It is All About the Influence

A common misconception is that if you have many followers on a social media platform then you are followed by many. But that isn’t necessarily true.

You could have 20,000 followers, and yes, that looks impressive, but does that mean that 20,000 people are actually engaged in your content? This can be false advertising for a company’s consumers, but it is also misleading in regards to a company’s analytics. How can you really gauge your company’s engagement when likes are able to be purchased?

It isn’t about the amount of people that follow your brand’s page or view a piece of content marketing, so why do some many companies feel they must rake in the followers and likes? How do you fix this issue?

According to Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia, “Instead of talking about how many people see your content, we need to be focusing on how much value that piece of content actually brings your audience.” In social media channels, high-quality content is of the utmost importance. Companies worldwide invest large quantities of money to create quality content, but in many cases, that content is not distributed properly.

Audiences neither find it nor share it. A good Content Creation and Distribution Plan for social media marketing will ensure that a company’s content is relevant, timely and well written and that it reaches the target audience using the optimal means as determined by the social media marketing team.

One of the major debates regarding content creation is between content quality and quantity—how much content is enough and how good does it need to be?

Content creation should ideally start by defining a quantity goal and a publishing schedule with proper deadlines. Once the publishing schedule is finalized, focus should be on quality for each piece of content being distributed.

In addition to good quality content, an effective social media effort must have a good distribution strategy. In other words, it needs to be shared. And that shouldn’t be a problem if the content is engaging. People naturally share information for many reasons; they could simply like the content or perhaps find it interesting. But whatever the reason, a company must ensure that their content provides their consumers with something that encourages shares or else it will be lost in the sea of content.

Vaynerchuk states, “Bottom line: I don’t care how many people see something, “I care about how many people see something.” Quality over quantity. Depth over width. Reach does not equal value and follower count doesn’t mean people are listening.”

So, it’s time to stop fretting over followers and put that time and energy into creating content that will engage; one must remember that it all begins with Content Creation and Distribution Strategy.

To read more articles about sales and marketing, visit http://www.smstudy.com/articles

Sources:

Gary Vaynerchuk, “Numbers Don’t Matter, Influence Does,” May 16, 2016. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/numbers-dont-matter-influence-does-gary-vaynerchuk?trk=hp-feed-article-title-channel-add

Going all the way with Content

Sales and marketing go hand in hand. The marketing team creates the content, and the sales team follows up with the consumers of the content to create potential leads. Right?

But there might be an easier way.

Marketers are continually improving their skills, so, for the most part, they read and study a lot of content. A company’s sales team will notice when a person has delved into their company’s content and naturally, the sales team cold calls them. However, what if the marketer is simply doing some research or looking to better their own marketing capabilities and are NOT a potential consumer of the product, JUST the content?

This can be relatively annoying for both sales and marketing professionals. How does a sales team recognize who is an actual lead and who is just another professional?

Generate a profile for a targeted lead. “Know that not everyone who downloads your content will be your ideal customer. For those who leave their details you need some way of carefully segmenting this list based on a profile of your dream customer. Get your sales team to approach these people respectfully. Don’t bombard them with product or service offers – you have to earn the right to sell. Prove you have their best interests at heart. Build relationships. Court them with more valuable content until they are ready to buy,” says Sharon Tanton, marketing and business developer at Valuable Content.

Another option is to focus on creating valuable content. Tanton notes, “a company would be far better off producing a well-rounded product and then creating some fantastic content that tells the story of how their product works and what value the product brings to its users. If the product is great, I believe I would hear about it on my social networks. We all love to share good stuff. Great content spreads and takes root on the web, and I’ve found it at the right time – e.g. the time when I was looking for information about a specific product.”

In Tanton’s suggested process, sales teams could target leads that come to them due to their company’s successful content that has already stirred up the consumer’s interest rather than cold calling and hoping for a lead. It is a waste of time and it generally irritates consumers and can even cause a drop in sales.

By creating a Content and Distribution Plan for social media marketing a company can ensure that their content is relevant, timely and well written and that it reaches the target audience using the optimal means as determined by the social media marketing team.

Content creation should ideally start by defining a quantity goal and a publishing schedule with proper deadlines. Once the publishing schedule is finalized, attention should be paid to the quality of each piece of content being distributed.

As stated in a previous article by SMstudy, “In addition to good quality content, an effective social media effort must have a good distribution strategy. In other words, it needs to be shared. And that shouldn’t be a problem if the content is engaging. People naturally share information for many reasons; they could simply like the content or perhaps find it interesting. But whatever the reason, a company must ensure that their content provides their consumers with something that encourages shares or else it will be lost in the sea of content.”

