Black History

What is Content Marketing?

Companies use content marketing strategies in order to attract the attention of potential new customers and then retain them long enough to gain their business.

These strategies are not simply producing content but creatively weaving content in a way to make it interesting.

Here is a list of steps you want to follow before you start implementing content marketing in your moving business:

Designate someone to be in charge of your content marketing
Define the mission or purpose of your marketing
Publish daily or at least very regularly
Publish content that is popular with modern culture to gain audience attention
Choose between using a branded or unbranded content hub
Optimize subscriber building
Implement Content Marketing ROI to determine your engagement and reachability
Once you have looked at these steps, you can look at several content marketing examples of techniques to use for your moving company.


Content Marketing Examples

When implementing content marketing techniques for your business there are many ways to creatively draw attention. Let’s look at 10 examples of content marketing techniques you can use.

1. Blogging

Blogging is a great starting point for content marketing. It allows you to draw attention to your social media presence and attract followers. Here are a few blogs of companies that are successful:

Buffer
Hubspot
Rip Curl
Write an article about several things that stand out about your moving company and title it something like “5 Reasons Our Moving Company is Unique.”

2. SEO through Social Media

Social media platforms are incredibly important when marketing for your business. Followers and visitors who share your content generate more traffic for you by indirectly helping your SEO search rankings.

An example of this technique is Lush cosmetics. Lush encourages social media users to post pictures or videos of their products with hashtags for Lush cosmetics which puts their products in front of many more potential customers.

By implementing SEO tactics on their social media platforms, they have generated over 4 million followers!



3. Video Content

Consider driving awareness for your brand through video ads. YouTube is the ideal platform for video ads and a great example of a company that used this strategy is Hootsuite.

They took the popular show “Game of Thrones” and grabbed the attention of viewers to weave this topic into their brand. They titled their video “A Game of Social Thrones” and then proceeded to tell a relatable story.

4. Images

Images with the fewest words possible tend to be the most powerful. Instagram is a great platform example for using images to generate business.

A perfect example of a company that uses top-notch photography techniques when marketing their products is Rolex. This iconic watch brand relays the timelessness of their timepieces through pictures that emanate quality.

5. Pithy Slogans

You want to designate a creative person or hire someone specifically to come up with a creative saying consumers can associate with your brand. A great place to find someone for the job is Upwork.com.

Here is a list of several companies with incredibly successful slogans:

Nike: “Just Do it!”
KFC: “It’s finger-lickin’ good”
Dunkin’ Doughnuts: “America runs on Dunkin’”
Coca-Cola: “Open Happiness”
McDonalds: “I’m lovin’ it”
If you can hire someone to come up with a witty saying that encapsulates your business the way creative writers wrote ones for these successful business examples, then they are worth their weight in gold!

6. Create an App

Charmin has a great reputation of incorporating humor into their ads but that’s not all they have done to build their success.

Another one of their successful marketing strategies is their development of the “Sit or Squat” app. This app allows people to find the nearest and cleanest public bathrooms to their location.

So far, their app has boasted over 100,000 downloads!

7. Resources and Ebooks

Simply Business is an insurance firm located in the UK. Sounds boring right? Wrong. They actually produce ebook guides and resource tips for other small businesses from event planning to local moving companies.

One example they’ve written is “The small business guide to Facebook.” They have generated thousands of shares and likes from their customer audience, boosting their company visibility and driving traffic to their site.

8. Personalization

It’s basically guaranteed you have heard of Coke’s “Share a Coke” campaign unless you have been living under a rock. Coke targeted consumers with a personalization tactic.

The reason this campaign was so successful was that its products incorporated 150 of the most popular names on the packaging. The emotional connection between buyers and the coke products are what made the bottles fly off the shelves.

9. Infographics

People generally are in love with reliable data displayed in a simple manner. These data report images are shared by social media users all the time.

Shutterstock is an example of a company that uses infographics. Since their business consists of images, they have created a resource that anyone can use called a creative trends report.



10. Relatable Humor

Does anyone else watch the Superbowl just for the Geico Car Insurance commercials? Geico is the perfect example of a company that could be considered a boring service but uses humor to make its company anything but boring.

Not only do they incorporate humor in their commercials, but they employ slant humor between their name and their mascot. In some dialects “Geico” can be the pronunciation of the word “gecko” and by associating their mascot of a lizard with their name, they achieve the goal of capturing your memory.

