Thanks to the team at Wishpond who put together a great infographic covering The State of Content Marketing in 213 we can get an idea of just how big it is going to be this year.

According to the infographic 118.4 billion dollars will be spent in 213 on content marketing, video marketing and social media. Content marketing alone will account for 25% of marketing budgets and 42% of budgets for companies with less than 1 employees.

Does content marketing really deliver? Yes. Companies that blog have on average 434% more pages indexed in search engines. Even in the B2B sector investing in content marketing and blogging pays off by driving 67% more leads.

Is your business betting big on content marketing? Does blogging play a central role in your marketing strategy? Let us know!

Infographic courtesy of Wishpond.

Why start a business blog?

Many reasons exist for starting a business blog. Before you get started with your blog take some time to think about what you hope to achieve. This will ensure your on the right path from your very first blog post.

Set clear objectives for your business blog.

By setting clear objectives everyone in the company will be on the same page. Depending on the type of business this can vary from driving sales to increasing influence or improving customer retention.

Here are some of the more common objectives for business blogs:

• Sales
• Public Relations
• Customer Retention
• Information/Education
• Industry Influence
• Community Development

Take some time to think about your business blogging objectives and share them with the rest of your team. This will ensure everyones blog posts are focused on helping to achieve your objectives.

What should you blog about?

Choosing the right topics to blog about is critical to the success of your business blog! With so many blogs out there in your industry/market think about who you want to be reading and what type of posts will be helpful to them. By following the below advice you will be more likely to produce valuable content that helps achieve your business blogging objectives.

Develop reader/customer personas.

Reader/customer personas are a helpful way to guide your content development. Think about the different types of people you want to target and influence with your blog posts. It could be different types of customers such as small business owners and larger enterprises or a specific segment of an industry.

Before you build your reader/customer personas take a few minutes to read advice from the experts at HubSpot.

Focus on quality content that is useful to your target industry/market.

A lot of businesses have blogs but few consistently post quality content that is useful. This is especially important with the ever increasing popularity of content marketing and blogging.

It is always a good idea to check out the competition and see what they are blogging about to make sure your blog stands out above the rest. Remember, if you keep your business blog packed with useful information readers will keep coming back for more.

Write blog posts that are evergreen content.

When you invest in a business blog you want to make sure your blog post  are “evergreen content“, remains relevant even months or years after you post them. This means focusing on useful information, advice and tips as opposed to specific news or events.

You can write about news and events in your industry but make sure you understand that they will only be of interest for a short period of time. After a month or two they are likely to fall by the wayside and not be of interest to your blog readers.

Where should you blog?

Every business that has a blog should make it part of their website. With a number of open-source blogging platforms to choose from it is relatively easy to setup a blog. When possible you should try to make sure your blog’s theme and styling is similar to the other sections of your business’s website.

Add a blog to your website.

To get started with your own business blog check out one of these open-source blogging platforms:

• WordPress
• Tumblr

Most of these blogging platforms are relatively easy to setup. Some require only a few minutes to install and configure. They are also likely to provide all the features you’ll need for your business blog. When setting up your business blog make sure to either choose a subdomain such as http://blog.yourwebsite.com or http://yourwebsite.com/blog/.

Write guest blog posts.

Posting on your own blog is great but it is also important to write guest blog posts. Especially when starting out growing your audience can be challenging. By writing guest posts for other influential blogs or industry websites you’ll get access to their  audience. This not only helps to attract new readers to your blog but will help to build your reputation as an industry/market expert.

For every couple of blog posts you publish make sure to write a guest blog post or two when starting out.

How to find your business blogging voice?

The voice and tone of your blog posts have a big impact on keeping readers engaged. It takes a little time but after a couple blog posts you should start to develop your blogging voice. Make sure to keep these concepts in mind when your working on your blogging voice. Just be sure to keep it as engaging as possible.

Keep your blog posts authentic.

When writing blog posts make sure to keep it authentic. Speak from your own knowledge and experience as opposed to trying to be something your not. Your readers are real people so write as you would speak to them in person.

Show off your personality.

Incorporating your personality into blog posts will give it a unique quality. It is a great way to engage readers, give them a better idea of who you are and make a dull topics more interesting.

Keep it appropriate.

It is tempting to get carried away and add too much personality to blog posts. Keep in mind that your blog represents your business! Each blog post should not cross the line and offend potential customers or readers.

How to build an audience and get readers for your business blog?

Once your business blog is setup it is time to start working on building an audience. This can take some time so don’t get discouraged if you don’t see results right away.

Remember, consistent effort and progress is the name of the game when it comes to business blogging.

Share blogs posts.

Sharing blog post via social media and sites that allow readers to submit blog posts is one of the best ways to build your audience and get new readers. Tweeting blog posts, sharing them on Facebook or posting them on LinkedIn Groups will really help!

Leave comments on other industry/market blogs.

Be an active and frequent participant on other industry/market blogs by leaving comments. Build a list of blogs to read each day and make it a point to leave a few comments each day. If you have a blog post that is relevant to the conversation don’t hesitate to share it within your comment. However, be careful not to self-promote too much!

