Let’s start with an easy one:

Resolution #1: I will update the copyright date on my website before the ball drops on New Year’s Eve

See, you’ll start the year off with one resolution achieved. Maybe I’m the only one who notices such things, but when I see an out of date copyright, I wonder if anyone is home. I saw one the other day that said 2008. Is this company even still in business? Who knows?

Resolution #2: I will not create a content asset without answering the 5 W’s.

Make 2016 the year that you create content with purpose. This means asking the following questions before you begin:

     Who is this content asset for?

     What behavior should it inspire?

     When in the sales cycle will it be useful?

     Where will my audience find it?

     Why will it be of interest to the reader/viewer?

Resolution #3: I will leverage content intelligence.

In addition to the 5 W’s your choices about which content to create should be driven by data. Which of your current assets are performing the best with each of your audience segments? Do people in a particular segment or at a certain stage in the buying cycle prefer specific asset types? If you are leveraging modern content delivery software, the answer will be in the data.

Resolution #4: I will market marketing.

Too often marketers are great at promoting their brand to prospects and customers, but not so great at promoting their work internally. This year, make sure that the organization has visibility into the work that you do. Perhaps plan a lunch-and-learn or other gathering to explain how content marketing impacts revenue, reputation and reach. You might also help others in the organization learn how to build their personal brand and how they can amplify your efforts by leveraging their own social networks.

Resolution #5: Focus on measureable impact.

Today’s business leaders are focused more than ever on tying every expense to ROI. This is fairly easy for paid advertising and other cut and dried demand generation tactics, but more difficult for content marketing. Software can help measure the impact of content by tieing it to the activity it drives and following the flow of users as they advance through the buyer’s journey.

Resolution #6: Pay attention to what is working for competitors.

We are often so overwhelmed by our own responsibilities and the need to feed the content beast (see #2) that we don’t’ take the time to see what is working for everyone else. If you haven’t already, check out Buzzsumo. This handy site lets you see what content is performing best over the social channels for any topic you choose. It’s a great way to look for content ideas and to get a glimpse into what types of assets your competitors are offering.

Resolution #7: Have fun!

It is easy to get so focused on results and day to day firefighting that everything seems like a drag. Don’t let that happen to you. Take a break if you need one, focus on what makes you passionate about your brand and your job. Connect with peers as often as possible and keep an eye out for opportunities to try something new and grow your skills. Life is short, don’t miss the good stuff.

We wish you all as safe, productive and enjoyable New Year!

The post 2016 New Year’s Resolutions for Content Marketers appeared first on Get Smart Content.

Reason one: Technology Can Now Support Cross-Channel Experiences
As recently as a few years ago, providing prospects with a cross-channel experience meant that you were providing a unified experience across the web and mobile. Today, technology allows for data to be shared between platforms to allow for a unified experience across email, the web, mobile apps and even sales conversations. For example, a prospect’s actions captured in a marketing automation platform can feed into the CRM, allowing sales reps to know what content a prospect consumed prior to a sales call. Or, the website can be personalized to reflect content that has been served in an email to reinforce a message, serve fresh content, or drive a prospect deeper down the marketing funnel. Systems are finally speaking to each other, which allows content to be intelligently served on any platform.

Reason two: Account-Based Marketing is Gaining Traction and Needs a Delivery Mechanism
Many B2B companies are adopting an account-based sales and marketing strategy and discovering the benefits of a hyper-targeted approach. To ensure that these accounts are moved through the marketing funnel, marketers are thinking more about content effectiveness and less about channel effectiveness. In other words, who cares about how a prospect chooses to learn about your solution. Does he respond better to pushed content via email or does he visit your site to learn more? With cross-channel personalization, it doesn’t matter. As long as you are segmenting and ensuring that your content is delivering results, where the content appears becomes irrelevant. All that matters in that your target accounts are served relevant content that resonates.

Reason three: Platform Integration Has Never Been Easier
Between marketing automation, content management, analytics, social media and data management, the last thing you need is another platform to manage. What you need is to have everything connected so you have clear analytics and actionable insight. Integrating platforms used to involve systems integrators and a team of developers. Today, marketing platforms are built with an eye towards integration and the marketer is the benefactor, able to integrate systems without development support, in most cases. Being able to bring together disparate data is what enables segmentation and personalization to work. For example, using 3rd party firmographic data in conjunction behavioral data and data from your CRM or marketing automation platform allows you to accurately segment your audience and serve the email and website content you know will drive action.

