Why are you doing content marketing?

“Because our competitors are…”

“To gain exposure…”

“Because I was told I had to…”

I ask this question a lot, and the above answers are pretty typical of the sort of response I hear.

Of course, every company wants to gain exposure and drive people to their website, and if enough people tell them content’s the way to do that, it makes sense that – at some point – they’d choose to go down that road.

However, while exposure and visits – and even email sign-ups and social growth – are all great to see, in isolation, they’re not going to make much of a difference to your bottom line (and they’re definitely not going to convince the guys “up top” that content is worth investing in).

In order to maximize the ROI of your content marketing, you need to be converting these leads into something tangible – something that can be assigned a dollar value.

If you’ve not yet reached that point, don’t worry – you’re not alone. Recent stats show that although 93% of marketers are using content marketing, only 9% of them deem it to be “very effective.”

In this post, I’m going to take a look at why you’re struggling to take your content to the next level, and what you can do to start converting the leads you capture and push yourself into that 9% of “very effective” content marketers.

Let’s begin by taking a look at…

What’s wrong with your content creation process

You’re targeting the wrong people

Newsflash: content that’s going to drive conversions has to target a demographic of visitors that are actually likely to convert. If you’re successfully driving leads with your content, but none of those leads are converting, could the problem be that the content doesn’t align with your target market? And that the resulting leads are unqualified and irrelevant as a result? Continue reading → Why Your Content Marketing Leads Aren’t Converting (and What to Do About It)

Guest Post from Shayla Price. Shayla lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology, and social responsibility. Twitter: @shaylaprice.

Show, don’t tell. That’s the new motto of online marketing.

Visual storytelling is staking its claim into business strategies across several industries. From Lowe’s six-second Vines to Etsy’s Pinterest boards, top brands are seeking new, eye-catching ways to gain their audience’s attention.

Socialbakers.com reports that Facebook posts with photos saw the most engagement, receiving 87% of total interactions. That’s why it’s no surprise that 71% of marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing.

If less text is better, how can you use visual storytelling to communicate your business’s values and products to consumers? Continue reading → How to Use Visual Storytelling to Seduce Your Audience

A lot of what I do starts with cold emails. Content marketing is all about creating relationships, and you’re not going to be able to do that unless you start putting yourself out there.

The reason that I have been successful with building an audience is because I believe in a help-first, ask questions later approach. I recognize the value in posting a link, mentioning an influencer, and promoting valuable tools—and so I try to do that for others as much as I can. It acts as a pre-emptive olive branch, showing others that my main concern, before I have even so much as an introduction, that I’m here to be helpful.

If you can adopt this philosophy early on, I believe it’s going to help you in every aspect of cold outreach. Be the kind of person that people want to have a relationship with, and it’s going to go far in creating in roads when you do start to reach out. When the time comes, however, you also need to have a strategy for getting your foot in the door, and that’s the art of the cold email. Continue reading → The 3 Cold Emails Templates Every Content Marketer Should Use

Before I jump into today’s post I’d like to offer my awesome readers a free copy of my new ebook: Content Marketing Playbook. Grab your free copy from Amazon.

In July 2012, a then unknown (at least, here in the U.S.) Korean pop artist Park Jae-sang (more commonly known as Psy) released the music video for Gangnam Style. You’ve probably heard of it.

The video took just 48 hours to make and contained no special effects – or, in fact, anything that unusual (cheesy pop videos aren’t exactly a new phenomenon).

And yet, on the day of its release, the video was viewed more than 500,000 times on YouTube. Within two months, it surpassed 5 million views, and in December 2013, the video exceeded 2 billion views, breaking YouTube’s viewer counter.

That’s pretty impressive stuff. Continue reading → A Data-Driven Approach to Going Viral