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Do you want a competitive edge in your marketplace? Are you using LinkedIn to research your competitors? In this article, you’ll learn how to use LinkedIn to gather valuable insights about your competitors and use what you learn to grow your own business. Why You Should Research Your Competitors on LinkedIn There are many benefits […]
The post How to Use LinkedIn for Competitor Research appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.
One thing we’ve heard over and over is that logging into social media analytics tools can leave marketers feeling a little lost. Sure you can see the reach and engagement of your posts but how is this really impacting your business?
Social media tools have been great at giving us social media metrics. But they terribly lack at providing us with a comprehensive view of the business. Unless you are running social ads, chances are you find it hard to know how your marketing efforts have influenced sales.
For direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands that invest in social media, the need to understand how social media and sales relate to each other is crucial. Marketers at these brands need to know how their social media strategy is helping the business. To them, social media is not just about getting likes and comments…
but how their social media posts are driving the business forward.
That’s why we are thrilled to introduce the first version of our Shopify integration today. You can now have your social and Shopify data in one single tool and create modern, visual reports with more data about your business.
(Can’t wait to get started? Start an Analyze Premium trial to try the integration right away!)
Our customers use our platform of products to build their brand and connect with their customers online. Analyze, our new analytics product, aims to help you realize the full potential of your brand.
To achieve the best version of your brand, we want to give you:
Currently, social media marketing can feel isolated from the business. You spend time creating content, find the best time to post, and respond to questions on your posts. At the end of the day, you can only report on follower growth, reach, and engagement.
Only if you had more data about your marketing efforts and the business!
When we look at 1,300 top DTC brands, we learned that 87.4 percent of them use Shopify to sell their products.
Shopify provides data that marketers and small business owners often lack in social media tools — sales data. We realized it’s a source of data that could give you a more complete picture of your brand:
Social + sales
“We usually cross reference metrics from Shopify and our social media analytics.”
When we asked our customers how they figure out whether what they are doing on social is worth it, we heard several versions of the quote above. That’s when we realized our customers have a problem we could solve.
With the new Shopify integration, you’ll have your social media and Shopify data in a single place — Analyze. For this first version, we focus on a few key metrics you need and put them in the same dashboard as your social media data.
At the top of your Shopify tab, you can get a quick health check-in on your business. This is built for you to get a sense of your business health at a glance.
One of the metrics you’ll get is your average customer lifetime value. This is an important metric to know because to have a profitable business, you generally want to spend less money on acquiring new customers and retaining them than they spend on your products.
You’ll also get data to help you understand where your sales are coming from and what products are selling well.
Which channel drives the most number of customers or the highest sales?
Which channel brings in the most valuable customers?
Which are my top products, and where are the sales coming from?
This additional data from Shopify in Analyze will give you a better picture of your business than having only social media data.
To make it easier for your reporting, you can add the tables to your reports in Analyze, download them as PDF, and share them with your team. Just like any other tables and charts in Analyze.
For a long time, marketers have struggled to show the impact of social media on the bottom line. Much of this data is not available in social media tools that marketers use to plan, optimize, and report their campaigns. It just felt off that marketers can plan and measure their social media campaigns in one tool but have to find another, often much more complicated, tool to know that the campaigns are selling products.
Now you can report how much sales your social media marketing strategy has generated for the business — using a single tool.
(These numbers do not include orders from customers who saw your social media posts and went to Google to search for your website and buy products. That is much harder to track right now. But you now know, at the minimum, how much sales came directly from your social media profiles and the actual impact is much higher.)
You no longer need to jump between tools to draw the connection between your social media efforts and your sales.
Hannah Pilpel, social project manager at MADE.COM, discovered that customers from organic social have a higher average order value than the site average. You can now see this for your business, too.
Having more data and analytics is essential for realizing the full potential of your brand. It gives you insights to act on and improve your marketing campaigns so that you can grow your brand and your business.
