Seth Godin once said: We don’t have an information shortage, we have an attention shortage. Seth certainly gets it … probably had it down before anyone else. What may you be asking? The concept of what it takes for Godin content success stories, of course. Secrets? Probably not. But certainly essential for success.
Content marketing tactics such as blog posts, feature articles, optimized website copy, white papers, social media content, and press releases move consumers along a specific path.
Content marketing generates awareness of your brand, product, or service; inspires consumers to engage and consider you; converts them into leads and sales, and creates advocates. Lots to gain, yes?
Study more: How to Frame Marketing Messages for Optimum Engagement
Generating a high number of content shares on social media is key to overcoming engagement obstacles for a number of reasons:
Godin content success stories … social shares amplify your content
No kidding, right? Although the organic effectiveness of most social channels for amplification has declined over the years (thanks to filtered news feeds), social media can still be a substantial source of referral traffic.
Godin content success stories … social shares show social proof
Social proof is key to proving the credibility of your content, which causes a bit of a “chicken or the egg” situation: you need social shares to generate social proof, yet people won’t share your post unless they know it’s from a credible source.
The best way to get around this is to provide valuable content in a well-optimized content experience (more on that below).
Social shares impact SEO
The connection between social signals and search engine ranking is indirect but important. The key thing to know is that if your content is good, people will share it increases the likelihood that you’ll generate links, which can drive some serious SEO juice.
So, social shares have a ton of great benefits in addition to being a key way to measure content engagement. But why aren’t people sharing your content on social? Let’s take a closer look.
Seth Godin showed how content marketing exposes consumers to your brand, engages potential customers, and converts them into leads and sales.
The following are his recommendations for ensuring the success of an online content marketing strategy that even small businesses can successfully implement today:
How to become a content creator … start with the customer
Self-serving and promotional content turns off readers. You’ll usually get only get one chance. Focus on offering educational, entertaining, and inspiring content.
Godin content success stories … do your homework
Seth recommends starting with a plan and process for researching the market. This will provide many ideas for developing compelling, relevant content of interest to the market’s customers.
Brian Carter and the Carter group are one of my favorite experts. Check them out often to do good homework.
Godin content success stories … engage the customer
Seth Godin’s best content marketing strategy uses the staff to stay in touch with your best customers.
You definitely must understand who needs what – and when. Takes considerable effort but it is absolutely essential.
Content personalization
Content must be personalized to increase its consumption and influence. It must inspire the actions you desire.
Your goal? Get the right information detail to the right decision maker on a just-in-time basis.
Timeliness
Nothing beats timeliness in terms of the value of information. Timely insights score big with your content consumers. Stay on top of your market and continually refine your ability to report on what is going on now.
Content marketing pillars … original thinking
Content readers are searching for new ideas not rehash. They value original thinking highly. Offer it. Create well-conceived original themes and content.
Brian Carter and the Carter group are one of my favorite sources of expertise. Here is his recommendation to get the best from your original ideas:
Successful digital marketers test a lot of ideas. Which means they come up with a lot of ideas. Then have the discipline to go through multiple tests. It requires both creativity and organization.
Successful content marketing examples … simplicity and clarity
Does your content meaning jump out to the reader? Can they get the meaning easily without deep thought? Simplicity in understandability and readability are essential factors that will drive your content’s success.
Examine your current in-house capabilities against your needs. Invest in leading-edge production tools and capabilities that will help your productivity and creative thinking. Form partnerships to further build out abilities. And don’t forget about your delivery networks.
Gain trust
Content marketing faces the same reader scrutiny and skepticism as traditional advertising. Being genuinely helpful is the only way to engage prospects to gain their trust and build strong relationships.
Don’t think you can execute ‘drive-by’ content that will succeed. Plan and refine continuously. Use analytics and reliable tracking tools to know what is working best and follow these paths.
This is your time to create successful content marketing. With good continuity and persistence helpful, relevant content will be able to develop lasting relationships with your customers. Lead with initiative and own the moment. Dive in today and notice how much your business improvements grow.
The bottom line
One of Seth’s core tenets is that marketing is no longer merely the work of giant organizations with giant budgets. That in fact, it is possible to spread an idea with care, guts, and effort, not just with money.
