Are yourcontent marketing strategies companies creating value or distaste among consumers?We asked our team of content marketers their biggest pet peeves (as both marketers and consumers) that really set them off and guide them on their own strategies of“things not to do”when creating content.
Mistake #1: Uninspiring subject lines
“Just because I’ve agreed to receive your periodic dispatches doesn’t mean I have the time or desire to read everything you send. Sorry. As a result, the subject line‘January 2020 newsletter’probably won’t draw a click unless I really love your organization. You can help me out, however, with a bone in the subject line: Entice me with a teaser and by all means, use active verbs.”
Kerby Meyers, SmarterCX Contributor
Mistake #2: Quantity over quality
“As a content marketing and SEO expert, my biggest pet peeve is the perception among some executives that crafting successful content is more about quantity than quality, and the lack of understanding all the elements that go into creating a blog post that eventually ranks in the top organic search position.
When content mills were a thing, lots of companies startedcopying the strategy with their own blogs, thinking that this was‘content marketing’. With Google and other search engines getting better at understanding the difference between high-quality URLs and thin content, the companies that followed this old approach are now rightfully losing a massive amount of organic traffic.”
Erik Mathes, SmarterCX Contributor
Mistake #3: Chasing quick wins vs long-term gains
“My biggest—and only—pet peeve in content marketing is when companies chase quick wins rather than long-term gains. We need to treat audiences—and the people tasked with reaching them—as people rather than machines.
One piece of advice that I have for content teams moving into 2020 is to slow down and to focus on quality above quantity. In the digital ecosystem, there tends to be a lot of pressure to emphasize hypergrowth and hyperspeed—to launch campaigns for the sake of launching campaigns.
We need to remember that we’re writing for people, not search engines, campaigns, or robots.”
Ritika Puri, SmarterCX Contributor
Mistake #4: When email is used by other divisions without asking
“As a customer: when I download something and my email is used by other divisions of the company or for what is often many other uses (I actually think this contravenes GDPR but companies still do it). I recently downloaded something from IG and I was absolutely inundated with emails! I unsubscribed but other products from the same group kept sending me emails. I think they should make it clear where the email will be used and by whom.”
Timothy Woods, SmarterCX Contributor
Mistake #5: Creating content just to create it
“As a marketer: My biggest content marketing pet peeve is hiring for content, but not strategy. Time and time again, new clients will come to me asking me to audit why their current content isn’t converting. Or, clients will come looking for a writer to tackle topics they’ve come up with themselves (that their audience might not be searching for or interested in!). It’s like throwing spaghetti at a wall to see if it sticks. Pro tip: it sticks because of the starches, not necessarily because it’s finished cooking! Creating content just to create it won’t benefit any business. A well-planned strategy is what attracts an audience and converts them into customers.”
Erin Ollila, SmarterCX Contributor
Mistake #6: Multiple email follow-ups to unresponded-to pitches
“As a journalist, I get hundreds of pitches from marketers about topics outside of the subjects I typically cover. Most of them I simply ignore, but on occasion I will receive‘did you see my message?’or‘just checking in…again’emails associated with pitches I didn’t respond to. One of these is bad enough, but two or three demonstrates you don’t know who you’re pitching to, haven’t put in the time to research your market, and guarantees your address will be added to my spam list.”
Benjamin Hunting, SmarterCX Contributor
Mistake #7: Content marketing as advertising
“Clients come to me within a week or month of embarking on a new content marketing strategy, wondering why their numbers are not shooting upwards and towards the right. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had to explain that content marketing is a long game that will reward handsomely in the long run, but only after months of consistently publishing and building trust in your brand. Content marketing is not advertising, period.”
Daniel Tay, SmarterCX Contributor
Mistake #8: Trying to trick me with the subject line
“My biggest content marketing pet peeve is when company emails try to trick me into thinking it is personalized or even that it is a reply by using“Re:”as the start of the subject. It doesn’t feel genuine, and it makes me not want to read your email when I have figured out your‘strategy’.”
Jodi Warner, SmarterCX Editor
Mistake #9: Telling the customer what to do
“My biggest content marketing pet peeve is using commands in messaging and phrases, like‘companies today need to…’and‘to get ahead, you must…’I’ve seen messages like this used by every tech company I’ve worked with, and it drives me crazy!
As content marketers, we’re not telling our audience what to do. We’re giving them information to make an informed decision. When we take lessons from our favorite literature, movies, etc. and show instead of tell, we set ourselves apart and above the content marketing norm.”
Consumers expect brands to know who they are and create compelling experiences for them. In fact, 63% of consumers said they’d think morepositively of a brand if itscontentwas more valuable, interesting or relevant and 59% of customers say that personalization influences their shopping decisions. Furthermore, according to a Forrester Research, Inc. study, 77%of the consumers surveyed stated that they have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides apersonalized service or experience.
Investing in Loyalty for Data Collection
Brands need to know who their customers are and what they’re interested in. Loyalty programs that capture data across all channels help to form a 360 view of customers. Loyalty programs sit on the front lines of customer data collection and for many brands, particularly CPG companies, that do not have a direct relationship with customers, loyalty programs may be to the only source of data collection.