This is just the first version of our Shopify integration, and we are keen to explore more ways to make it more valuable to you. For example, here are some of the areas we have been thinking about:
For now, with your social media and Shopify data together in Analyze, you can already have a better understanding of your marketing and brand.
Give yourself an advantage today.
Google is sending notices to sites that have mobile-first indexing issues.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Businesses battle to appear on page 1 of Google search results. Their goal: Get consumers to visit their website and buy.
But, according to a study by Forbes and Yext, only half of consumers believe brands give accurate information in search results.
And 68% of adults in the U.S. say that trust in a brand has “a great deal” or “a lot” of influence on their decision when making a big purchase, according to another study by SurveyMonkey.
Ranking in Google search results isn’t enough. Your content also needs to quickly create trust.
Lee Odden — international speaker, B2B marketing strategist, and CEO of digital marketing agency Top Rank Marketing — joined AWeber’s FWD: Thinking Show to explain how to earn trust and website traffic with SEO and content marketing.
His approach: Connect with influential people who have attention, credibility, and authority. These influencers should be able to produce and promote content their fans — and your potential customers — will love.
“Consumers trust content from influencers more than content that ranks in search. They even trust influencers more than they trust friends’ opinions,” shares Odden.
Collaborating with influencers on content not only makes your brand easier to find, it increases your credibility. And it’s easy to start, says Odden. “The search terms you want to rank for will be the same keywords you use to find influential partners.”
Watch the episode on-demand to hear more of Lee’s thoughts on earning trust through optimizing your marketing channels.
For more than 20 years, AWeber has supported entrepreneurs and small businesses with powerfully-simple email marketing solutions. Get your free trial today.
The post How to Create Trustworthy Content That People Want to Read appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.
Marketo’s core feature updates indicate the company’s focus on improving API settings and integrations.
Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.
One thing we’ve heard over and over is that logging into social media analytics tools can leave marketers feeling a little lost. Sure you can see the reach and engagement of your posts but how is this really impacting your business?
Social media tools have been great at giving us social media metrics. But they terribly lack at providing us with a comprehensive view of the business. Unless you are running social ads, chances are you find it hard to know how your marketing efforts have influenced sales.
For direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands that invest in social media, the need to understand how social media and sales relate to each other is crucial. Marketers at these brands need to know how their social media strategy is helping the business. To them, social media is not just about getting likes and comments…
but how their social media posts are driving the business forward.
That’s why we are thrilled to introduce the first version of our Shopify integration today. You can now have your social and Shopify data in one single tool and create modern, visual reports with more data about your business.
(Can’t wait to get started? Start an Analyze Premium trial to try the integration right away!)
Our customers use our platform of products to build their brand and connect with their customers online. Analyze, our new analytics product, aims to help you realize the full potential of your brand.
To achieve the best version of your brand, we want to give you:
Currently, social media marketing can feel isolated from the business. You spend time creating content, find the best time to post, and respond to questions on your posts. At the end of the day, you can only report on follower growth, reach, and engagement.
Only if you had more data about your marketing efforts and the business!
When we look at 1,300 top DTC brands, we learned that 87.4 percent of them use Shopify to sell their products.
Shopify provides data that marketers and small business owners often lack in social media tools — sales data. We realized it’s a source of data that could give you a more complete picture of your brand:
Social + sales
“We usually cross reference metrics from Shopify and our social media analytics.”
When we asked our customers how they figure out whether what they are doing on social is worth it, we heard several versions of the quote above. That’s when we realized our customers have a problem we could solve.
With the new Shopify integration, you’ll have your social media and Shopify data in a single place — Analyze. For this first version, we focus on a few key metrics you need and put them in the same dashboard as your social media data.
At the top of your Shopify tab, you can get a quick health check-in on your business. This is built for you to get a sense of your business health at a glance.
One of the metrics you’ll get is your average customer lifetime value. This is an important metric to know because to have a profitable business, you generally want to spend less money on acquiring new customers and retaining them than they spend on your products.