Reason four: It’s Costlier to Not Personalize
Retail sites have set the example for how personalization and cross-channel targeting can drive sales. Remember the shock of seeing your first retargeting ad? It was shocking because it was so effective. The internet knew you and what you liked and was able to serve content that was meaningful to you. Today, when so much of life is personalized – – your news feed, your shopping recommendations, your music – – your buyers will no longer spend the time to actively seek the information they need. They want it delivered to them and they want it to be applicable to their needs. Those that don’t make the effort will find their business going to those that do.

So go forth in 2016 and personalize. According to Harvard Business Review, Personalization can deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend, and can lift sales by 10% or more. It has never been easier and your prospects and customers will thank you for providing them with relevant experiences!

The post Four Reasons Why Cross-Channel Personalization will Become a Reality in 2016 appeared first on Get Smart Content.

When Key Words Ruled the World

In the early days of the internet, search engines were very simple and easy to manipulate. They just looked for pages that used the search term the most. This was awesome for marketers. If you were searching, for example for a “black handbag,” I could become the number one result simply by repeating the words “black handbag” as many times as possible on my page. Back then, it didn’t matter if my site was “Amber’s House of Overpriced Imports,” and I was competing against Coach or Macy’s. All that mattered was how many times I used the exact words you put in the search bar. I could even do ridiculous things like filling my page with white text on a white background (something a human would never notice) in order to increase my keyword density. Ah, the good old days.

Of course modern search engines are a heck of a lot smarter. Today, Google and others have caught on to keyword stuffing and other black hat tricks. They also have learned that backlinks, traffic and other indicators matter when determining relevance. (Amber’s House of Overpriced Imports will lose to Amazon every time.)  With every new release, Google is getting better at understanding what a page is about, not just which specific words are used frequently.

What does this mean for content marketers? Should we stop worrying about SEO?

These Days Content is King (Sort Of)

To a large extent, the answer is yes. Modern marketers should craft quality content that is designed to cause the reader to take some action, whether it is filling out a lead form, making a purchase, or simply reading more content. Our assets should be written for people, not search bots. They should be highly relevant to the individual who consumes them and should fit well with the person’s stage in the buyer’s journey.

However, that doesn’t mean disregarding search altogether. Content is only useful if your audience can find it, after all. The trick is to make content marketing and SEO play nicely together. This means crafting content that is useful to humans, but also technically optimized for search engines.

To achieve this, start by writing content that makes sense for a particular audience segment at a certain point in the sales cycle. Then think about the keywords one might use to find this valuable asset. Finally, optimize the technical aspects of your page – the headers, alt tags, image file names, meta description, page title and so forth – to align with the keywords. All of these artifacts can be optimized without compromising the user’s experience.  Google will know when to rank your page, but won’t penalize it for obvious keyword stuffing.

When it comes to content marketing and SEO, it isn’t a zero sum game. You can write great content for humans and make it easy for search engines to categorize as well.

The post Content Marketing and SEO: BFFs or Frenemies? appeared first on Get Smart Content.

You should have a look at the whole thing when you have some time. Here are our thoughts on a few of our favorite excerpts.

“Over the next year, content marketers will focus, not only on how to reach people, but also on how to resonate with them.”  – Jay Acunzo | VP, Platform & Content NextView Ventures

Jay hits the nail on the head. It is one thing to get your content in front of your audience, it is quite another to make a meaningful connection. Over the last few years content marketers have become prolific at producing and better at promoting it. Next year will be all about making sure that it matters.

“Show me a 30-minute conversation between B2B marketing leaders, and I’ll show you a dozen mentions of “account-based marketing (ABM)”. I’ll resist the temptation to say, ‘Account-based marketing is the new content marketing,’ but truth is, it’s the topic on everyone’s tongue.” – Joe Chernov | VP of Marketing, InsightSquared

The practice of account based marketing means morphing your website dynamically based on what you know about the visitor’s organization.  If you can match the visitor to a record in your marketing automation system, suddenly you can deliver very specific content that will appeal to the interests of your visitor.  No wonder it will be hot in 2016.

“Too much content marketing is created on a hunch and doesn’t perform that well. 2016 will be the year marketers start to use data and a connection with leads and revenue to develop their strategy, to create better content, and more smartly distribute it.” – Pawan Deshpanade | CEO, Curata

We’ve been touting the virtues of content intelligence for some time, so we couldn’t agree more. Data, not guesses should be the driver of every marketing strategy.

“The focus will be shifting from simply creating ‘more’ content to serving the ‘right’ content – especially personalized content. We have the ability to deliver – and users now expect – personalized and hyper-relevant content delivered instantly to them wherever they are engaging – social, email, or any channel, for that matter.” Amanda Todorovich, Content Marketing Director, Cleveland Clinic

Agreed. In 2016, the question shifts from whether personalized content is necessary, to which is the best platform to deliver it for your brand.

