What’s your story?
Trickier still, what’s your company’s story?
In the world of marketing, the ability to tell a compelling story is everything. Indeed, a knack for storytelling has again and again proven the hallmark of stellar content marketing campaigns.
Looking for a little inspiration for creative ways to tell a story – your brand’s story? Check out four brands that have nailed storytelling in creative, unexpected ways.
If you use social media as an inbound marketing tool for your business, chances are you have a presence on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. (And if you don’t have one on those three, you probably should.) But there is one you platform might be missing out on. One that has a whopping 300 million monthly users.
Does your content reek of sales pitch?
As we’ve discussed before, when customers get a whiff of content that’s all about you, they run in the other direction. In fact, Forbes columnist Christine Comaford calls “content that’s too branded” the No. 1 mistake marketers make. Content should be natural, objective and unbiased, and provide value to your audience. In other words, don’t make it all about you.
Here some guidelines to follow to avoid the costly mistake of “overbranding”:
Visual learning has been around since before the written word. After all, what were hieroglyphics and cave drawings if not visual storytelling? Thanks to our digital world, we’re no longer confined to telling our story on a piece of rock. But that hasn’t made the use of visuals any less important.
Infographics are an effective way to deliver your content in short, bite-size pieces that are easy to digest and enjoyable to share. Studies reveal that 40% of people respond better to visual information than they do to plain text, and infographics are shown to boost web traffic by 12%. And, since 65% of people are visual learners, it makes sense to appeal to them with pictures as well as words.
Of course, you can’t just randomly slap some pictures on a page and explain them; that’s what scrapbooks are for. Effective infographics require careful thought, strategy and collaboration with designers. When done correctly, they can easily go viral and amplify your content marketing efforts. Let’s look at 11 steps you can take to make your infographics engaging and effective.
Today, everyone’s an author, journalist or publisher, thanks to the web. On Twitter, around 500 million Tweets are sent per day, and approximately 100 hours of video are uploaded on Youtube each minute.
How does reading from a screen affect our concentration, empathy and engagement with what we’re reading? According to conventional wisdom, digital readers have shorter attention spans, prefer to skim low-level content, and retain fewer details about what they read.
For marketers, that has often translated into a preference for short, bite-sized online content.
But a new study from Columbia Journalism Review questions those assumptions — and their findings could change the way you write for online audiences.
In the past, digital marketers and salespeople focused on advertising and cold calls over inbound marketing and content creation. That has changed as buyers have become more empowered in the Information Age. They can use a search engine to perform thorough research before making a purchasing decision — and that’s exactly what they do.
According to Pardot, 72% of buyers will start their research with Google when they’re faced with a problem or particular pain point. In addition, 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before a buyer reaches out to a salesperson. All that time is spent researching and discovering relevant content that will help them make their decision.
Though content is crucial at every stage of the buyer’s journey, content for the awareness stage is arguably the most important. If you aren’t producing valuable top-of-the-funnel content to attract buyers, then you have zero chance of selling to them.
You’ve been using the same B2B lead generation ideas for years. Now that 2019 is almost here, it’s time to switch up how you draw in prospects, take them through the buyer’s journey and convince them to make a purchase.
You can have a great blog that no one reads, a high-quality product that no one buys and a terrific brand that absolutely no one cares about. This is because people don’t care how great what you’re offering is; they care about what makes you different from the competition and how you will best meet their specific needs.
When content farms like Demand Studios, Suite101 and Associated Content soared in popularity a couple of years ago, they thought they had it all figured out: Pay people abysmal rates to churn out “content” that was little more than keywords strung together to support advertisements. In this model, words are merely a commodity, valued only for their ability to get someone to click on the page, but with no real intent to educate, inform, entertain, inspire or accomplish any of myriad goals good writing is meant to do.