You’ll also get data to help you understand where your sales are coming from and what products are selling well.
Which channel drives the most number of customers or the highest sales?
Which channel brings in the most valuable customers?
Which are my top products, and where are the sales coming from?
This additional data from Shopify in Analyze will give you a better picture of your business than having only social media data.
To make it easier for your reporting, you can add the tables to your reports in Analyze, download them as PDF, and share them with your team. Just like any other tables and charts in Analyze.
For a long time, marketers have struggled to show the impact of social media on the bottom line. Much of this data is not available in social media tools that marketers use to plan, optimize, and report their campaigns. It just felt off that marketers can plan and measure their social media campaigns in one tool but have to find another, often much more complicated, tool to know that the campaigns are selling products.
Now you can report how much sales your social media marketing strategy has generated for the business — using a single tool.
(These numbers do not include orders from customers who saw your social media posts and went to Google to search for your website and buy products. That is much harder to track right now. But you now know, at the minimum, how much sales came directly from your social media profiles and the actual impact is much higher.)
You no longer need to jump between tools to draw the connection between your social media efforts and your sales.
Hannah Pilpel, social project manager at MADE.COM, discovered that customers from organic social have a higher average order value than the site average. You can now see this for your business, too.
Having more data and analytics is essential for realizing the full potential of your brand. It gives you insights to act on and improve your marketing campaigns so that you can grow your brand and your business.
This is just the first version of our Shopify integration, and we are keen to explore more ways to make it more valuable to you. For example, here are some of the areas we have been thinking about:
For now, with your social media and Shopify data together in Analyze, you can already have a better understanding of your marketing and brand.
Give yourself an advantage today.
Most of us grow up with dreams of making it on TV or the local radio with headlines like “Local Man Does Good” or “Neighborhood Woman Breaks World Record”.
Unfortunately, many of us won’t see those dreams become reality — however, as marketers, we can create content that is worthy of making it big.
My team at Fractl creates content with one goal in mind: to produce the most engaging and impactful human experiences on the web. Sometimes, those experiences are shared on traditional media outlets such as radio and television, as well.
To help your brand increase exposure across a variety of traditional media outlets, let’s explore some techniques you can incorporate to take your content to the next level.
Probably one of the most beneficial forms of publicity is traditional radio and the accompanying blog coverage. Radio networks work together and bounce content from site to site. If your work is featured with one local station, the likelihood of natural syndication increases.
Local and radio outreach is a strategy best employed with light-hearted, evergreen content. For instance, a campaign uncovering popular baby names through generations saw coverage on the iHeart Radio network and was a top performer for our client when it came to natural syndication.
The major draw? Babies who are named after the first family, including Ivanka, Melania, and Baron.
Lists of baby names may seem like an exhausted topic, but still, we see new articles every year exposing the top 50 names so new moms can garner inspiration (and know which names to avoid).
Our approach was a bit different. We pored over years of Social Security Administration data to compare name changes over the past 70 years and how pop culture and trends have impacted how we name our children. Throughout our promotions process, this content proved interesting for readers at both the local and national levels.
The main takeaway here is to avoid limiting your content by addressing hot news topics and pressing social issues. Instead, focus on providing interesting, evergreen projects that engage an audience in a lighthearted way.
Some mornings are slow news mornings, especially at the local level. Additionally, most stations enjoy sprinkling a few positive, uplifting, and relatable stories in between all the negative and heartbreaking segments. This is where content marketing strategies prove valuable.
Producing relatable content can be as simple as surveying Americans about their preferences and sorting those results by state and region. That’s exactly what we did for a client looking to build brand exposure and traffic. We surveyed over 2,000 Americans to get their opinions on the best and worst Halloween candies. This study hit a sweet spot; it was a newsworthy topic paired with regional relevance.
