Category: Curated Content

We post an overwhelming amount of content online every day. Each month, people read over 23 billion blog posts on WordPress.

Certainly, that’s not enough, so we also upload 18,000 hours of video to YouTube every minute!

For brands to be seen and heard, they often resort to releasing content intended to grab people’s attention. There’s a reason brands still release controversial content: It gets people talking. Content marketers want to create binge-worthy experiences that keep their audience engaged and coming back for more, yet many fall into the trap of releasing content that comes back to haunt them.

With such high competition, there is little to gain by playing it safe, but there is always great risk involved with publishing this type of content. If you want to avoid an image-damaging fiasco, there are several key practices your marketing team must consider before they release a potentially controversial piece of content.

1. View th… Read More

Like paid search before it, paid social has become a hotspot of competition within the digital marketing world. More and more, people are looking to it to diversify their ad spending. It’s an arena rich with opportunity, but also with plenty of room for error.

We all know that the only constant with social platforms is change; you simply cannot build your brand effectively via paid social advertising if you’re not continuously examining, learning, and refining your approach. Pattern89’s recent webinar on the Anatomy of A Social Ad is full of gems about how to do just that.

Pattern89 has created an impressive data co-op consisting of information from hundreds of top brands that use a cutting-edge machine learning platform to analyze and predict ad performance. It looks at over 2,400 attributes of an ad, from the creative itself to audience targeting, audience saturation, and more.

Their ultimate goal is not just to answer WHAT is happening, but WHY it’s happening. This webinar is based on the data gleaned from studying the co-op’s Facebook and Instagram paid social advertisements in 2017.

The Full Funnel

Conversion is the name of the game, right? Everyone’s boss wants to see the hard numbers on how many purchases were made in response to a particular a… Read More

Facebook ads can take up a significant amount of a marketing budget. That might be okay if you’re getting good results, but too many marketers advertise on Facebook without methodical approaches. They then find themselves experiencing the same Facebook-related pitfalls.

1. Overlooking Video as a Marketing Method

Research from BuzzSumo indicates a decline in engagement with many types of posts. Facebook reports that up to 15,000 pieces of content could appear in a person’s feed each time they log onto Facebook. There’s more content being made than there is time to absorb it.

BuzzSumo reviewed a year’s worth of content and engagements on Facebook and found that although posts with images and links show a decline in interactions, that’s not true for video posts. In fact, there was a 10 percent increase in engagement over the past year with these types of posts.

Yet video posts are still nowhere near as prominent as other kinds of content on Facebook. Marketers have an opportunity to fill the void and gain traction by creating video-based ads.

There's more content posted to Facebook than there is time to absorb it.
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2. Not Being Specific En… Read More

You want to constantly improve your search rankings for all of your content, right?

The higher your content ranks, the more traffic you get. The more traffic you get, the more revenue you (hopefully) generate for your organization. The more revenue you generate, the more parades your organization will throw in your honor. (Okay, so maybe parades are a stretch.)

Many content marketers feel that once they’ve created a great piece of content and done the initial promotional push, their ranking in Google is out of their hands. Perhaps these steps look familiar for optimizing a piece of content:

Identify your primary keyword. (Preferably, this is a medium tail keyword.)
Write your content according to on-page SEO best practices.
Link to the piece of content from other pages using anchor text that matches the primary keyword.
Work to build inbound links to your content.
Move on to the next piece of content.

Hopefully, you’re doing steps one through four. If you’re not, start ASAP.

But optimizing content shouldn’t be a one-time event. And it doesn’t take an SEO expert to make high-impact tweaks to content to get it to rank higher and drive more organic traffic.

Ongoing Ranking Optimization

Be… Read More

Online reviews, when done well, create new customers. Done poorly, they repel potential customers.

How important are online reviews? More than 80% of Americans trust them, according to BrightLocal research. A new study I just finished yesterday for my upcoming book with Daniel Lemin found that online reviews rank second—behind only friend and family recommendations—among the critical sources of information driving a consumer’s potential purchase.

And among millennials? They trust online reviews MORE than they trust friends and family.

But they can’t be reviews from whenever. Like the new Harry Styles ballad, they have to be FRESH! In fact, 77% of consumers do not trust reviews that are older than 90 days, says BrightLocal.

Also, Google now uses “review velocity”—the pace at which your business accumulates new reviews—as a ranking factor for local search results.

We are at a point where getting a consistent supply of positive reviews has a material impact on business success. Yet, S… Read More