2 Must-Have Types Of Social Media Content To Use In Your 2017 Campaigns
May 08, 2017
May 08, 2017
10 min read
10 min read
Content marketing is one of the top strategies for every online marketer, irrespective of what their primary marketing strategy is, in whichever year. Content has been, content is, and content always will be the one-way road to success in web marketing field. Developing high-quality content is key to generating enormous traffic on your website. But, using the right content is also necessary.
With the passing of years, the trends change. Therefore, the type of content to use on your website has also changed over the years. Also, if you’re one of them who’re still using written content only, without any modification, the end is near for your web business.
Here are the types of content you should be using in 2017.
1. Infographics:
Using more infographics on your website can boost your web traffic. The popularity of infographics is increasing day by day. And, as I can observe, the reasonable factors are the visual appeal, availability of sufficient information, and simplified readability.
According to stats collected from MarTech and HubSpot,
- Web platforms like Pinterest and Postano are growing in popularity and set to continue these trends in the future
- Search volume has increased by 800% between 2010 and 2012
- According to a finding on BuzzSumo, infographics were shared more than 5000 times across major social media platforms
The science behind the popularity of Infographics.
- For human brain looking and grasping the data is more easier than reading and grasping the same data.
- Infographics are extremely engaging.
- The color scheme used in Infographics are more catchy for the eye.
2. Video content
Use of marketing videos for your product rather than simply written content can enhance your web business and boost the traffic reaching your website.
A brief glance at the statistics collected by Hubspot and Insivia to find why and how? Led me to the following conclusion.
The 2016 report based on 2015 data: If you think video content is a recent thing, you’re totally wrong. Here is some data that proves video marketing existed and started on the journey to its popularity from a while back.
- Embedding video in your marketing mail increases your click-through rate by 200-300%
- 45.4% users viewed at least one video online in a month
- 80% of the college and university students from across the world are a regular visitor to Youtube
- Including a video on your home-page can increase your conversion up to a whopping 80%
- From a users point of view, watching a video helps in decision making for 90% of the audience.
- Youtube reports a 100% rise in mobile consumption of videos
Now, heading towards the recent report based on the online user behavior in 2016
- 92% users share online videos
- After watching a product video, 62% of users are likely to purchase the product online
- 37% of successful marketers believe that online video is the reason for their success.
- The retention percentage increases to 65% after a duration of 3 days, if the information is served with adequate image or video.
The psychology behind video content popularity
- Video is an entertaining way to serve the desired information and easier to grasp.
- Our mind is more likely to process and retain videos for a longer duration than any other form.
- Explainer product videos influence decision making.
Embed these two content formats in your 2017 content marketing strategy, and you will observe the business growing rapidly.
Using Social Media To Create Hot Leads From Your Content Marketing
There is more to inbound marketing than creating compelling content. Even the best writing and visuals are no good if it doesn’t attract readers and entice people to visit your site. If you don’t feel like you have the skills to create or market your own content, you can always decide to use outsourced inbound marketing. Be sure to hire a reputable agency, though, because, since you can’t see or monitor them, you want to make sure they are honest and not acting in ways that reflect badly on your company. In what ways can you market your brand? You can and should use all the traditional methods of getting people to respond to your content and check out your product: forum posting and commenting on blogs are great ways to link back to your site. But there is one way to get noticed that trumps even that. Social Media. Social sites are one super way to build leads and get your brand out there and noticed. It is a terrific way to post content that will lead readers back to your website. Here are 4 popular social media outlets and how you can use them to market your product: Pinterest Pinterest is a photo-sharing site and is one of the most popular ways that people share content on the internet today. Users create ‘boards’ which are basically collections of ‘pins’-or images-related to particular topics. When someone likes your content, they can re-pin it to share it. The best way to get people to visit your boards is to use eye-catching images with your content. You can re-pin other content you find to fill up your boards with interesting materials and entice others to visit. YouTube YouTube videos tend to rank high in Google search results and can be a great way to boost your popularity. You can create and upload a video of anything related to your product; how-to, instructions, demonstrations, before and after, etc. Videos keep the reader engaged and can really show off your product’s benefits. Add a link at the end of each video to encourage people to visit your website. After all, every visit is a potential sale. Encourage members to visit your YouTube channel by commenting on other videos and interacting with the community. Google+ Google Plus content is highly favored on search results. Posting SEO-friendly articles will improve your chances of getting views and clicks. Google Plus has a couple of really unique features that come in handy. One is it’s ‘circles’ which allow you to group followers together into specific categories based on their interests. This allows you to target the proper audiences for your content. Another great feature is the Hangouts. Hangouts are video and audio recording that you create and share with your followers. Hangouts are automatically uploaded to YouTube and shared on your Google Plus page to attract even more viewers. Facebook It may seem like an easy way to promote your brand, especially if you have a lot of followers. However, what you need are followers who are interested in what you have to offer. Blog posts, images and videos tend to do very well on facebook. You can encourage visits by placing a link to your facebook page on your other social sites, so interested parties can click on it and follow you. Two great tools Facebook offers is their Pages Insights-a graph that shows how well your content is performing and Audience Highlights-which gives you the demographics of your visitors. This way you can see if you are reaching your target audience and adapt your content accordingly. All in all, social media is a marketing tool you don’t want to skip. You can grow by connecting accounts, getting shares and building followers. Engage with all the social media sites at first. Once you’ve established where most of your traffic is coming from, you can start to concentrate on utilizing those media platforms more. ...