It was popular and controversial enough to spark a conversation on a number of regional television news outlets. Supporting Idaho for their love of Almond Joys or disagreeing with Marylanders for their affinity for Nerds proved to be a festive way to ring in the new season.
A similar study by AT&T citing the most popular Halloween costumes in every state gained traction with many local news stations. NBC New York reported their residents would likely go the pop culture route for their costumes, and CI Proud predicted a ton of Mickey Mouse costumes.
Ultimately, collecting regional statistics allows for the opportunity to narrow your outreach efforts and appeal to an audience on a more personal level.
The Today Show’s segment “What’s Trending Today” has covered a number of content marketing studies, and they all have one thing in common: shocking statistics. Obviously, you can’t always predict a study will provide shocking takeaways, but leveraging the ones that do is key.
During the outreach stage, make sure to identify gold when it appears. When our survey of 2,000 drivers across the United States revealed that more than half of drivers pick their noses when they are driving, and 1% say they’ve changed a diaper while behind the wheel, we clearly had a winner. The Today Show discussed their driving confessions and named our client on the air.
When formulating new ideas for your projects, try to ask questions that relate to a common fascination.
For instance, we know the media loves to report on Millennials: habits, trends, disruptions, finances, etc. Creating a survey or study that uncovers some surprising statistics about Millennial cooking habits, let’s say, might be your ticket onto the Today Show. It comes down to finding the right topic, and asking the right questions.
Exposure on traditional media outlets is still one of the best ways to reach your audience. In fact, a majority of Americans claim to respond positively to TV, radio, and newspaper ads. Of course, like any content marketing campaign, the results can be hit-or-miss.
By following some of the trends we see with radio, local, and national television coverage, you can increase your chances for exposure and further engage your audience. Try to create evergreen content, with relatable, regionally-specific data. Also, be sure to identify a major hook.
You’ve likely already hit these marks in recent surveys and projects. Be sure to use what you have and expand your outreach strategy to include local and national stations. Once you see the results, you won’t regret it.
There are a lot of tools out there and a ton of SEO reports.
But when you use them, what happens?
You get lost, right?
Don’t worry, that’s normal (sadly). And maybe one day I will
be able to fix that.
But for now, the next best thing I can do is teach you how to grow your SEO traffic using Ubersuggest. This way, you know exactly what to do, even if you have never done any SEO.
Here we go…
Head over to the Ubersuggest dashboard and
register for a free account.
Once you do that, I want you to click on “Add Your First Project.”
Next, add your URL and the name of your website.
Then pick the main country or city that you do business in. If you are a national business, then type in the country you are in. If you are a local business, type in your city and click “Next.”
If you do business in multiple countries or cities, you can type them in one at a time and select each country or city.
Assuming you have your site connected to Google Search Console, you’ll see a list of keywords that you can automatically track on the left-hand side. Aside from tracking any of those, you can track others as well. Just type in the keywords you want to track in the box and hit the “Enter” key.
After hitting the “Next” button, you will be taken to your dashboard. It may take a minute but your dashboard will look something like this:
Click on the “Tracked Keywords” box and load your website profile.
What’s cool about this report is that you can see your rankings
over time both on mobile and desktop devices. This is important because Google
has a mobile index, which means your rankings are probably slightly different
on mobile devices than desktop.
If you want to see how you are ranking on Google’s mobile index, you just have to click the “Mobile” icon.
The report is self-explanatory. It shows your rankings over time for any keyword you are tracking. You can always add more keywords and even switch between locations.
For example, as of writing this blog post, I rank number 4 on desktop devices for the term “SEO” in the United States. In the United Kingdom, though, I rank number 16. Looks like I need to work on that. 😉
What’s cool about this report is you can drill down on any
keyword and track your rankings over time. For example, here’s what my site
looks like now…
The purpose of this report is to track your SEO progress. If you are heading in the right direction, your rankings should be going up over time.
Sure, some weeks your rankings will be up and other weeks it
will be down, but over time you should see them climb.
Once you have created your first project, it’s time to improve your rankings.