Write guest posts.

Writing guest posts on other websites and blogs can get you in front of tens of thousands of readers. If your able to get the opportunity to write a guest posts on an influential blog make sure to take the time to write a great guest blog post. Hopefully, readers enjoy your post enough to check out your business blog!

Quote and interview other experts.

Featuring industry experts on your business blog is a great way to build an audience. Take a little time out to interview a few experts or quote them in blog posts. All it takes is a tweet, note or email to let the expert know and they just might share your blog post with their audience.

Research keywords and invest in SEO.

Search engine traffic will always be a big part of how you reach new readers and grow your audience. Take time to research and incorporate keywords into your blog posts. There are a couple free tools that can help you find the right phrases to target such as Google’s Keyword Tool or Market Samurai.

Invest some time in learning how to optimize your business blog for search engines. This includes adding a sitemap, keyword rich URLs, and configuring Google’s Webmaster Tools for your blog.

Conclusion

Getting started with a business blog can seem a little overwhelming. By taking a step by step approach you’ll be on your way to becoming a business blogging pro in no time.

To better understand the impact of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter on the world’s youth take a look at this infographic from letterbox. You’ll will learn how social media use varies between age groups, parents perception, how much time youth spend on social media and even their emotional response to having it be an integral part of life.

Infographic provided by letterbox.

To help you navigate the maze of building your brand we have outline 5 steps to help you successfully increase brand awareness.

Name

The name of your brand has a huge impact on your success! When choosing a brand name make sure that it provides instant clarity. When people see your brand’s name they should have an idea of what kind of services or products you offer. Examples of brand names that do a good job of providing clarity include EverNote, DevShip, and ValueCoder.

Be careful not to use words or jargon that will be out dated in the next 5-1+ years. There is nothing worse than building brand awareness only to have the name you selected be outdated as technology or trends change. When thinking about your brand name ask yourself if it could be eternal. Will the brand name still work? Will it accurately reflect the changing services or products you will offer over the next 5-1+ years?

Design

A great design does wonders for increasing brand awareness. We are visual creatures and the color scheme, typography and logo you select for your brand will impact how people respond. Design is so important to increasing brand awareness that elements such as color alone have been shown to increase brand recognition by 73%.

The font used in your branding also has an impact. Out of the top brands in the world, around 63% use the SANS font type making it one of the most popular fonts with leading brands. Interestingly, the SERIF font type is only used by around 8% of the world’s top brands including Google.

Another important component of your brand’s design is the use of a logo or lack there of. The majority of top brands use a logo accompanied with the brand name (56%). However, a couple very iconic brands such as Apple have chosen to use a logo without their brand name with a lot of success. When starting out or trying to increase brand awareness it is probably best to have a logo accompanies with your brand’s name.

Positioning

Correctly positioning your brand is one of the most important components to successfully increase brand awareness. Take your time to really think about how you want to position your brand. Once people are aware of your brand it can be challenging to shift your positioning.

The first step is to think about the attributes of what your services or products provide customers. This should be kept simple, to the point and focused on the most valuable attributes. DropBox‘s positioning of Your Stuff, Anywhere and Buffer‘s A Smarter Way to Share are two great examples of brand taglines that effectively communicate the attributes of their products.

Truly great brands stand for something! They are more than the sum of their products or services. Figure out  the values that are important to your brand and incorporate them in your efforts to increase brand awareness. You may even want to add a statement of your brand’s core values to your website. A great example of this is Moz.com with their TAGFEE Code that lays out the values they believe in as a brand.

When people are aware of your brand they will have an expectation that they will need to meet. In your efforts to increase brand awareness make sure you are not setting yourself up to not deliver on your customers expectations. Think about the experience you provide to customers and make sure their expectations are inline with your brand’s positioning. SimplyMeasured‘s brand name and positioning as a provider of Easy Social Media Analytics and Measurement is a perfect example. Consumers have an expectation that they offer an easy to use solution for analyzing and measuring social media campaigns.

Recognition

If you do a good job increasing brand awareness consumers should instantly recognize your brand. This will help you stand out from competing brands.

The first step to establish brand recognition is to build a presence with your target demographic. Make sure you choose the right target demographic for your brand because establishing a presence takes time and money. Find the experts, news sources and events that can provide your brand the opportunity to be front and center. Brands like Moz.com do a great job at building a presence with their target demographic of startups and tech companies in their hometown of Seattle. If you read GeekWire, the leading tech/startup magazine in Seattle and attend local events or conferences you likely to notice their presence.

Once you have begun establishing a presence it is important to build awareness around the problem your brand solves and the solution you offer consumers. Take the time to share your expertise, contribute useful advice and become an active participant in your target demographic’s community. This will help to establish your brand as a credible expert and a valued member of the community as opposed to a brand focused only on selling a service or product. For example, Moz.com’s CEO Rand Fishkin regularly speaks online marketing best practices at conferences, helped create inbound.org for sharing marketing tips and regularly posts informative videos each week as part of Moz.com’s Whiteboard Friday series.