By leveraging customer data captured in a multichannel loyalty solution, brands can make personalized recommendations, offer relevant promotions, and upsell and cross sell relevant products or services to consumers.
Loyalty Program Tactics and Customer Insights
A benefit to engagement-based loyalty programs is that they provide brands with the opportunity to capture rich sets of transactional and non-transactional data.
By incorporating activitiesacross all channelsand touchpoints, brands can collect a great deal of insight into who their customers are.
Registration
When a customer registers for a loyalty program, the brand can collect foundational customer data such as email address, birthday and location in exchange for points. This information means that the brand can send the customer email communications, target them with location specific offers, and surprise and delight with birthday promotions.
Content engagement
By incentivizing loyalty members to engage with branded content in exchange for points, brands can gauge which topics resonate best with their customers and target them with promotions related to the product or service they just read about in a blog post or watched in a YouTube video.
Points for purchase
Brands can incentivize loyalty members to earn points for each transaction. The information captured tells a brand about the products customers purchase across different product categories, at which locations and whether online or in-store. For example, Colorescience Lasting Rewards program provides members with product recommendations based on transaction history combined with profile information.
Surveys
Another point earning activity that captures useful customer data is surveys. By asking members to complete surveys based on their personal style, preferences or habits, brands can learn everything about their customers from their skin tone to their favorite color to how often they visit a brand in-store. This information can be used to target the customer with specific products and promotions.
Event Engagement
Brands can invite loyalty members to member-only events, capture their attendance and invite them to similar future events. The brand can also start to identify whether there is a correlation between members who attend an event and order specific products.
Social Media Engagement
Brands can incentivize loyalty members to connect their social media accounts to their loyalty program and share brand content in exchange for points. This allows brands to not only track members’ social media presence, but also identify social media influencers and reward those that engage most heavily.
Refer-a-Friend
When brands incentivize members for referring their friends and family to the brand, this helps expand the membership base and capture the referral’s age, location, and contact information.
Redemption
Based on how frequently a customer has completed activities as part of the loyalty program, the brand can offer the customer a catalog of rewards from which to redeem. Redemptions can give a better idea of a consumer outside of their purchase history. Rewards such as a sweepstakes or an experiential reward can reveal a consumer’s priorities and interests. For example, Verizon tracks which rewards customers find most appealing, from free coffee to tickets concerts and sporting events to once-in-a-lifetime meet and greets with famous artists and athletes. This gives Verizon deep insight into its customers’ hobbies, interests, likes and dislikes. As Verizon learns what interests their customers, they give them more of what they want.
Segmenting Customers to Improve Relevancy
Based on the data gleaned from these loyalty program activities, brands can begin to start segmenting their customers.Segmentationallows brands to group customers based on where they fall in the product life cycle and how they engage with the brand. Brands can group customers based on all known data to deliver personalized activities, rewards, and brand experiences.
Using Data to Drive Personalized Brand Experiences
Through data capture and segmentation, brands can start to provide compelling brand experiences for their customers through meaningful communications, relevant promotions and personalized rewards.
Data might be key to your campaigns, but are you managing it correctly? Drawing the proper insights and taking the proper actions on it? Find out how to “Go Further with Data Management.”
from Oracle Blogs | Oracle Marketing Cloud https://ift.tt/32uAMje
via IFTTT
Former CEO of Tesco, Sir Terry Leahy, credits the company’s loyalty program, Clubcard, as the key reason the company was able exceed the performance of its two biggest competitors. Using loyalty data, Tesco was able to make better data-driven decisions.
“It was absolutely transformational for the business,” he said. “We could treat customers as individuals. And we could learn what they were interested in, what their behaviors were, and we could tailor and target all of their marketing so that it was relevant to that individual consumer.”
Successful loyalty programs are no longer just a brand differentiator, they’re also a valuable source of customer data. Loyalty programs sit on the front lines of customer data collection and for many brands, particularly CPG companies that do not have a direct relationship with customers, loyalty programs may be to the only source of data collection.
Not only will this data tell you about what your customer wants from your brand and why they purchase and engage with you, but the insight gained from a loyalty program is more relevant and accurate than a third-party data source and can tell a company so much more about where to invest their time and money, and where to tweak their strategies to grow their business.
Let’s take a look at some of the areas where loyalty data can drive effective business decision making.
Make better merchandising decisions
Using data from a loyalty program, retail brands for example, can make informed decisions about price, promotion, and product selection. Brands have the ability to drill down to SKU-level data and understand the products their best customers are purchasing, even to the frequency. Using loyalty data, brands can personalize product and discount offers to improve the customer experience and drive sales.
Create better in-store shopping experiences
This data can also be used to help drive better in-store experiences. Knowing the transaction history of customers enables brands to create a more personalized in-store experience. An example of a brand that uses data to provide better in-store shopping experiences is Nordstrom. By using sensors and Wi-Fi signals, the company tracks who comes to their stores, how long they spend and which parts of the store they visit. They have also installed interactive touchscreens in changing rooms in select stores to allow customers to order products and view stock online.