Let’s first start off by going to the “Site Audit” report. In the navigation, click on the “Site Audit” button.
Once you are there, type in your URL and click the “Search” button.
It can take a few minutes to run the report, but once it is
done it will look something like this.
Your goal is to optimize your site for as high as an SEO score as possible. Ideally, you want to be reaching for 90 or higher.
Keep in mind that as you add more pages to your site and it gets bigger, it will be increasingly harder to achieve a 90+ score. So, for sites that have more than a few hundred pages, shoot for a score that is at least 80.
As you can see above, I’m getting close to the 80 mark, so I’ll have to get my team to go in and fix some of my errors and warnings.
When looking at this report, you’ll want to fix your critical errors first, then your warnings if you have time. Eventually, you want to consider fixing the recommendations as well.
Click on “Critical Errors” if you have any. If not, click on the Warnings” option. You’ll see a report that looks something like this:
Your errors are probably going to be different than mine, but your report will look similar.
Click through on the first issue on the report and work your way down. The report sorts the results based on impact. The ones at the top should be fixed first as they will have the highest chance of making an impact on your traffic.
If you aren’t sure of what to do or how to fix the issue, just click on the “What Is This” and “How Do I Fix It” prompts.
Again, you will want to do this for all of your critical
errors and warnings.
Once you do that, go back to the “Site Audit” report and scroll down to where you see your site speed results.
Your goal should be to get an “Excellent” ranking for both mobile and desktop devices. If you are struggling to do this, check out Pagespeed Insights by Google as it will give you a detailed explanation of what to fix.
If you are like me, you probably will need someone to help
you out with this. You can always find a developer from Upwork and pay them 50 to 100 dollars to fix
your issues.
After you fix your errors, you’ll want to double-check to make sure you did them right. Click on the “Recrawl Website” button to have Ubersuggest recrawl your site and double-check that the errors were fixed correctly.
It will take a bit for Ubersuggest to recrawl your website
as it is going through all of your code again.
By now you have probably heard the saying that “content is king.”
In theory, the more content you have, the more keywords you will have on your site and the higher the chance that you’ll rank on Google for more terms.
Of course, the content needs to be of high quality and people have to be interested in that topic. If you write about stuff that no one wants to read about, then you won’t get any traffic.
Now, I want you to go to the “Traffic Analyzer Overview” report.
Put in a competitor’s URL and you will see a report that
looks something like this.
This report shows the estimated monthly visitors your competition is receiving from search engines, how many keywords they are ranking for on page 1 of Google, their top pages, every major keyword they rank for, and the estimated traffic each keyword drives to their site.
I want you to go to the “Top Pages” section and click the button that says “View The Pages That Drive Traffic To This Domain.”
You’ll be taken to the “Top Pages” report.
Here, you will see a list of pages that your competition has on their site. The ones at top are their most popular pages and as you go down the list you’ll find pages that get less and less traffic.
Now I want you to click “View All” under “Estimated Visits” for the top page on your competition’s site.
These are the keywords that the page ranks for.
And you’ll also want to click “View All” under links to see who links to your competition.
Save that list by exporting the results (just click the export button) or by copying them.
I want you to repeat this process for the top 10 to 20 pages for each of your main competitors. It will give you an idea of the keywords that they are going after that drive them traffic.
Next, I want you to click on the “Keywords” navigation link under the “Traffic Analyzer” heading.
You’ll see a list of all of the keywords your competitor ranks for and how much traffic they are getting for those keywords.
This list will give you an idea of the keywords that your
competition is targeting.
Now, by combining the data you saw from the “Top Pages” report and the data you got from the “Keywords” report, you’ll now have a good understanding of the type of keywords that are driving your competition traffic.
I want you to take some of those keywords and come up with
your own blog post ideas.
You can come up with ideas to blog on using a few simple
reports in Ubersuggest.
The first is the “Content Ideas” report. In the navigation bar, click on the “Content Ideas” button.