Reputation

No matter how great of a job you do building brand awareness, if your brand gets a bad reputation you’ll be facing an uphill battle. Keep in mind these words of wisdom from entrepreneurial Jedi Benjamin Franklin, “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.” Protecting your brand’s reputation is a team effort.

Brands are not built by marketing and pr teams but an entire company. Having a culture of integrity is a critical component to building and maintaining positive brand awareness. With social media and smartphones one unhappy customer can have a big impact on your brand’s reputation. Just take a look at what happened to United Airlines when they broke a passengers guitar and he was unable to get it replaced after 9 months of trying to work with customer service. The music video he produced about the negative experience, United Breaks Guitars has more than 12 million views on YouTube to date.

Over the last few years the Middle East has become one of the main hubs for social media. It is estimated that 3.7% of internet users around the world are from this region and that over 4% of the local population have internet access. Due to the widespread availability of the internet and mobile phone, the user base of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have grown at a massive rate. According to the infographic the Middle East has 58 million Facebook users, 6.5 million twitter users and 5.8 million LinkedIn users. People in the Middle East also tend to prefer using social media platforms in English (48%) as opposed to Arabic (45%).

In terms of demographics the study highlights a number of interesting facts. Men are more likely than women to use of social media platforms (65% male vs 45% female). Children and young adults are the two main groups who use social media with 36% of those in the 18-24 age bracket and 32% of those in the 25-34 age bracket being the most active users in social media communities. This age groups are mostly likely to use Facebook (94%), Twitter (52%), and Google+ (46%) though Instagram and LinkedIn also have a strong presence.

Some countries have a strong social media presence than others. Research presented in the infographic show that Egyptians have the strongest social media presence with 1 in 4 Arab Facebook users coming from the country. Other areas in the Middle East such as Saudia Arabia and the UAE account for about 8% of users in the Gulf Region. Interestingly, in the UAE LinkedIn is more popular than Twitter probably due its business focus.

Infographic courtesy of Go-Gulf.com

Management and staff encourage customers to leave feedback on their official twitter and Facebook channels regarding services, events and menu items. This provides them with additional insight about what is being liked and disliked and enables them to work on areas in which a weakness is apparent.

Top restaurants are hiring social media marketers to run their online operations and to create hype about new menu items and specials that are awaiting launch.

In order to entice customers, certain restaurants are providing discount coupons and special deals via social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

Human resource specialists are also using social media to recruit potential restaurant employees through job postings on platforms such as LinkedIn as well as Facebook groups/pages.

Infographic courtesy of Digital Dining

1. Your headline should include three unrelated fonts and at least one connecting script. Don’t be afraid to get creative. Catch the eye and the brain will follow.
2. Speech bubbles can be used to help any small message stand out, or to do what they were originally intended to do: talk!
3. When using a graph, opt for a donut graph. These are the most popular form of graphs, eclipsing pie graphs in popularity in 29.
4. Ribbon banners are an infographic standard, and a sign that you know what you’re talking about. Other pictoral items, like the icons for man and woman or a gear, create visual interest and bank on a consumer’s familiarity with that symbol and what it implies.
5. The goal is to get your consumer scrolling. While there’s no ideal proportion for an infographic, no block of related content should fit on one screen. You always want them to have to scroll down. A sinuous timeline also keeps the reader’s eye flowing down, so if you’ve got the content for one, go for it!
6. Paper textures have universal appeal.
7. Who says large print is only for books? Emphasize key points with a larger font size. The ideal font size is 199 percent.

When all else fails, take your cues from the admen to disguise bad data or weak content: “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”

Infographic courtesy of Zedaxis.

In the field of customer service, you may have often heard people talk about the popular adage “the first impression is the last impression”. In 213, these little words of wisdom are the key drivers of a company’s future success rate. This can be seen in the study by the fact that 24% of respondents were likely to make repeat purchases within the next two years on the basis of a favorable initial experience with a company. On the other hand, 37% of respondents were likely to stop purchases for a minimum period of two years if a negative impression was formed at the start.

Certain social groups are more likely to avoid products from companies with negative impressions. Results show that the highest avoiders are the elite/high-income (79%) and the lowest are women (45%). This could possibly be due to the fact that the rich have more alternatives to choose from and tend to have a higher rate of switching between brands and products.

In an age dominated by the rapid spread of information via social media platforms, good client feedback is vital. It plays a role in how fast reviews are spread, as well as purchasing decisions. In the study, 95% of respondents were likely to report bad experiences as opposed to only 85% who were like to report good ones. Furthermore, 88% of the surveyed group were likely to be influenced by these positive and negative impressions while making online shopping purchasing decisions.

The importance of customer feedback in customer service has increased exponentially due to social media and the fast pace that information spreads. This is demonstrated by the fact that 55% of participants were willing to switch to different brands if they had a bad experiences. The research presented in this infographic highlight that to succeed in the future, you need to do everything in your power to guarantee great customer service and positive reviews.

Infographic courtesy of Zendesk