Now that you’ve read about many examples you can implement in your content marketing plan, you are ready to start your content marketing strategy.

Standing Out in the Crowd

At the end of the day, you want to choose content marketing examples for your moving business that appeal to people through emotion (telling powerful stories), personalization when possible (like Share A Coke), and honesty (gaining consumer trust).

Thanks for reading and be sure to check out the rest of our blog for other business tips and strategies!

Did you know that the open rate for SMS is nearly 98%?

Because SMS can offer such incredible open rates, it can be one of the best ways to reach your target audience. But if you want to use SMS to market your business, you may have doubts about where to begin.

You might be unsure of how to get the phone numbers for your campaigns. You may also worry about the kind of messages you should send people, once you have their phone number.

his post aims to provide you with some clarity on how SMS marketing works. Once you’ve read this post, you’ll be able to comfortably answer the question “What is SMS marketing?”



Let’s begin!

What Is SMS marketing?

SMS marketing is a means of marketing that’s based on you sending text messages to people. SMS (short message service) is just another way to describe a text message, and the two terms are interchangeable.

This method of marketing works well, as people carry phones with them everywhere they go. This then makes it easy for you to reach your target audience, no matter where they are.

Additionally, a text message often demands more attention than an email. This is usually down to the fact that not many other companies are using SMS marketing to contact customers.

It’s also worth noting that the notification for a text message often differs to the notification for an email.

SMS notifications are often more audible and can cause the phone to vibrate, whereas emails might not allow for this to happen. Following this, SMS marketing can produce better levels of engagement. That’s because people will quickly check their phone, upon receiving a promotional text message.

Is there an intersection between content marketing and local SEO for B2B businesses? That’s what we want to explore in this piece. Google and Bing have leaned a lot into local SEO on their search engine results pages. It’s become a lot easier for local businesses to get a high placement on SERPs than in the past.

At first glance, local SEO might only seem like a B2C thing. The point of local search is to help the public find things nearby that relate to their interests. For instance, if someone is hungry they can look for restaurants on their phones and get results based on their location.

But the stereotype for B2B is different. It’s all done through phones and emails, not someone walking up to a storefront. Business decisions aren’t decided in an instant either, unlike deciding to look for some food. So why would a B2B business even want to look at local SEO techniques?



Local Content and Search Advantages for B2B Businesses

There are plenty of tactics that you can use in the quest to raise brand awareness. Some choose to use paid advertising, others want to pay for billboards, and still others engage in email campaigns. Local content is another tactic. Local content is content that talks about something relevant to the local business area.

This kind of content is great for improving local SEO results because it gives search engines the confidence that your business is located in a region. “It really comes down to one question: would you advertise locally to acquire new clients? If yes, then you can utilize local content. If no, local content probably doesn’t make sense for you,” says Crazy Egg.




The process of creating local promotional content is very similar to creating content for a national brand.

A catering company for business events might write something like “Top 5 convention centers in Spokane,” assuming they were in the Spokane area. Local content goes above and beyond general articles to provide information relevant to that area. Articles about local festivals and events, weather conditions, and the like are all possibilities.

Considering that 93 percent of online experiences begin with search, and that even 82 percent of customers about to buy something in store will still research online, brands today cannot afford to overlook the importance of SEO and creating a strong digital presence. Many organizations, however, have to learn how to manage this with a small SEO team. Given the immense task of fully optimizing a site and elevating a brand across the web, this can feel challenging.

Fortunately, we have seen many organizations that achieve considerable SEO success despite a small SEO team by using an optimal strategy. Here is what we would recommend for those who want to take their optimization to the next level.

Understand the importance of training people in multiple disciplines
When it comes to building a highly efficient small SEO team, you want to emphasize the importance of cross-discipline training and cooperation. One of the challenges faced by small SEO teams is the variety of disciplines that go into building a solid SEO strategy.



In general, you need someone who:

Can manage the technical side of SEO to help you take advantage of opportunities in presentation with coding and schema markup

Will produce high quality content to help demonstrate the brand’s expertise and trustworthiness
Has the ability to do standard on-page SEO optimization to help the content rank as highly as possible

Understands how to use social media to engage with prospective customers and drive traffic back to your site to build engagement and rankings

A marketer who understands the overarching SEO strategy and content production who can create schedules and fit all of the different pieces together into a solid strategy.