I want you to type in one of the keywords your competition
is ranking for that you also want to rank for.
For example, I rank for “SEO tips.” If you want to rank for that term, you would type that into the content ideas report and hit the “Search” button.
You’ll then see a list of blog posts that have done well on that topic based on social shares, backlinks, and estimated visits.
It takes some digging to find good topics because ideally, a post should have all 3: social shares, backlinks, and estimated visits.
When you find a good one, click “View All” under “Estimated Visits” to see the keywords that the post ranks for.
If you write a similar post, you’ll want to make sure you include these keywords.
And you’ll want to click “View All” under links to see who links to your competition. Keep track of this as you will use it later. You can do this by copying the list or by clicking on the export button.
You can also get more ideas by going to the keyword ideas report. So, in the navigation bar, click on the “Keyword Ideas” button.
From there, type in keywords related to what your competition ranks for and you will see a list of long-tail suggestions that are similar.
You can also click on the “Related” link in that report to see a bigger list of related keywords.
And you can click on “Questions,” “Prepositions,” and “Comparisons” to see even more keyword and blog post ideas.
Typically, the more search volume a keyword has the more
traffic you’ll get when you write about it.
Now that you have a list of keywords and topic ideas, it’s time for you to write and publish your content.
If you are new to writing blog posts, watch the video below. It breaks down my writing process.
I wish SEO was as simple as fixing errors and writing content based on popular keywords but it isn’t.
Remember how I had you create a list of sites that link to your competition?
You know, the ones you got from the “Top Pages” and “Content Ideas” reports.
I want you to start emailing each of the sites linking to your competition and ask them to link to you. See if someone else is linking to your competition. If they are, it shows you that they don’t mind linking to sites in your space. This means that there is a good chance you can convince them to link to you as well.
You’ll have to browse around their site to find their email. But once you do, send off a personal message explaining why your content will provide value to their readers and how it is different/better than what they are currently linking to.
In addition to that, I want you to go to the “Backlinks” report. In the navigation bar, click on the “Backlinks” option.
In this report, I want you to type in your competitor’s domain. You’ll see a report that looks like this:
You’ll be able to see their total link count, link growth over time, and, most importantly, a list of sites linking to your competition.
Now type in a URL of a blog post that your competition has written and that you know is popular (do this in the search bar). Next to it, in the search bar, change the drop-down to “URL” and click the “Search” button.
Once the report is done loading, you’ll see a new list of links pointing to that specific URL on your competition’s site.
I want you to do the same thing. Reach out to all of those
URLs and ask for a link as well.
When doing this, you’ll find that a lot of people will ignore you but you need to think of it as sales. You need to follow up and try to convince people. The more links you get, the higher your rankings will climb in the long run.
Even if you only convince 5 people out of 100 that you
email, it is still not bad as something is better than nothing.
My goal with Ubersuggest wasn’t to create too many reports, but instead, make the tool easy to use so you can generate more search traffic.
And as your rankings and traffic climb, you’ll see within your Ubersuggest dashboard how things are going.
What’s beautiful about this is that it will crawl your site automatically once you create a project. This way, when new SEO errors appear, Ubersuggest will notify you.
So, are you ready to improve your SEO traffic? Go to Ubersuggest and create a project.
The post A Step-by-Step Guide to Growing Your SEO Traffic Using Ubersuggest appeared first on Neil Patel.
Most of us grow up with dreams of making it on TV or the local radio with headlines like “Local Man Does Good” or “Neighborhood Woman Breaks World Record”.
Unfortunately, many of us won’t see those dreams become reality — however, as marketers, we can create content that is worthy of making it big.
My team at Fractl creates content with one goal in mind: to produce the most engaging and impactful human experiences on the web. Sometimes, those experiences are shared on traditional media outlets such as radio and television, as well.
To help your brand increase exposure across a variety of traditional media outlets, let’s explore some techniques you can incorporate to take your content to the next level.