We want small businesses to see that they could be marketers too.
Well, that’s no longer a problem. In fact, it’s swung so far the other way that we have a new problem.
When marketing was expensive, it was done with care. Not only by committees that worked hard to keep things consistent but by creators who thought deeply about their long-term reputation.
Today, because noise is everywhere, we’re all surrounded by a screaming horde, an open-outcry marketplace of ideas where the race to be heard appears to be the only race that matters.
And so subtlety flies out the window, along with a desire to engage for the long haul. Just a troop of gorillas, all arguing over the last remaining banana.
It turns out that there’s a useful response… to ignore them. To stick to the work, to the smallest possible audience, to build something worth talking about.
What actually works in a noisy environment isn’t more noise—it’s the challenging work of earning the benefit of people telling people.
We don’t need more hustle. We need more care and generosity.
So, remember this simple fact. Stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.
Let your content marketing success be your difference maker as Seth Godin recommends.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your marketing strategies? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Seth Godin certainly gets it … probably had it down before anyone else. What may you be asking? My top SEO strategies are what creates content marketing success, of course. Secrets? Probably not. But certainly essential for success.
We don’t have an information shortage; we have an attention shortage.
Content marketingtactics such as; blog posts feature articles, optimized websitecopy, white papers, social media content and press releases. They are what move consumers along a specific path. Content marketing generates awareness of your brand, product or service. It inspires consumers to engage and consider you. It converts them into leads and sales and creates advocates. Lots to gain, yes?
More to learn: Press Coverage … 9 Actionable Ways to Get Good Coverage
Discover how content marketing exposes consumers to your brand, engages potential customers, and converts them into leads and sales. The following are our recommendations for ensuring the success of an online content marketing strategy. A strategy that even small businesses can successfully implement today.
My top SEO strategies … influence marketing
There is nothing more valuable than contact with people who already have popular websites. Do not try to ask them to promote you. The better option is to some ego-bait stuff (like interview) with them then ask them for a guest blog.
In-depth articles
Forget about writing average blog posts. Instead of this write some 10X stuff – 10X Content is the Future.
Combine techniques
It is a mix of skills you already know but from your perspective. For example, I used to check the volume of keywords through Google PPC and Bing PPC program then make a new content map strategy.
Competitors
Tools designed for spying on your competitors cover just 50% of this job. Check every post, comment and article your competitors push. This way you can measure what strategy could be fruitful for your business.
Content
Not just SEO’d and unique but also useful. Your content should be shared and liked. Your goal here is to be noticed and mentioned. You need to receive as much attention as possible.
Promotion
No matter how good your content is, you won’t get any benefit from it unless you promote it. Hard. Remember: 99% of perspiration and 1% of inspiration.
Content comes first
A website with brilliant content can do great with or without SEO. A website with bad content will not survive with or without SEO. Note that a website with good content can become even better with SEO!
So, what is considered good content?
SEO strategies and techniques … original content
(articles, text, images, videos, presentations, infographics, comments, etc.) No copies or re-writes of existing articles.
Content published on your website first
Even if it’s your content, if you have already published it on another website then it’s not good for your site.
Content that includes text as well
Try to have text to accompany your non-text content. For example, if you post videos on your website, try to add a text description as well. If you add images, try to describe in words what the image is all about.
Content that is well researched
Users don’t want to read quickly prepared posts and neither do search engines. If you are writing about a certain topic or answering a question, make sure that what you write is justified and covers both sides of a story. Long articles are proven to rank better than short articles.
Posting frequency
Two things are important when it comes to posting frequency. First is to have fresh content on your website and second to establish a publishing strategy and stick to it.
Keyword research
Keyword research is the main driver of successful SEO. To improve your search engine ranking, you’ll need first to analyze keywords that are relevant to your industry.
Sound link building
It’s simple: high-quality link building produces greater results.
Creating quality content
Don’t let poor content affect your site’s search engine rank. It’s vital that you offer engaging and useful information to keep your visitors coming back.
When you go about implementing SEO strategies ( to guarantee a favorable search engine ranking), try following these methods to improve your ranking.
Content marketing strategy
Every website should have a content strategy focused around your top keywords. When you create content such as blog posts, videos, whitepapers, research reports and webinars, it gives people something to link to. Also, the content you create can rank by itself in the search engines.