On a small SEO team, it may be a challenge to create a fully equipped team with a member to fill every role. Instead, often a single team member needs to have the insight to fill multiple roles.


Offer opportunities for team members to receive training in various disciplines that the group needs. For example, provide your content writers with lessons and training opportunities to help them understand how to do on-page SEO.

Online, there is now a wealth of opportunities for brands who want to find training for different areas of SEO. Blogs, like our BrightEdge blog,  can help novice SEO professionals delve into different areas of specialization. Training courses and books can also help professionals learn more about how to drive success online.

Is there an intersection between content marketing and local SEO for B2B businesses? That’s what we want to explore in this piece. Google and Bing have leaned a lot into local SEO on their search engine results pages. It’s become a lot easier for local businesses to get a high placement on SERPs than in the past.

At first glance, local SEO might only seem like a B2C thing. The point of local search is to help the public find things nearby that relate to their interests. For instance, if someone is hungry they can look for restaurants on their phones and get results based on their location.

But the stereotype for B2B is different. It’s all done through phones and emails, not someone walking up to a storefront. Business decisions aren’t decided in an instant either, unlike deciding to look for some food. So why would a B2B business even want to look at local SEO techniques?



Quick Takeaways:

Know how Google defines a local business and what characteristics you share with one.
Doing Local SEO right gives you a lot of visibility on search engines.
Give a local flavor to your content, wherever you have or want to build brand presence.

Local Content and Search Advantages for B2B Businesses

There are plenty of tactics that you can use in the quest to raise brand awareness. Some choose to use paid advertising, others want to pay for billboards, and still others engage in email campaigns. Local content is another tactic. Local content is content that talks about something relevant to the local business area.

This kind of content is great for improving local SEO results because it gives search engines the confidence that your business is located in a region. “It really comes down to one question: would you advertise locally to acquire new clients? If yes, then you can utilize local content. If no, local content probably doesn’t make sense for you,” says Crazy Egg.

The process of creating local promotional content is very similar to creating content for a national brand.



Find something which resonates with your local residents
Create a piece of content that encompasses that + is better than what you’ve encountered up until then
Promote that piece of content using social media channels and platforms.

After assessing the results, repeat the process.

A catering company for business events might write something like “Top 5 convention centers in Spokane,” assuming they were in the Spokane area. Local content goes above and beyond general articles to provide information relevant to that area. Articles about local festivals and events, weather conditions, and the like are all possibilities.

Want more leads? Maybe… but probably what you really want is better leads. It’s 2019, after all – B2B marketers have evolved past “lead gen 101”. They need leads that contribute to pipeline. Leads that become closed deals and real revenue.

Plenty of research backs this up. But here’s just one example: 58% of marketers said their top priority was lead quality.

Only 46% said it was lead quantity.

Getting higher-quality leads is a great goal, but it means you have to think more strategically about your ppc lead generation advertising. You have to think beyond the first click – way beyond it. So while many of the tools we’ve listed here are expressly for ppc, a couple are for optimizing what happens after the click.



Some of these ppc tools may be brand new to you, some will be familiar. Some you may already use. We’ve also included a handful of tools that aren’t primarily known as pay per click tools – but if you know how to use them, they can really help B2B lead generation campaigns.

PPC Lead Generation Competitive Analysis Tools

SpyFu.

SpyFu can show you detailed information about your competitors’ SEO and pay per click campaigns, including keywords, estimated spend, estimated traffic, and even the ads they’ve run. It will give you suggestions for negative keywords, tell you who their top organic and paid competitors are, and more. SpyFu’s new tool, Nacho Analytics, even promises to basically show you your competitors’ analytics reports.



Ahrefs is another tool that has similar functionality to SpyFu. They’re primarily known for SEO, but because SEO and PPC are so complementary, you could easily find ways to optimize your ppc accounts with this tool. Same goes for Moz, which is also a terrific SEO analysis tool.

SEMRush.

SEMRush is another competitive analysis tool that can be used for both SEO and PPC. It can help you:

analyze your ppc strategy and your competitors’ strategies
organize your keywords into ad groups more effectively
find negative keywords (more on that below)
research your competitors’ keywords and ads

Great SEO can get sites to the top of organic search rankings, provide valuable traffic from long-tail or high-traffic keywords and play a crucial role in driving growth to your company. However, there is one pitfall to all the hard work that goes into ranking at the top organically. That pitfall is paid search. With pretty minimal effort and investment, competitors can start driving traffic from the same keywords you spent months attempting to rank for. That’s why the best digital marketers supplement SEO tactics with targeted PPC to yield top results.