While these are our favorites, we suggest taking a look at the entire presentation from the Content Marketing institute. Whether these predictions come true or not, we know that 2016 will be a fabulous year to be a content marketer. Are you ready?

The post Content Marketing Predictions for 2016: The Experts Weigh In appeared first on Get Smart Content.

1 – More Scrolling, Less Clicking

Ah, the infinite scrolling page. As you may recall, we predicted that marketers would create long pages, making it easy to scroll through lots of content without doing a lot of clicking. This makes it easier to consume content on mobile devices and small screens. While long scrolling pages aren’t without their detractors, we certainly have seen more of them in 2015. We think this trend will continue, but marketers will get smarter about delivering information in a way that feels organic and tells a compelling story.

2 – Large Images and Video above the Fold

We predicted the demise of sliders and the rise of images and video above the fold. We were certainly right about this one, particularly video.  To see exactly what this design style looks like, check out Gainsight’s page for their annual industry event, Pulse.  (Bonus, it’s also a single page scrolling site.)

3 – Dynamic Content

Our expectation was that in 2015 marketers would use dynamic content to help reduce bounce rates, increase conversions and decrease sales cycles. That ha absolutely come to pass. Our clients, for example, typically see a 50% increase in form submissions, a 60% increase in time on site and a 40% decrease in bounce rate. At this point, dynamic content no longer deserves to be described as a “trend.” It’s the new way that content is delivered.

4 – Minimalist Design

We talked a bit last year about how flat design was evolving, especially with the impact of Google’s Material Design approach. With minimalist design, information is conveyed in the simplest, fundamental manner possible and the design is never a distraction. This continues to be the goal of designers in late 2015, but the scope of what that means has grown as designers have realized that they can achieve simplicity and clear communications with a wide range of styles and looks.

5 – Responsiveness

Like dynamic content, responsiveness is not a trend. Especially after Google’s mobile friendly algorithm change, marketers who haven’t achieved website responsiveness are at an enormous competitive disadvantage. When we make our list of 2016 trend predictions, responsiveness won’t be on it because it is a done deal. One thing that we might include, however, is device aware content. While responsiveness is about making the same content look good on different size screens, device aware content, is about delivering different content based on what might be more useful to a user on a mobile device. That’s something that will continue to gain traction in 2016.

The way that people interact with digital content continues to evolve. Smart marketers are making data-driven decisions about how best to keep up with audience behavior. It’s an exciting time to be in the business. Soon, we’ll make some predictions about 2016. Can’t wait to see how we do.

The post How’d We Do on our 2015 Design Trend Predictions? appeared first on Get Smart Content.

The Method

Audience segmentation is simply the practice of defining sub groups of people within your target market who have similar challenges, needs and goals. The most common primary segments are:

• Industry (i.e. higher education, retail, finance)
• Job Function (i.e. accounting, sales, IT)
• Geography (i.e. local, out of area)
• Past relationship (i.e. existing customers vs. new prospects)

In some cases, it makes sense to divide these segments into subsets that might consider:

• Company size (i.e. small business, mid-size, large enterprise)
• Buying role (i.e. financial buyer, technical buyer, decision-maker, influencer)
• Buying cycle stage (i.e. discovery, consideration, decision)

The Value

Once you have audience segments that make sense for your business defined, you can begin crafting and delivering content that will be useful and appealing to each of them. Even if you deliver the exact same product or service to every customer, the messages that appeal to an HR manager of a bank may be very different than those that capture the attention of a software company IT project manager, for example. In the consumer world, travel and tourism organizations have found that the interests of people who live nearby are very different from those who are planning to visit from out of the area.  The more closely aligned the content is with the relevant facts of the user’s identity, the more likely it is to get them to act.

The Catch

We just said that content should be aligned as closely as possible with the needs of every unique visitor. So, the more segments the better, right? Not exactly. Here’s where the balancing act comes in. If you have so many segments that you don’t have the resources to create high quality, compelling content for each of them, you may end up lowering the value of your content across the board. Marketing resources are in short supply for most organizations, meaning that they must be used wisely. It is far better to have five or six segments that you can manage effectively than to have thirty that aren’t managed well at all.

This means you must give careful consideration to the factors that most strongly impact what your buyers will find useful. You must also take into account your organization’s capacity for content generation and customization. (Sometimes all it takes to make a bit of content that is suitable for one audience, appropriate for another is just an altered headline and a few minor text changes.)

Your goal is to come up with a list of segments that are meaningful and manageable. Once you accomplish that, you’ll have set the stage for delivering the right message to the right visitor every single time.

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