best tutorials in finding out how to write and how to get more thumbs.
Start replying to a few relevant topics which are in line either with your services or with your blogs.
While replying to the relevant topics, you can include links to your blogs. However, in NO circumstance, it should sound self-promotion.
Initially, try to post succinct content so that anyone can read it even while surfing the page. Later on, depending on the question and comfort, you may even post lengthy content.
In case your readers will find your content interesting, engaging, and informative, they will surely follow you till your website to check out your own blogs.
2. Makeover your old blogs
Though it is true that old content can also drive traffic, it is equally important to keep your old content updated and in line with the trends. Each blog listed on your website, be it fresh or old, should have valuable, relevant, and right content.
Your main aim behind the blog posts is to convert your readers into your subscribers. When a reader visits your website for some information and what if they find that your content is stale and irrelevant? It will simply cost you by making you lose your audience. Losing a valuable visitor and subscriber is of course not a welcoming thing. On the other hand, search engines always update their algorithm. There are prominent chances that your site may get penalized if you are not up-to-date.
You can make a few amendments to your existing content in the following suggested manner:
Rectify all minor and major grammatical issues
Incorporate trends that are new and relevant to your blog title. At the same time, delete which is now not relevant based on the recent updates and algorithm workings
Only use images that are relevant and search engine friendly.
Identify the keywords that are actually performing well for higher rankings. You can use SEMrush tool for the same
Periodically moderate comments on your blog posts.
Identify the well-performing posts using blog analytics. Observe a number of views for the specific post.
Keep an eye on the number of shares of your blog on social media.
While updating the old blog post:
Do not modify URL
You may amend the blog title but ensure to retain the keywords.
Assess meta-description if it can be improved.
Provide internal links to your new posts for strengthening internal linking
3. Use compelling infographics
A picture can portray 1000 of words. This is a sort of ‘not-to-miss’ in your effective content marketing strategy.
Infographics should contain no more than 5-6 statistics/ points of information. Research by KISSmetrics found that any more than 6 and it becomes too much for the reader to consume.
Keep these guiding principles handy while creating valuable info graph:
It should be easy to embed to enable more social media shares
Use odd numbers in your title to catch attention. E.g. 243% hike (instead of 250%). Odd numbers always do better than even numbers
Instead of writing long stories, present short, crisp, and catchy phrases/sentences
If your infographic has information in list format, e.g. “5 SEO techniques ”, ensure to label each point with numbers.
4. Make your brand creative with a variety of content
No doubt content marketing is all about blogging, eBooks, articles, and other content in written format. These strategies are going to stay for long and probably forever. However, do not miss out on the new bud of content marketing; video content.
Video content will enhance revenue in 2017 and beyond. Marketers who use video grow their revenue 49% faster as compared to non-video users. According to Cisco, 69% of all consumer Internet traffic will be the result of a video. A video is for sure the future of both content marketing and SEO.
While creating effective video content that makes your brand more creative, do not miss out to ensure:
Your content voice is in line with your audience voice
The video has been designed corresponding to your goal and it serves the purpose
Video content contains the kind of emotion you need to drive with
It does have a strong CTA; it should provide a way to the user to take some desired action. Sometimes it is also better to have lead capture set up with the best possible minimum fields. For example:
Last but not least, it fulfils all possible SEO criteria, e.g. usage of relevant keywords, optimized titles, wise usage of tags, proper description, and others
Conclusion
So far, content marketing has grown from marketing activity to an approach of marketing. It is nothing but creating engaging content to inform your target audience about your offerings and drive them to your website. Follow the given guidelines and enjoy the boost of your search traffic and sales.