For example, if you write a blog post on “How to Pick an SEO Company,” there is a possibility it will rank for some of the keywords you use in the title and the body post. This is especially true if the post gets linked to from other websites or shared a lot on social media. It also helps if your website, as a whole, already has significant high-quality links.
This results in high domain authority, which translates into better rankings for all of your content. Also, regular content creation shows Google that your website is alive and active. By sending this fresh content signal to Google on a continual basis, it will result in better rankings for your website as a whole.
Generate quality backlinks
Having an influencer and content marketing strategy will help you develop backlinks to your website. It is also important to actively seek ways to get people to link to you. Some of the best ways to do this are to write for a large publication, do industry interviews, and recommend your powerful content to people who matter.
Also, you can also use tools like Majestic SEO to see who is linking to your competitors. Once you identify the links to your competitor’s sites, you can analyze these links and learn how they got them. This will pave the way for the implementation of a similar strategy for your website. For example, did they donate to a charity causing the charity to link to their site? You can do the same thing.
Be mobile-friendly
In 2015, there was a major Google update known as Mobilegeddon. This meant that if you did not have a mobileversion of your website by April 21, 2015, you lost a significant amount of your rankings in the mobile version of the Google search listings.
Keep studying: 19 Top Marketing Initiatives We Should Be Discussing
So your website needs to be mobile-ready. There are three types of accepted options for a mobile site in Google’s eyes. The first is a responsive design. The second is being set up on a mobile subdomain or use dynamic serving. And finally, Google also now ranks websites higher that apply SEO for their apps. So if you have an app, make sure you are taking the time to implement application SEO.
Move to HTTPS, a secure site
The “S” in HTTPS stands for security, and if your URL leads with HTTPS (Example Domain) instead of HTTP (Example Domain), then your website is secure. Google wants you to move your site to HTTPS so badly that they are now giving a ranking boost to websites that are secure. As we moved into 2016, we started seeing many new websites transferring to HTTPS.
Need some help in finding ways to grow your customers?
Such as creativeideas to help the differentiation with potential customers? Or perhaps finding ways to work with other businesses?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of collaborative innovation. And put it to good use in adapting to changes in your business environment.
It’s up to you to keep improving your learning and experience with innovation and creativity efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
More reading on social media marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Seth Godin was quoted as saying: We don’t have an information shortage, we have an attention shortage. Seth certainly gets it … probably had it down before anyone else. What you may be asking? The concept of what it takes for content marketing success, of course. Secrets? Probably not. But certainly essential for success.
Content marketing tactics such as blog posts, feature articles, optimized website copy, white papers, social media content, and press releases move consumers along a specific path. Content marketing generates awareness of your brand, product or service; inspires consumers to engage and consider you; converts them into leads and sales, and creates advocates. Lots to gain, yes?
Discover how content marketing
exposes consumers to your brand, engages potential customers, and converts them
into leads and sales. The
following are our recommendations for ensuring the success of an online content marketing strategy that
even small businesses can successfully implement today:
Influence
marketing
There is nothing more valuable than contact with people who already have popular website. Do not try to ask them to promote you, better option is to some ego-bait stuff (like interview) with them then ask them for guest blog.
Are you one that believes that creativity can be learned? We are among that group. We also believe in suggestions for innovative thinking can boost team creativity through effective collaboration. Through a series of sparks and not a single flash of insight. Certainly our way of thinking on influence marketing.
In-depth articles
Forget
about writing average blog posts. Instead of this write some 10X stuff – 10X Content is the
Future.
Combine techniques
It is a mix of skills you already know but from your perspective. For example, I used to check the volume of keywords trough Google PPC and Bing PPC program then make a new content map strategy.
SEO strategy plan … competitors
Tools
designed for spying on your competitors cover just 50% of this job. Check every
post, comment and article your competitors push. This way you can measure what
strategy could be fruitful for your business.
SEO
strategy example … content
Not
just SEO’d and unique but also useful. Your content should be shared and liked.
Your goal here is to be noticed and mentioned and receive as much attention as
possible.
Promotion
No matter how good your content is, you won’t get any benefit from it unless you promote it. Hard. Remember 99% of perspiration and 1% inspiration.
