One of the foundational principles of a proper branding strategy understands that people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. Your products or services stand on their own in terms of quality, but surrounding that product or service with an effective brand image is essential to convincing clients that you are the company worth investing their resources in.

Marketing is the primary vessel your company’s brand relies on to communicate an image of purpose to clients and other companies. While product or service information satisfies the “what?” question for an audience of interested prospects, branding is the force that is tasked with answering the “why?”

Simon Sinek formulated an interesting concept of explaining the relationship between the “why” and the “what” from the consumers’ standpoint. Using Apple as an archetype for his “Golden Circle” theory, he contends that their initial brand revolved around a message to consumers before they knew anything about what Apple products were like or how efficient they could be.

“Challenging the status quo” and “think different” quickly let would-be PC users know that Apple’s goal was to step outside of mainstream computing and offer people a different experience through some sort of innovative product. A tasteful design that provides users with a simple way to use the technology satisfied the “how” question still before many people had an Apple machine in their home.

This sort of inside-out tactic to branding within an industry dominated by stale normalcy and inescapable trends makes for a perfect opportunity to use your brand as a powerful inbound marketing tool to break out and show people you have a product worth their money.

If you’re struggling to articulate the “why” of your company to customers, here’s a few ways to add finesse to your brand:

1. Tell Your Story

The inbound strategy to marketing puts an immense amount of power into your copy. This doesn’t always mean you need to craft a rhetorical masterpiece that will hypnotize your audience with beautiful prose and commanding calls to action. You might see the most results from just a clever tagline embedded within an intelligent design scheme.

If you don’t have a tagline to draw in prospects with simplicity and a straightforward message, start by asking yourself what would inspire someone to at the very least take a closer look inside your site. Is the phrase exciting? Does it describe the essence of what you are here to do for them?

2. Show Them Who You Are

Inbound content marketing also puts power in visual media. Not only is the Internet a virtual blank canvas without the constraints of traditional print media, but the ability to embed videos, user-generated content, and other visual media to a single web location can have a dramatic effect on your brand’s image through context alone.

Social media itself seems to be headed in a direction where visual media drives discussion and social interaction. Sites like Instagram, Pinterest, Vine, YouTube, and Tumblr among others can garner their own respective followings when combined with effectively written information and an intuitive website design.

A great example of this kind of implementation is The Economist. A renowned publication with many subscribers, their Tumblr is essentially built to provide more condensed, shareable, and entertaining place to view many of the same articles available through their primary website.

Simple, readable, and easy to scan are all aspects that give low-attention visitors the kind of content they can easily digest.

3. Use A Specific Marketing Campaign To Define Your Brand

Another route to take with an inbound strategy is to design a salient marketing campaign you can implement without a direct sales goal in mind. Your goal should revolve around communicating with your audience and establishing the message that gives your company purpose.

RedBull recently took this idea to the extreme by making history in space. Sponsoring Felix Baumgartner’s harrowing free-fall from 120,000 high, the massive amount of media attention had nothing to do with RedBull’s energy drinks, but rather just the simple point that they intend on pushing the limits of what is possible.

The “inside-out” approach to branding is a great strategy to try if you aren’t meeting your marketing goals through the virtue of your product or service alone.

If you want more information on the inbound marketing strategies making brands into successes through the quality of their content, our Digital Marketing eBook which covers all the basics of online marketing. Download it free here.

Photo credit: followtheseinstructions

This past January, Twitter picked up the stand-alone app to use as a short film making and sharing tool, and since then it has exploded in popularity. The app, if you haven’t heard of it yet, allows users to create, edit, and share 6-second videos via Twitter and/or Facebook, and currently has one of the quickest growing communities in social media, becoming the most popular free app in the US in April.

Obviously, because it’s so new, the app has a few wrinkles to smooth out. When it first launched, users complained about it crashing frequently and losing their data when it did so. It also did not allow the use of front-facing cameras, a trait that one might think would be intuitive for a video making/sharing app. As of its first update on April 30th, the app now supports the use of front-facing cameras, and also launched a ‘mentions’ feature, similar to Twitter’s.

The best thing about Vine is that it’s free. There’s no million dollar investment for companies who want to make an a commercial, like there would be in making a video in the traditional way. Granted, this means that the technical quality of the videos is rather low, given the current status of video phones, but as the examples below will show you, what Vine videos lack in polish, they make up for in creativity.

Vine’s very small time limit forces users to think outside of the box when trying to get their message across. All Vines play automatically and also loop, giving them a stop-motion film-like quality.

But how can businesses use Vine’s popularity and unique format? Try following these other companies’ leads.

Dove

Have a sense of playfulness! Six seconds is not a whole lot of time, so keep your message short and sweet. Like other social media platforms, Vine is about building the character of your brand and making it approachable to the public. Little jokes, particularly puns, are perfect for Vine and easy to pull off, with a little forethought.

General Electric

Just like with blog posts and tweets, Vines can be used to relay interesting, relevant trivia and information to your audience, a trait that a lot of great marketing content has. GE gets extra points for also including a hashtag, which creates a virtual ‘space’ for their customers to engage and interact with them.

BuzzFeed

Make it personal! Vine is sort of like Twitter, but with video. The short video length allows your followers a little glimpse into your company’s office and shows off the quirks of your employees. It lets them know that when they interact with you, they’re interacting with actual people, not a corporation or an automated robot. Small businesses would also do well to use Vine to start a conversation with their followers, encouraging them to make their own Vine videos and tweeting them at the company.