Make smarter cross sell and partnership decisionsCPG and consumer goods brands using receipt scan as part of their loyalty program have access to location and total basket data. Access to information on the additional items purchased by a customer provides CPGs with greater visibility into the persona of their customers. This provides CPG brands with valuable data on opportunities where they have opportunity to cross sell oreven partner with other brands. This data also helps supermarkets and retailers optimize store layout for better in-store customer experiences that maximize profitability. For example, if a supermarket’s loyalty program identifies the trend that customers regularly purchase potato chips with beer, they could maximize the likelihood of the purchase of both items by stocking them in close proximity.Create stronger competitive strategies
Brands that leverage loyalty data to make better business decisions are already helping set their brand apart from the competition. In today’s competitive landscape where brands are only as valuable as the service they provide, brands have a major opportunity to win customers through creating personalized experiences. This means demonstrating an understanding of a customer’s needs and wants by leveraging data to target customers with the right product recommendations and promotions. For example, Tarte’s “tarte <3 rewards” loyalty program captures data about their members which can be used to make relevant product recommendations. This provides customers with a custom service that not only makes the customer feel valued, but also helps the brand introduce new products to an engaged customer.
Additionally, adding the option to write reviews as a point earning loyalty program activity also provides brands with crucial feedback about the quality of products and services and often, how these compare to the competition.
Decide how to spend marketing budget
Brands can makesmarter decisions about what to spend their marketing budget on, and even save costs by being more targeted with their approach. Communications and promotions are more relevant and therefore more effective in engaging customers. Brands are also able to determine by looking at the loyalty data based on incentivized engagement activities how customers interact with their brand. For example, if customers are very active on social media, brands can leverage this data to spend more on social media marketing.
The benefits of adopting a loyalty program as a source of customer data insight is incredibly valuable for any brand. Insights can be leveraged to improve inventory management and merchandising strategy. It can help brands compete and provide the most relevant and meaningful experiences for customers, as well as increase sales, loyalty and engagement.
Standing out isn’t easy. Being remembered is even more difficult. Modern marketing is a digital sea teeming with messages. Audiences find themselves bombarded with thousands of marketing messages every day, and you, as a digital marketer, are constantly jostling and fighting for attention.
Tactile marketing automation can help. It involves physical marketing offers being triggered by audience behaviors. It utilizes direct mail pieces that are delivered using the same marketing automation logic you would have with emails and other digital content. If someone shows interest in your brand in some way—they sign up for something, click onto something—they receive a direct mail piece. These direct mail pieces are branded and personalized—and meant to make a difference.
Receiving something physical—something that you can hold in your hands—has become something of a rare occurrence nowadays. However, when it does happen, it stands out. It adds a nice touch. It makes people remember it.
Of course, this isn’t to say that you should throw out digital marketing tactics that allow you to get more done more quickly and keep up with audiences and the competition. This means mixing in a few direct mail offers with your digital marketing spice things up and get the best of both worlds.
Recently, Oracle CX Marketing and PFL, a marketing technology company that provides sales enablement and direct marketing automation solutions, teamed up to take a closer look at Tactile Marketing Automation that included:
What is it?
How do you benefit?
What does it have in common with digital marketing?
“Never despise small beginnings, and don’t belittle your own accomplishments. Remember them and use them as inspiration as you go on to the next thing. When you venture outside your comfort zone, wherever the starting point may be, it’s kind of a big deal.” – Chris Guillebeau
Our guest today is Chris Guillebeau. Chris started the World Domination Summit in Portland, which is in it’s 10th and final year in 2020. He visited every country in the world before turning 35. Chris is a New York Times bestselling author and has written several books including The Art of Non-Conformity, The $100 Startup and 100 Side Hustles. Chris is also the host of the incredibly popular Side Hustle School podcast, which has now published over 1000 episodes.
Listen to the episode:
Subscribe to The Fizzle Show in your favorite podcast player:
“When it comes to data, simplify. Become an essentialist. Get beneath the data to the essence. Look for patterns. Patterns transform info into wisdom.”
— Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS Institute
Not too long ago, the aunt of a prominent Haitian political figure was kidnapped and held for a $150,000 ransom demand. Hostage negotiator Chris Voss managed to convince the kidnappers to release the hostage for just $1471 dollars and a CD player. It’s a pretty incredible (true) story.
So how did he do it?
In this video, Flint McGlaughlin explains Voss(s) secret, pointing out three lessons that business owners, marketers — and anyone else who needs to negotiate a deal — can learn to increase conversion.
Remember, the goal of a webpage is to win a yes. A sale is simply a big yes. It is the sum total of a series of smaller yes(s) the customer makes while interacting with your business.
Just as Voss knew that one small “no” in the negotiation process could put the safety of the hostage in danger, we should be aware that a single “no” anywhere in the customer journey process can jeapardize the sale.
Watch the video to get the macro YES.
If you would like your own webpage diagnosed on one of our upcoming YouTube Live sessions, you can send your website info through this form, and we’ll try to fit it in.
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.
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.
Step #2: Fixing your SEO errors
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.
Step #3: Competitor analysis
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.
Step #4: Come up with 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.
Step #5: Promotion
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.
Conclusion
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.