Focusing efforts on creating valuable content will then bridge the gap for the sales team, eventually eliminating the need for cold calls. Sales and marketing goes hand but marketing by necessity goes first, so create content to produce the sales, rather than attempt sales from the produced content.

For more interesting articles visit http://www.SMstudy.com

Content Marketing Pt.1: Marketings New Weapon of Choice

It’s official! Traditional “interruptive” advertising (both online and television) isn’t so hot nowadays. On the other hand, content marketing is emerging as the weapon of choice for brands who are in it to win it. Over a series of posts, we will explore the ins-and-outs of smart story-driven marketing, what it looks like when it’s done right and its importance in the social media landscape.

First, let’s mull some basic statistics that will illustrate how bad it really is for interruptive advertising. For television, the prospects are grim: one third of millennials already report not watching broadcast TV (originally reported by the New York Times in October 2013) with the numbers of people willing to break up with television at an astonishing high rate of 16 percent year over year (YOY).

And then there’s digital. Recent data show that online (and mobile) advertising isn’t on fire, either. According to the Contently Playbook, banner ad click- through rates (CTR) come in between .10 and .04 percent, some of which most likely represents some bot activity. They also state that ad recall (banner ads specifically) is abysmal with 86 percent of consumers unable to recall the last ad they saw. 

To drive the sorry state of digital ads home, Contently states, “You're more likely to survive a plane crash or join the Navy SEALs than click on a banner ad.”

Ouch. So much for the bad news.

Ready for the good news? Content marketing is a very attractive alternative to interruptive advertising and recent findings offers the numbers to back up its current lofty status in the marketing community. Business2Community reported content marketing driving traffic with 68% of consumers. In addition, they noted that “up to 55% of consumers are not only attracted to custom content but most would buy the products or services of the content provider.”

If these numbers persist, the future of content marketing looks quite rosy, indeed. There are, however, a few things to be aware of when venturing into a content marketing strategy.

One important issue with content marketing is the emergence of Peak Content, a phenomenon we reported on in February. At the time, we quoted author Kevin Anderson’s 2014 definition: “Peak Content is ‘the point at which this glut of things to read, watch and listen to becomes completely unsustainable.’” As of March 2016, we are still noting the trend.

The unprecedented rate at which people are posting content online is one quick example of Peak Content. Taken from the infographic, 24 Hours on the Internet, it’s reported (and this was in 2012) that 2 million blog posts are published every day. That’s 720,000,000 blog posts a year. With numbers like these we quickly see why quality is paramount to rise to the top of the content pile.

Additional evidence comes from the marketing data company TrackMaven that reported social media channels are suffering from lower engagement. They acknowledge low quality content is contributing to the decline.

The report states, “Most content fails at the content creation stage. Smart content can overcome bad distribution, but smart distribution cannot save bad content.”

Marketers either already know, or are catching on quickly, that high-quality content is the way to achieving greater engagement, including increased CTR, sales and all the other good stuff a company or brand likes to see.

In a nutshell, all signs point to the need to bring your A game when embarking on content marketing. 

Now that we know it’s working, how is it being done? More to the point, how is it being done well? In regards to content creation, options vary. A company may decide to use experts in a given field, hire freelancers, create an in-house team or create a unique cocktail of creation options that work with the brand’s needs and resources.

In our next post we’ll explore the growing “virtual newsroom” where content marketing is “beat” based and provides the space and structure for the highest-quality journalism-style content marketing…and the growing relationship between journalists and content marketing.

Stay tuned.

For more articles on sales and marketing, visit smstudy.com.

Photo courtesy of Florian Klauer, Unsplash.

Sources:

“Third of Millennials Watch Mostly Online Video or no Broadcast TV” Andrew Beaujon, Oct. 10, 2013, Poynter. http://www.poynter.org/2013/third-of-millennials-watch-no-broadcast-tv/225528/

“24 Hours on the Internet,” digtalbuzz blog, March 13, 2012 http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/infographic-24-hours-on-the-internet/

“Marketers Are Creating More Content, but They’re Not Sure Why,” Natalie Burg, March 8, 2016, Contently https://contently.com/strategist/2016/03/08/marketers-creating-more-content-not-sure-why/

“The Ultimate Content Strategist Playbook No. 1: Evangelizing Content and Setting Yourself Up for Success,” Contently,https://contently.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/150303_Playbook.pdf

“Your Social Content is Failing. So now what?” Kara Burney, Feb. 5, 2015. http://trackmaven.com/blog/2015/02/data-backed-proof-that-social-media-content-is-failing-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/

“8 Hard-to-Ignore Content Marketing Benefits (Infographic),” Jomer Gregorio, Oct. 20, 2014, Business 2 Community. http://www.business2community.com/infographics/8-hard-ignore-content-marketing-benefits-infographic