How to make SEO and PPC efforts work together it's always important to remember that no matter how good your rankings, the top 2 or 3 or even 4 results are likely to be search or shopping ads. They will inevitably cut into the click-through rates of top-ranking pages.



SEO and PPC Work Best Together — Here’s Why

SEO strategies are often thought of as long-term and sustainable approaches to digital marketing. Fast advancements in rankings and increases in traffic are hard to come by. Strategies take months and often years of commitment in order to yield results. PPC management efforts, in contrast, can yield results almost immediately—but are costly in the long term. Balancing both long-term and short-term strategies is ideal.

Stopping the Competition:

No matter your ranking, it is likely that paid ads appear above your organic results. If you want to fully capitalize on search results, it is a good idea to supplement keywords of value with targeted PPC ads.

In addition, some companies love to implement “conquest” campaigns in which you pay for keywords that include your competitor’s brand in them. These can be costly, but potentially quite effective. Thankfully, protecting your own brand with PPC is relatively inexpensive, but then again, you’re spending extra money on something you probably rank for.

Actionable Tip: If you’re on a tight budget, or you have a client concerned with branded campaigns, drop the maximum cost-per-click significantly lower. AdWords likely won’t tell you how low you can go, and will suggest much higher, but because this is your brand and there is likely a much higher relevance to your ads and landing pages, you can significantly reduce costs without losing your position. Make sure to test this out to find the right balance and determine your optimal standing.



Keyword Research/Testing:

Use PPC results to determine the best opportunities for organic, long-term approach (this includes PPC tests for headlines, ad copy, landing pages and keyword optimization).

PPC campaigns can be a great way to test the potential value of creating content that can organically rank for the same keywords. Maybe there is significant volume, but if no one converts, PPC can help determine that.

If competitors are paying for keywords, it is likely that they have determined that those keywords have value. Checking competitors’ campaigns can give great insight into new keywords to target, as well as language that best converts.

High-quality photos are critical to an effective marketing strategy. Did you know that the inclusion of quality photographs generates a 30 percent increase in Twitter engagement?

This means that social media users, or prospective clients, are more likely to like, retweet, or comment on your post. Ultimately, quality imagery yields lead that your team can convert to sales.

Read on to learn why you should invest in high-quality digital marketing images. Explore why imagery is so important in marketing and how to take your game to the next level.



Photos Do Not Lie

The truth is that consumers trust photos more than any other type of sales pitch. Take a technical description as the perfect example.

Shoppers know that companies talk up their products and write about them in the most favorable way. On the other hand, a photograph says 1000 words. It gives consumers a baseline to set expectations and determine if they like it.

The product description and characteristics are still important. However, a high-quality photograph sets a great first impression and makes the shopper want to learn more.



Quality Is Important

Every business plays lip service to producing quality products or service. Some of the best companies go to great lengths to deliver the highest quality in their industry.

Either way, using low-quality photographs to market a product or service is detrimental. What kind of message do you think a low-quality picture gives to shoppers?

It tells them that management is willing to overlook quality. Perhaps most important is that it inserts doubt into the shopper’s mind about quality assurance.

Images Affect a Shopper’s Mood

There is clinical proof that imagery affects a person’s mood. Depending on the tone of the picture, an image can make a person angry or sad.

When trying to sell a product or service, the goal is to generate a positive mood. Simply put, a happy or motivated shopper is more likely to make a purchasing decision than an angry one.

Social media success isn’t nearly as random as it can seem. Most successful pages and brands have had a great deal of work put into them over time, along with solid decision-making in terms of content, post frequency, and who or what they tag. Though it’s a challenge, there’s no magical force keeping you from reaching your social media goals.

Why you need a social media audit
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

To reach your destination, you first need to know how to steer your ship. That’s difficult if you don’t know where you are in the first place. To establish that, begin with a social media audit.



What Is a Social Media Audit?

This post will cover the basic elements. You may want to consult other sources for further details about the process. A social media audit generally looks into the following:

The results of your posts and overall engagement, including metrics such as likes, number of comments, the overall reach for reach post, mentions, shares, and more. If it can be measured, it probably should be measured.
How your posts perform in both short term and long term. While most social media content doesn’t have a long shelf life, sometimes a piece of content can go viral after the fact. A good audit helps you figure out why.

Comparison of similar posts to see how the differences between them affect success.
Both your top performing posts and your worst posts, in-depth, in order to help you adjust strategies for the future.

The alignment between your social media campaign and your brand / company goals and stated values. There shouldn’t be dissonance here.
Your expenditures and an analysis of whether the current outreach used is the most cost-effective option.

The audit will use the data collected to help your team analyze the interests of your audience and take demographics into consideration, maximizing future engagement.

As noted, you can absolutely add or remove elements depending on your business needs. What is important to note is that it is a holistic process. For this to be effective, you must look at everything. A missing (but important) factor can potentially take the whole audit off course.

To perform an audit, we recommend using social media monitoring tools so your time isn’t wasted gathering data (a task a program can do nearly instantly). Which tools to use is up to you, but try to pick a service that will keep all your data together for easier analysis, as well as one that won’t try to keep additional data behind paywalls.

The Information to Develop a Clear Strategy

A proper social media audit will provide all the information you need to develop a clear strategy and goals for the future. It will help identify which platforms to focus on for success, develop a solid posting strategy, and even help optimize post timing and scheduling.

Are you trying to gain new business for your cryptocurrency business?

If so, you need to remember that you’re not in a business that everyone understands. Even if you know why others need to have cryptocurrency, you have to be able to sell the “why” to others.

That’s why marketing for a cryptocurrency business is pertinent for you to survive. Content needs to inform and help your potential clients realize why they need to work with you.



1.You Have to Be on Social Media

If you’re a cryptocurrency business in 2018, you have to be on social media. There’s no way around this. Without it, you don’t look like you know what’s going on.

On social media, you should be posting regular updates about the cryptocurrency business, responding to others who are talking about it, and using it for your own personal knowledge.

Keep in mind that it’s not enough to be on social media. You need to make sure you’re picking the sites that your target audience is on. Otherwise, it will be a waste of time.

Also, make sure you post on a regular basis. Inactive social media does more harm than no social media at all.

2.Content, Content, Content

The days of odd television segments and annoying radio speakers are over. The average customer is too smart to fall for simple advertisements before they come to your business.

Instead, customers want to see inbound marketing, and most don’t even know what it’s called! Inbound marketing is marketing that they find on their own because they want it.

Some common examples of inbound marketing are social media posts, blogs, and videos. These pieces of marketing content don’t advertise directly. Instead, they help their potential clients learn something.

As a cryptocurrency business, consider posting blogs about cryptocurrency tools like 3Commas. You could also create videos telling users what to expect in the upcoming weeks.

Educating your potential clients will make them feel appreciated, and they’ll know how to use your product for their benefit. Because cryptocurrency is complex, make sure you don’t skip out on this step of your marketing strategy.

Did you know the digital advertising industry is worth more than $192 billion?

Do you want to increase your sales but are wondering what is a click funnel? Not to worry! In this article, we’ll go over what it is and how it could help.

Want to learn more? Keep reading to find out.



What is a Click Funnel?

Clickfunnels is an online sales funnel builder. It helps businesses sell, market, and deliver their products online.

This tool helps simplify the online marketing of products and services. Users have funnel options pre-built for a specific service or product.

You can use it to build webinars, landing pages, and membership sites. Clickfunnels incorporates elements needed for a functional sales funnel.

You’ll have a unified and comprehensive package. Many people choose between Clickfunnels vs Leadpages.

How Does It Work?

Clickfunnels allows users to use a bunch of pre-built sale funnels. They choose the one that matches their business needs. Clickfunnels saves you time and speeds up the sales funnel setup.

When you’ve selected your funnel, you’ll need to choose a template. You have a variety to choose from and proven to work. With a bunch of templates to use, you don’t have to worry about a testing phase.

It’s a user-friendly interface. You can integrate clocks, videos, and animation to your templates. You can perform your A/B testing to see what works and what doesn’t work. You don’t have to deal with a learning curve.

Clickfunnels has a staff ready to answer any of your questions. They also have a Facebook group you can join for more support.

Nowadays, many businesses leverage search engine optimization (SEO) to boost their credibility, visibility and trustworthiness online. With the online market being so highly competitive and oversaturated, it’s important for companies to have a reliable way to stand out and become more visible. One of the best ways to do that is through SEO. That being said, one of the major activities for SEO is link building. Efficient link building helps you build relevancy as an industry expert.

It also helps you expand your reach on the market and gives potency to your content. Not only that, but high-quality backlinks share the first place with content as the most important factor for rankings on search engines, such as Google. That being said, creating high-quality backlinks requires a good link building strategy and the right approach that will yield value to your business. Here are a few tips for creating such a successful link building strategy.



1.Know your target audience well

Understanding your target audience is the key to having a successful link building strategy. The main reason is that you must craft links and content that is in accordance with your audiences’ preferences and likings. Otherwise, you’re simply wasting time on building irrelevant links that won’t yield any interest or drive more traffic to your website for that matter.

Therefore, you should conduct some thorough market research and find out as much as you can about your audience. For instance, who they are, what their interests are, what their needs and expectations are, as well as what their core demographics are. That will tell you more about what type of content to create for both your audience and for your link building campaign.

2.Seek out relevant sources for your links

When creating quality backlinks, it’s important to do so on credible and reputable sources. The main reason is that the more credibility and domain authority your sources have, the more credibility you gain in return. Not only that, but you must also target sources, such as websites and blogs your target audience visits or follows.

That way, the links you build on those sources will be more efficient and will engage your audience and help you build awareness. A good way to start would be to identify good guest posting sources. By becoming a contributor on relevant blogs, you ensure that your audience notices and shows interest in you. In addition, you’re positioning yourself as an expert, which will help you build trust with your audience.

lf Sales and Marketing were a manufacturing operation starting with raw materials — leads — and ending up with 5% to 20% in a deliverable product — won sales — it would soon be shut down to determine what is wrong.

However, companies continue to spend untold dollars on lead generation efforts ultimately doomed to fail.

Lack of lead management impacts lead conversion and ROI

I think the major cause for poor lead conversion and ROI is the lack of lead management, also known

 as passing unqualified leads, or marketing qualified leads (MQLs), directly to sales reps.



Lack of lead management impacts lead conversion and ROI

I think the major cause for poor lead conversion and ROI is the lack of lead management, also known as passing unqualified leads, or marketing qualified leads (MQLs), directly to sales reps.

MarketingSherpa captured some of the key lead management issues in the B2B Marketing Benchmark Report. Of the 1,745 marketers surveyed, the research showed the following:

b2b lead management, Introduction to Lead Management68% of study participants have not identified their Sales and Marketing Funnel

61% send all leads directly to Sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified

79% have not established lead scoring

65% have not established lead nurturing

In my own experience working with companies, I’ve found the top issues include:

Marketing qualified leads (MQLs aka inquiries) have been sent to salespeople without qualifying them first or sending leads to Sales based on lead scoring alone.

A lead nurturing program has not been implemented.

Sales has not been given the means to hand leads back to marketing to re-engage for further work or nurturing on their behalf.

Optimization is the process of serving unique experiences to each individual in your digital space by tailoring content and design to their specific needs and preferences. According to Forrester, continuous optimization is “an analytics-driven approach that seeks to leverage every customer interaction to evolve the understanding of the customer, which is in turn used to evolve and optimize current and future customer experiences.” In today's age, optimizing your digital presence to meet the needs of consumers is vital in promoting new sales, customer loyalty, and business growth.

Why Is It So Difficult to Achieve?

Often times, while some members of an organization may wish to start moving toward optimization, there are factors that actually prohibit their ability to achieve it. Common challenges that businesses are faced with include lack of data available and the misconception that all visitors are the same. It’s important to understand that every user is unique, and not everyone will engage with content or experiences in the same way across digital channels (think email, website, and mobile apps). Without an ample amount of data, decisions tend to be based upon opinions and hypotheses rather than factual evidence.



So, Why Should Your Business Care About Optimization?
By utilizing a testing strategy to reach optimization, businesses are able to use data as evidence in deciding what content, designs, and experiences will resonate with people most in order to create better-performing user experiences across the board. There are a plethora of reasons as to why businesses should adopt an optimization strategy, but here are a few of the most common reasons:

1) An optimized UX on your website or app shortens the path to conversion for your visitors.

Consumers are constantly looking for the quickest and easiest ways to accomplish tasks, and optimizing the user experience is vital in helping users accomplish this. By testing and collecting data to determine exactly how users interact across digital platforms, organizations are armed with the facts around how to convert visitors quickly, easily, and seamlessly without a conscious thought from the user.

2) Gathering actionable insights allows your business to keep up in an ever-changing marketplace.

Gathering actionable insights is where data collection becomes a true game changer. Monitoring users on a website allows a great deal of information to be gathered, and based on user behavior, areas of opportunity and areas of strength can be identified extremely quickly. This allows business to turn data into knowledge and power, to eliminate the guesswork when planning for future designs and experiences.

3) Cross-channel enablement enhances your ability to foster brand equity.

By testing, collecting data, and gathering actionable insights, business are able to start moving toward a cross-channel approach. Serving users consistent experiences across digital channels not only helps increase brand awareness, but it fosters the idea of brand loyalty and the ability for visitors to remain connect and engaged with specific products or brands that are of interest.

When many people think of the B2B organization, they imagine large factories or manufacturing companies, turning out large orders to other big companies. However, the reality is that companies of all sizes are business-to-business-oriented, which means that marketing strategies need to be utilized by every company, no matter the size or level of complexity in their solution offerings.

Businesses at their core, exist to solve a problem for their target audience. Once a business remembers this (even if they consist of a single person), it’s easy to see how basic B2B marketing strategies as mentioned on Forbes, like targeting actual humans, building trust, and reducing expenses for clients can have true appeal and effect.

By focusing on what the client needs (instead of your size relative to theirs), it can help you communicate better to the client how you can make them better. Furthermore, the internet has made it easier than ever for small businesses to scale, especially because they have better access to vendors and drop-shipping companies they can partner with to make their products and services available to more people.



A few good examples of this were given in Diana Huff’s post titled U.S. Manufacturing Anchors the Innovation Economy, which not only discusses how technology has furthered the development of B2B innovation, but it has also allowed companies like Diverse Woodworking, which started in a garage and now has scaled to large warehouse to create custom wood-carved products.

Not utilizing social media: Because social media sites like Facebook have their own review systems, it’s important for businesses to have a local presence. Clients are much more likely to choose a business based on a referral, whether it’s from someone they know or a handful of online reviews they’ve read. Having an active social media presence can help ensure that not only are reviews being left on website profiles, but that they, along with other current updates about the company, are being shown to as many people as possible.

In John Deere MachineFinder, optimizing John Deere dealer web pages and contact information has become an important localization element of the entire online marketing program. Indeed many of the organization’s social media mentions and inbound links can be realized through localization efforts.

“Growth hacking” is one of those buzzwords that’s started popping up in digital marketing circles over the last few years. But what exactly is growth hacking and how can you use it to benefit your content marketing efforts?

The clue is in the name – growth hacking is all about growing your business rapidly with a limited budget. The term came about from start-ups who needed to grow their fledgling businesses as quickly as possible with limited resources. These start-ups typically achieve this growth by taking advantage of low-cost alternatives to traditional marketing that can be extremely effective when done well.

A growth hacker is essentially a marketer who might use a combination of techniques including social media, viral marketing, and SEO to increase brand awareness and conversion rates as quickly as possible.

Your business may not be in the start-up stage, but you can still use growth hacking techniques to grow your business.

When you apply these techniques or “hacks” to your content marketing, you end up doing something that’s come to be known as “content hacking”. A content hacker is someone who achieves massive growth through content.



Quick Takeaways

Content hacking can help boost your marketing efforts in a short time, with a limited budget.
Good content hackers are data-driven, innovative, and constantly optimizing their content.
Analyzing your own successful content and that of your competitors is a great start for driving content growth.

Content Hacking Basics

So how do you become a content hacker? The key is to think outside of the box and look for little content marketing tricks that you can take advantage of to attract more social shares, drive more traffic to your site, and boost your conversion rate.

These days, nearly everyone is using content marketing, and for a very good reason – it’s more effective than many other marketing channels, and yet, you can get started on a shoestring budget.

Some of the things you must consider to growth hack your content marketing include:

SEO – Google’s algorithm is always changing. Successful content hackers stay up to date with these changes and know how to craft their content in order to use them for their own benefit.

Data analysis and optimization – successful content hacking strategies are almost always data-driven. By carefully analyzing the data you have available, you can look for optimization opportunities and tweak your content strategy for growth.

Recognizing opportunities – a good content hacker will always be on the lookout for the next opportunity. Something like being the first to publish a breaking news story in your industry could be your key to achieving explosive success.

Understanding virality – viral content is one of the cornerstones of content hacking. There’s no sure-fire way of ensuring a piece of content goes viral, but content hackers will do their best to maximize the chances of this happening.

Originality – content hacking is all about finding your own unique path and not copying what everyone else is doing. Only those who experiment and think outside of the box can become true content hackers.

Google has released a flurry of algorithm updates in the first half of 2018, which has made it difficult for SEO professionals to work out exactly which tactics are working to help sites rank at the top of organic search results. Whether a website has been practicing white hat, grey hat, or even black hat SEO, the entire industry has been affected by the recent updates.

How to rank better in 2018To make things more challenging, Google hasn’t provided any indication of what factors may be contributing to SEO improvement or deterioration. SEO pros know there have been algorithm changes. They just can’t identify exactly how they have been affected.


Despite the uncertainty, there are still certain practices that stand the test of time with SEO. So, if you want to virtually guarantee an improvement in your website’s organic search position, here are a few ideas you should implement in addition to on-page optimization.



Ensure that all of your site’s 301 redirects are going to the right URLs.

It’s likely your website has permanent (301) redirects pointing to the wrong URLs or even broken links that are sending 404 error messages to search engine crawlers. Your URLs have a certain amount of PageRank associated with them. If you want a percentage of the PageRank from these web pages passed onto your new URLs so the authority passes throughout the website, you need to correctly implement 301 redirects.

You can view your redirects either by running a crawler on your website, analysing the server logs, or viewing the list in your redirection plugin (if you have one installed).

Analyse your server logs.

The server logs will unearth the most valuable technical data for your site’s SEO campaign. They will show the exact timings and navigation path that search engine crawlers take on your website. It’s essential that you analyse the URL paths, redirections, loading success, or errors flagged in the server logs.

Additionally, you will need to identify how many URLs the search engine crawler is visiting each time it’s on your website. This way, you can optimise your “crawl budget” to ensure the search engine crawler finds and indexes the URLs and the content that you want it to access on your website.

Add a responsive mobile design to your website.

Google continues to put more emphasis on mobile-friendly websites. The easiest solution is to add a mobile-responsive design for smartphones, tablets and other portable devices. If your site is also configured to a mobile application, Google provides developer guidelines to allow users searching from mobile devices to open the app directly from the organic search result.

Add AMP to your site’s content pages.
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If your website hosts informative articles, blog posts or news articles, you’ll want to incorporate accelerated mobile pages (AMP) on your site. This will allow you to serve content more quickly on mobile devices. Google tends to look favourably on sites that incorporate AMP.

Automate SEO activities with Sheer SEO

Minimize your web page size to improve the loading speed.
Web page loading time is important because the search engine crawler will attempt to download as many pages as it can to crawl and index the web content. If a web page size is too large, it will slow down the crawling process and may force the crawler to leave the website prematurely.

Aim to limit the size of your web pages to 1MB or less. This should allow the crawler to download and crawl more pages, thus improving the organic search visibility of the website.

In an era when the average business buyer only contacts a brand when he/she is 67 percent through the buying process, there’s every reason to make sure that you’re reaching prospective customers at every stage of their research, not just when they’re ready to buy. Otherwise, when buyers finally do start to contact vendors, you may not even be part of the conversation.

SEM offer strategy this is especially true for technology marketers, and doubly true for those in nascent or emerging categories, when much of the marketing challenge may consist of convincing buyers that they have a problem to solve in the first place. Smart technology marketers look to capture buyers early on in the sales cycle, then engage them in a consistent nurture campaign to build credibility, trust, and to position their solution favorably for when the buyers are ready to engage with sales.



It’s puzzling, therefore, why so many SEM campaigns in the high tech space focus exclusively on late-stage offers, namely trials and demos. Actually, I know why it is. One reason is a general (short-sighted, in my view) opinion of SEM as merely a tool to find prospects who are ready to buy. But the second reason is that technology marketers (and their sales counterparts) are impatient, have short term business horizons, and don’t want to “wait around” for leads to be qualified.

However, by limiting paid search (SEM) campaigns (and social ads like LinkedIn also) to prospects who are ready to look at a product, marketers do themselves and their companies a disservice. If you expand your SEM offer strategy to include early-stage content, yes – you’ll generate a mix of leads and not just highly qualified demo-ready prospects – but, if you have the right nurture strategy in place, you’ll end up with many more qualified leads, and a greater ROI, in the long run.