Probably one of the most beneficial forms of publicity is traditional radio and the accompanying blog coverage. Radio networks work together and bounce content from site to site. If your work is featured with one local station, the likelihood of natural syndication increases.
Local and radio outreach is a strategy best employed with light-hearted, evergreen content. For instance, a campaign uncovering popular baby names through generations saw coverage on the iHeart Radio network and was a top performer for our client when it came to natural syndication.
The major draw? Babies who are named after the first family, including Ivanka, Melania, and Baron.
Lists of baby names may seem like an exhausted topic, but still, we see new articles every year exposing the top 50 names so new moms can garner inspiration (and know which names to avoid).
Our approach was a bit different. We pored over years of Social Security Administration data to compare name changes over the past 70 years and how pop culture and trends have impacted how we name our children. Throughout our promotions process, this content proved interesting for readers at both the local and national levels.
The main takeaway here is to avoid limiting your content by addressing hot news topics and pressing social issues. Instead, focus on providing interesting, evergreen projects that engage an audience in a lighthearted way.
Some mornings are slow news mornings, especially at the local level. Additionally, most stations enjoy sprinkling a few positive, uplifting, and relatable stories in between all the negative and heartbreaking segments. This is where content marketing strategies prove valuable.
Producing relatable content can be as simple as surveying Americans about their preferences and sorting those results by state and region. That’s exactly what we did for a client looking to build brand exposure and traffic. We surveyed over 2,000 Americans to get their opinions on the best and worst Halloween candies. This study hit a sweet spot; it was a newsworthy topic paired with regional relevance.
It was popular and controversial enough to spark a conversation on a number of regional television news outlets. Supporting Idaho for their love of Almond Joys or disagreeing with Marylanders for their affinity for Nerds proved to be a festive way to ring in the new season.
A similar study by AT&T citing the most popular Halloween costumes in every state gained traction with many local news stations. NBC New York reported their residents would likely go the pop culture route for their costumes, and CI Proud predicted a ton of Mickey Mouse costumes.
Ultimately, collecting regional statistics allows for the opportunity to narrow your outreach efforts and appeal to an audience on a more personal level.
The Today Show’s segment “What’s Trending Today” has covered a number of content marketing studies, and they all have one thing in common: shocking statistics. Obviously, you can’t always predict a study will provide shocking takeaways, but leveraging the ones that do is key.
During the outreach stage, make sure to identify gold when it appears. When our survey of 2,000 drivers across the United States revealed that more than half of drivers pick their noses when they are driving, and 1% say they’ve changed a diaper while behind the wheel, we clearly had a winner. The Today Show discussed their driving confessions and named our client on the air.
When formulating new ideas for your projects, try to ask questions that relate to a common fascination.
For instance, we know the media loves to report on Millennials: habits, trends, disruptions, finances, etc. Creating a survey or study that uncovers some surprising statistics about Millennial cooking habits, let’s say, might be your ticket onto the Today Show. It comes down to finding the right topic, and asking the right questions.
Exposure on traditional media outlets is still one of the best ways to reach your audience. In fact, a majority of Americans claim to respond positively to TV, radio, and newspaper ads. Of course, like any content marketing campaign, the results can be hit-or-miss.
By following some of the trends we see with radio, local, and national television coverage, you can increase your chances for exposure and further engage your audience. Try to create evergreen content, with relatable, regionally-specific data. Also, be sure to identify a major hook.
You’ve likely already hit these marks in recent surveys and projects. Be sure to use what you have and expand your outreach strategy to include local and national stations. Once you see the results, you won’t regret it.
Is a billboard an affordable marketing tool for a design firm or copywriter? Don’t laugh it off. I spoke with Bart Bradshaw, host of the Built to Stay podcast, who educated me all about the latest in outdoor advertising. It’s not as expensive as you think and depending on your niche, it could definitely make you stand out. Listen to our companion interview on choosing a niche.