Content comes first
A
website with brilliant content can do great with or without SEO, a website with
bad content will not survive with or without SEO, a website with good content
can become even better with SEO!
So,
what is considered good content?
Original Content (articles, text, images, videos, presentations, infographics, comments, etc.) – No copies or re-writes of existing articles
Content published on
your website first – Even if it’s your own content,
if you have already published it on another website then it’s not good for your
site.
Content that includes text as well – Try to have text to accompany your non-text content. For example, if you post videos on your website try to add a text description as well. If you add images try to describe in words what the image is all about.
Content that is well researched – Users don’t want to read quickly prepared posts and neither does search engines. If you are writing about a certain topic or answering a question make sure that what you write is justified and covers both sites of a story. Long articles are proven to rank better than short articles.
Posting frequency – 2 things are important when it comes to posting frequency.
The first is to have fresh content on your website and second to establish a publishing strategy and stick to it.
Keyword
research
–
is the main driver of successful SEO. In order to improve your search engine
ranking, you’ll need to first analyze keywords that are relevant to your
industry.
Sound
link building
–
it’s simple: High-quality link building produces greater results.
Creating
quality content
–
Don’t let poor content affect your site’s search engine rank. It’s vital that
you offer engaging and useful information to keep your visitors coming back.
When
you go about implementing SEO strategies –and in order to guarantee a
favorable search engine ranking–try following these methods to improve your spot
in SERPs.
Content-marketing
strategy
Every website should have a content strategy focused on your top keywords. When you create content such as blog posts, videos, whitepapers, research reports, and webinars, it gives people something to link to. In addition, the content you create can rank by itself in the search engines.
For example, if you write a blog post on “How to Pick an SEO Company,” there is a possibility it will rank for some of the keywords you use in the title and in the body post, especially if the post gets linked to from other websites or shared a lot on social media. It also helps if your website as a whole already has significant-high-quality links.
This
results in high domain authority, which translates into better rankings for all
of your content. In addition, regular content creation shows Google that your
website is alive and active. By sending this fresh content signal to Google on
a continual basis, it will result in better rankings for your website as a
whole.
SEO
strategy plan … generate quality backlinks
Having
an influencer and content marketing strategy will help you develop backlinks to
your website, but it is also important to actively be seeking ways to get
people to link to you. Some of the best ways to do this are to write for a
large publication, do industry interviews and recommend your powerful content
to people who matter.
In
addition, you can also use tools like Majestic SEO to see who is linking to
your competitors. Once you identify the links to your competitor’s sites, you
can analyze these links, learn how they got them and implement a similar
strategy for your website. For example, did they donate to a charity causing
the charity to link to their site? You can do the same thing.
Be
mobile-friendly
In
2015, there was a major Google update known as Mobilegeddon. This meant that if
you did not have a mobile version of your website by April 21, 2015, you lost a
significant amount of your rankings in the mobile version of the Google search
listings.
So your website needs to be mobile-ready. There are three types of accepted options for a mobile site in Google’s eyes: responsive design, being set up on a mobile subdomain or use dynamic serving. Google also now ranks websites higher that apply SEO for their apps. So if you have an app, make sure you are taking the time to implement application SEO.
The bottom line
Since as much as 90% of what we learned in a life-time always come to us via visual cues, we should constantly enhance our perceptual sensitivity to the environment, according to information scientists.
So, more than 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci was right when he said, use all our senses, especially our sense of sight. Our power of observation and imagination depends on it. Productive thoughts often have their origins in the combinatorial play and dynamics of sensory inputs from environmental cues.
In my view, our thinking cap is often governed by how far we can stretch our power of vision and imagination.
Need some help in finding ways to grow
your customers? Such as creative
ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers? Or perhaps finding
ways to work with other businesses?
So
what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only
the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the
effectiveness of collaborative innovation. And put it to good use in adapting
to changes in your business environment.
It’s
up to you to keep improving your learning and experience with innovation and
creativity efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor
may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that
it is within you already.
All
you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day
you learn and apply new lessons.
Try.
Learn. Improve. Repeat.
When things are not what you want them
to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Are
you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself
and your team?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Check out these additional articles on business and its performance from our library: