Social Media Tips | Content Marketing

6 Tips to Using Social Media for Content Marketing

When it comes to digital marketing, content plays a vital role and rules all other methods of online promotions.

Content marketing is the fastest growing specialty in digital marketing. Experts make use of various approaches to do it effectively. For any business, quality content provides a great way to engage effectively with customers and to get found on the search engines.

Google, the search engine behemoth, prefers high quality content that offers genuine and credible information to the audience. The quality of content is actually a decisive factor in ranking as well. The latest search algorithms are mighty enough to devalue low quality and plagiarized content.

The next big thing when it comes to content is promotion through social media, which is a separate strategy when compared to general web content marketing. As social media is one of the primary digital marketing platforms today, it is essential for the online marketers to master appropriate strategies to achieve business results.

Promoting Content Through Social Media

Paid promotion through social media is a highly effective way to get worthy promotional content into the hands of target customers. But, when you need more traffic and visibility for your content, it is essential to encourage the readers and your social media followers to share and re-post your content in their own social circles.

Luckily, we have many unique ways to improve blog post content and make them more sharable on social media. By practicing these techniques while developing content for your website, you will be well positioned to achieve good results in terms of increased number of shares, leads and closed business. If you want your content marketing efforts to be successful, try the following methods.

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Artificial Intelligence - AI | SEO, Real-Time Data

Artificial Intelligence Is Changing SEO: Get Ahead Or Fall Behind

The AI revolution is upon us, with no signs of slowing down anytime soon. It seemed like yesterday when things like automated social media posts, blog content, and chatbots were something laughable, not fully able to compete with human intelligence. However, these algorithms have accelerated almost to the point of reaching human logic, making marketers both excited and scared.

On one end, the idea of having our content and customer data be delivered to us in a way that’s way more efficient than ever before is incredibly enticing to content distributors. On the flip side, this is making content providers/writers nervous about whether their jobs are going to become obsolete. In spite of the ongoing debate, certain innovations are going to be here to stay, with SEO being one of the focus on the forefront.

As quick as AI has been shifting the world of marketing in general, SEO has been following suit in a big way. Not only are things like keywords, metrics, and targeted ads going to become increasingly automated, but the possibilities of real-time data aggregation solutions are going to change the game for good. And luckily for you, below we’ve listed a few key points on how this will happen.

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Fake Business Review | Internet Defamation Law

Jeweler Ordered To Pay $34,500 For Trashing Rival In Fake Yelp Review

A cheap shot at a rival business ended up costing a jeweler thousands.

A jury awarded a Massachusetts jeweler more than $34,500 in damages last month after an employee at a neighboring business posted a fake Yelp review that accused the store of theft and urged customers to stay away.

“He told the people we were thieves, that we were cold-blooded thieves. I’ve never been convicted of anything in my life,” Stephen Blumberg, who owns Stephen Leigh Jewelers in Quincy, told CBS Boston.

Blumberg filed a defamation lawsuit against Toodie’s Fine Jewelry and Adam Jacobs, the owner’s son, after Jacobs refused to take down the incendiary review in 2013, Blumberg’s attorney, Carl Goodman, told The Huffington Post Thursday.

“It was up for about six months,” Goodman said. “If you see some bad reviews, you tend to say, ‘I’ll just go somewhere else.’”

Blumberg’s investigation of the review led him to Jacobs, who was working full time at Toodie’s, Goodman said.

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Social Media Marketing | Social Media Tips

4 Ways to Boost Your Social Media Creativity Game

You don't have to be Tinder to light a fire under your customer base with word-of-mouth marketing tactics.

Leave it to a dating app to demonstrate the instant success a creative social media marketing approach can bring to a new business.

Tinder, the location-based dating service that facilitates matchups between interested parties, used a tactic best described as word-of-mouth advertising in a digital format to successfully launch its app.

In a recent podcast, Tinder co-founder and CEO Sean Rad revealed the company grew by 50 percent the day after texting 500 individuals a link to its app. That tactic and other word-of-mouth campaigns grew Tinder’s customer base from 20,000 to 500,000 users in less than a month.

To quickly reach and grow their own customer bases, entrepreneurs must embrace social media in all its forms. Social media’s free word-of-mouth quality can attract and engage potential customers at a stage in a company’s development when advertising budgets are often tight, and expenses carefully monitored.

When building a new business, attracting customers is imperative -- and social media is a leading path to gathering and retaining loyal consumers.

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Influencer Marketing | Content Marketing

Repurposing Your Influencer Marketing Content for Maximum Value

You’ve heard it many times: reuse, reduce, recycle. Did you know that this piece of advice doesn’t just apply to aluminum cans and plastic water bottles?

You can repurpose your influencer marketing content to increase its value to your campaign. Think of it like a neighborhood recycling program: You’re preventing waste while putting resources back into the community — or, in this case, your company.

Repost on Social Media

Your influencers likely share content related to your brand on social media, but the buck doesn’t have to stop there. Just as you would toss your Dr. Pepper can into a recycling bin at work, you can repost content that your influencers have already shared with your audience.

In addition to supplying you with free content, reposting influencer content also ensures that your message reaches the broadest audience possible. Influencer campaigns often cost money, so make sure you get as much ROI as possible out of each piece of content.

Use Content For Advertisements

Many people recycle for altruistic reasons, but others expect to earn money for it. Scrap metal yards, for instance, will pay for aluminum cans and other metals. You can use this same philosophy to give your digital ads more meat.

According to an eMarketer report, one-fifth of respondents to a marketing study revealed that they had used influencer content in their digital ads. They might post a photograph of an influencer wearing a piece of clothing, for instance, to promote an apparel brand. Along with a well-worded pitch, this type of advertisement can easily move product.

Make sure you have permission to use the content commercially (which is usually part-and-parcel of influencer campaigns.) Additionally, target your advertisements to an audience that will recognize your influencer and therefore ascribe more meaning to the promotion. If consumers don’t know the influencer, they probably won’t feel swayed by his or her opinion.

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SEO | SEO Tips | Website Redesign

10 SEO Mistakes to Avoid During a Website Redesign

Redesigning a website can be a huge project, with hundreds of technical, financial, creative, operational, and strategic decisions to think through. From planning out your goals to building your site from the ground up, it can take months of planning, designing, writing, and developing before you can show off your masterpiece to the world.

One key to making sure your launch goes off without a hitch is to ensure your website speaks the language of search engines—or SEO. How do you make sure that any SEO value you’ve built up with your old website is not only retained, but also enhanced in a new website? Here are 10 SEO mistakes to avoid when redesigning your website.

Mistake #1: Redesigning Without Goals

Before you start designing or mapping out content, you need to ask yourself: What are the primary goals and objectives for this new website?

If you plan to use your website to generate sales leads, your content and user experience need to align with your conversion paths, helping to nurture visitors into leads. This is a key element of inbound marketing programs. To find leads, you’ll want to generate awareness by increasing traffic. This means more blogging, premium content creation, social sharing, and reasons to keep people coming back. There is no one-size-fits-all website. So when discussing a redesign with your team, think through these core elements:

Goal of Redesign: What does success look like in 3-6 months?

Personas: Who are your ideal customers? Depending on your business, you may have several types of ideal prospects.

Buyer’s Journey: What are the core phases that a prospect experiences when making a decision to purchase a product like yours?

Key Elements: What are must-have features and components to help us accomplish our goals?

Mistake #2: Not Capturing Data

Now that you’ve made the decision to redesign your site, you should establish metrics based on the performance of your old website. These analytics benchmarks can be found in HubSpot or Google Analytics and will help you set goals for the new site, as well as overall business growth.

Some examples of the types of data include:

• B2B publishers who monetize based on ad revenue will likely be more concerned with benchmarking time spent on site, overall visits, and average banner clickthrough rates.
• A B2C company might only care about visitors to sales conversions of a certain product, focusing the entire user experience toward it right away.
• Or, a service-based organization may be more concerned with lead generation for their sales team and spend more time educating and raising awareness outside of its brand.

From an SEO perspective, in order to retain link equity and any value you’ve built on your current domain, you’ll want to benchmark these metrics at a minimum:

• Total traffic (from organic search, referrals, etc.)
• Conversion rates (ideally, each step between traffic and customers)
• Which pages are getting organic traffic (usually mapped to the best keywords)
• Usage metrics (geography, bounce rate, time on site, etc.)
• Inbound links (the sites that are linking back to you)

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