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How Video Should Be Used For Brand Building In 2019
Move over big chunks of content, users today prefer watching a snackable video instead for just about anything! Why? Because watching a video is simply more engaging than reading blocks of content and there’s an ever increasing number of users preferring to consume video content over anything else on the web. Users like Video so much that more than 85% of users would like to see brands produce more video content in the years to come. And brands are following suit. More than 80% of brands actively use some or the other form of video as their marketing tool and have admitted to continue using it for the next year as the ROI they’re seeing from videos is much higher than what they initially expected. And half of the remaining 20% of brands reportedly said that they plan to fire up their video marketing efforts pretty soon. So, there’s still time to hop on the video bandwagon for your brand if you haven’t yet started with it. But Why Videos? Video is the future of content marketing and brand building, there’s no denying about that. Depending on the way you use it, video can help your audience every step of their buyer journey and can generate a ton of awareness for the products or services you sell. Moreover, Videos help you connect with your audience in a way that plain blocks of content never can and helps spark emotion in your target audience. And when your videos emotionally connect with your audience, it fosters trust and makes them stick to your brand. But you’ll have to use videos strategically and carefully align it with the buyer journey of your customers to get the best results. So, here are a few ways to powerfully use videos to market your brand, stand out from the noise and gain a lot of exposure in 2019 - Share your brand’s story Every brand has a story behind its inception. Every brand has a purpose to fulfill.What better way to showcase your unique brand story with an engaging video? While blogs have been the go-to way for marketers to share compelling brand stories with their audience to make them trust their brand, video is quickly taking over. Publishing brand stories is all about making a glorious first impression, getting in the good books of prospective customers and quickly building an emotional connection with them and video is a perfect match for it. In your brand story video, try creating a video for your brand that clearly showcases what your business stands for, what customers can expect from your business and why your business is different from the rest to make an impact on your audience. Keep your product marketing to the bare minimum in your brand stories, rather focus on the values your products brings to the table. Barbie does it perfectly with their powerful video campaign that clearly showcases what their brand sells… dreams, not dolls. It is an engaging video which powerfully connects and leaves an impact on viewers and puts their brand in the best light possible. Showcase your products or services Videos are a great way to boast about your own products and services and sell it to prospective customers. Other than that, videos can serve as great product explainers tools as well. More than 95% of people agree that they watched a product explainer video to get a better understanding of a product. If you offer a complex product or a SaaS solution, showing a video that clearly tells users how to use it is always better and more engaging that throwing a full-fledged document at their face which elaborates the process for them. For example, Spotify, in their initial years when they were the first of its kind, marketed themselves with the help of a great product explainer video which told users exactly how their product can help them in hearing music that they like, anytime. And the video was responsible for convincing and bringing in initial users for Spotify. Which you can do too. You can take the help of a video-production company or use tools like PowToon that can do it for you. When making product explainer videos, keep it short and precise and focus on highlighting the true value your product delivers so prospects can quickly get a jist of what your product has to offer Other than that, to stand out from the competition, you can create boastful videos about your products or services that shows users exactly how your product is better than the rest to gain an edge and impress prospects right off the bat. Blendtec is a perfect example of a brand that aced video marketing with their one-of-a-kind product videos. Blendtec sells blenders with a tagline of ‘World’s most advanced blenders’ and started a video marketing campaign to showcase the superiority of their blenders in 2006 which went viral instantly. The viral video marketing campaign included a video series of their blenders blending unblendable stuff like phones, cameras and more. The viral campaign still runs to this day and drives valuable sales for their business on a daily basis. Engage with customers by answering their questions Want to showcase yourself as a brand that listens to their customers? Start creating videos where you address the exact questions your customers are asking you day-in and day-out. Creating a video that answers all the burning questions of your existing customers can help you in portraying your brand as the one who cares about their customers and strives to provide them with the best experience, which builds trust with your audience. Moreover, by taking the questions head-on with your video and placing it in your Q/A page, you save yourself a lot of time answering the exact same question to a lot of other users. You can make use of live video on major social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram and go on a live Q/A session with your audience where they can ask you the questions they like and receive answers in real-time. Great for building a strong relationship with your audience. Behind-the-scenes Videos Talking about live-video, you can make use of live-video to give a live sneak-peek to your audience about what happens behind the curtains of your business. Introduce your audience to the people who are responsible for running your brand, broadcast a company event or simply showcase your daily work routine, showing the human side of your brand can go a long way in making your audience trust you. On the plus side, live-videos are great for engaging with your audience as everything happens in real-time. Showcase customer testimonials Another great way to use videos to powerfully market your brand is by publishing customer testimonial videos on your website. When prospective customers see other people raving about your products and services, they automatically get inclined to make the final purchase, that’s the power of word-of-mouth. Many brands are already making use of video testimonials to boost conversions for their business by placing them prominently on their website. You should do it too to help users at the end of their buyer journey make the final purchase decision. Video is a great way to build brand awareness, engage users, provide a great customer experience and boost sales. Whether you are planning to use it soon or have been actively including it in your marketing efforts, keep the above-mentioned ways in mind before you start creating the next video for your business. ...
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5 Proactive Content Marketing And Planning Trends To Follow
Digital marketing is the form of content marketing, marketing automation, paid advertising and mobile optimization will all continue to grow in the coming years. Some of the new marketing trends that’ll see the light of the day in 2016 are: 1. Digital Marketing is not a niche channel anymore Digital has become so mainstream and central to marketing, that it does not require niche treatment. Findings released by Gartner about their study concerning digital marketing clearly prove the above point. Marketers have stopped making a distinction between offline and online marketing disciplines. Today marketing is a mixed effort of both the platforms as people opt for digitally-led experiences and traditional advertising. B2B firms, like their B2C counterparts, have begun to realize that they have numerous tools, tactics, and channels to reach and engage their target audience. 2. Advocate Marketing Until now B2B marketers were focusing a lot of time and effort on the pre-purchase part of the customer journey. But increasingly, firms are realizing success by also concentrating their efforts and energy on providing value beyond the sale, with the aim that the client will turn into a promoter- an advocate who wilfully refers your business to others and provides references. Referrals have long been considered a valuable form of marketing, and are popular for delivering qualified leads that tend to become clients and are loyal to the business for a long period of time. While loyalty programs have become a staple in retail marketing, we are seeing a new version of them being adopted by B2B businesses. Advocate marketing software platforms such as Influitive and CustomerAdvocacy help marketers in building advocacy relationships with clients by increasing social media engagement, generating reviews for their products, and capturing referrals. These platforms make the use of customized portals and allow firms to invite their best customers to participate in challenges and provide feedback to earn gifts like badges, special event invitations, and award ceremonies. 3. Search Budgets Shift to Content A report released by PulsePoint and Digiday found that budget allocations for content marketing are bound to increase by 59 percent, far outpacing search and social budgets. Search engines are rewarding websites with high quality and relevant content much more than companies who have merely invested in the technical aspects of SEO. Today rankings are more independent of technical SEO and more about creating content that people are searching for in order to earn rankings. Rankings are also affected by providing content for long-tail keywords that now contribute to 70% of the search traffic. So while SEO and SEM will still have a role in a B2B marketer’s budget, the trend will be more about providing content that entices the target audience. 4. Online Advertising Disruption Even though Google is moving towards promoting display video ads in search engine result pages, the year ahead should make for some major disruption in the online advertising space. A recent report published by Pagefair and Adobe found that ad blocking in the US grew by 48% from last year and there are now almost 198 million active ad-block users around the world. Another major trouble to the B2B marketers was that click-through rates were massively declining across all ad formats and placements is only 0.06%. So this clearly reinforces that users are annoyed with content that is not relevant to them or that they don’t seek in the online space. Another trouble to the advertisers is caused by the Bot-frauds that have been estimated to cause a loss of $6.3 billion dollars to the industry globally. The research conducted by WhiteOps and the Association of National Advertisers recently analyzed over 3 million websites and found that bots accounted for 23 percent of video ad impressions, 11 percent of all display impressions, and 19 percent of all retargeted ads. Even after all this, online advertising is not going to disappear anytime soon, but ad-blockers, bot-frauds, and excessively low click-through rates are still going to haunt many B2B marketers. 5. Email Marketing is Alive! Many people predicted the death of email marketing, but the research data shows quite the contrary. According to the research conducted by Gigaom Research, marketers still rank email as the most effective tactic for conversions, awareness, acquisition, and retention. While many B2B firms have stepped up their email marketing campaigns, others have not leveraged email marketing to its full potential. In 2016, we’re going to see a trend towards more effective use of email marketing by B2B companies. There are many reasons to support the above statement such as better ROI, effectiveness, and measurability, but one noteworthy reason for them all is mobile. As B2B businesses have been wondering all the way long how to leverage mobile, the answer has been under their noses all this while. A study conducted by Moveable Ink found that in the first quarter of 2015, 67% of all US email opens occurred on a mobile device- and 75% of those were smartphones. While the data is variable in many studies, the growth in mobile email opens is staggering and the shift towards mobile opens is undeniable. While there are certainly other trends likely to appear in the B2B space in 2016, these five ought to stand out and for sure to happen. If we missed out on any of the happening trends around, let us know in the comments section. ...
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