EEUK

Tell a story! Marketing has evolved into creating narratives, not pushing products in front of people. Sure, six seconds isn’t a whole lot of time, but it’s more than enough to get the message across. The above video was created around Valentine’s day.

Need a Facebook page to share your company Vine videos on? Check out our free Facebook Marketing eBook!

Writing a non-blog webpage is tricky business. Like your old undergrad lit papers, internal webpages are a genre all their own, i.e. you’ll never write anything quite like a webpage again until, of course, you have to write another webpage.

With this in mind, I’ve put together a brief 4-point checklist for those trying their hand at this basic, but essential aspect of digital marketing. Even if you yourself won’t be crafting your own webpages, make sure whomever you collaborate with understands these basic points about how to structure internal webpages to up your chances of moving visitors through the funnel.

1. Style Variation

Varying the physical style of your webpage copywriting is something that we’ve covered a lot in the past, but typically more in reference to blogging.

But the same rules for styling blog posts apply to webpages—and for good reason. When you have only a few seconds to earn and keep someone’s attention, it’s crucial to emphasis the key words and phrases that your audience SHOULD NOT miss.

Use numbered lists, bullet lists, bold phrases (never more than 10 words at once), italics (best with text-based calls to action and testimonials), and try to limit paragraphs to 2-3 sentences.

Unfortunately, visitors won’t read every single word you write. Stylize the important info so that they at least consume what you need them to.

2. A Why, a What, and a How

Of course, every webpage needs information. But the mistake I see with most DIY webpage copywriting is that it’s unstructured information.

You could spend a lifetime practicing how best to structure written information—in fact, most writers will. But for the purpose of launching an effective webpage, structure the page in three sections:

Why — Why should someone care about, i.e. “the problem”?

What — What is your unique solution to the problem?

How — How does your unique solution work to solve the problem?

That’s kind of all you need. And you can take that advice literally—structure the webpage in three succinct paragraphs, all beneath headers (<h2>s or <h3>s) that speak to the paragraphs that follow.

There is, of course, a 4^th information element needed to complete the webpage copy, but the first three elements are needed to provide necessary context.

The 4^th element? A “What’s Next?”

3. A Next Action

Every webpage you publish has a specific job to do. Often, reading a webpage is the 2^nd or 3^rd step in the Awareness stage of a prospect’s buying process.

But, typically DIY copywriters forget to situate their webpages within this larger process. And without a clear next action, visitors will either have to hunt for the information they need (a digital marketing “worst practice”) or they’ll bounce altogether.

So, assuming you’ve got the Why, the What, and the How structured correctly and formatted in an attention keeping way, be sure to include on your webpages a clear next action for the visitor to take. A premium content download, an eNewsletter signup, an RSS subscription, contact form submission—you have a lot of options for how to further funnel your prospects.

4. Links That Make Sense

We’ve often covered along with other blogging best practices the need to “cite sources” via an external link to any information you reference in your blog posts. The same idea applies to internal webpages, only slightly modified.

Internal webpages need links as well, but these links should reference other internal pages (contact us, specific product pages, etc.) as relevant sidesteps in the funnel. Basically, links on internal webpages should keep your visitors on-site as much as possible. It’s up to you whether these links open a new browser tab, but try to link within the same tab window when directing visitors to landing pages—nudge visitors toward making a choice at any conversion points.

Interested in seeing how a webpages fit within the larger context of full sales cycle. Download our no-cost eBook, Creating Content That Converts: The Complete Guide to Content Marketing, today

Photo Credit: jaymail-email-marketing

Learn more Facebook tips and best practices by downloading our free Facebook marketing guide.

Video Transcript

Hi everyone, Sam Zastrow here back with another edition of How-To Tuesday. I’m coming to you poolside today. I just have one quick tip for you today; it shouldn’t take too long. I just wanted to talk about using local photos on Facebook as contests to get people to engage.

This is a tip I picked up awhile ago — I think I was just reading a blog post about a study NPR did about local content and how much engagement those kind of posts get. This guy said he knew of a small business that was running these contests and I thought, “That’s a great idea, we should use that for our clients.”

I’ve seen it used a few times since then, and it’s just a really great way to get people commenting and liking your posts. I’ve got a couple of examples here for you.

Visit Milwaukee — I know they do this every week. They have a “Where Are We Milwaukee” (contest) as you can see on the screen here. They just take a photo or find a photo of a place in Milwaukee. Usually they make it kind of up-close like this one so you can’t really tell what it is and they just ask people where it was taken. People love these things, they’re answering by commenting on it. You can see they got 15-20 comments here.

Here’s another example of a hotel in Iowa. You can see they got a lot of engagement: a lot of comments and likes and even a share. It’s just one local attraction; this is the Fourth Street Elevator which is a very old, famous attraction there in Dubuque.

If you can’t take the photos yourself, which obviously is the easiest thing, you can search Flickr and find images taken by somebody else. You can see I searched “Madison, Wisconsin,” here. You can just kind of cycle through and find a nice close-up one to use like this one of Monona Terrace.

Alternatively, if you have a place in mind, you can just do a search for that place. I’ll do “Monona Terrace” and look for one this way. It’s not a bad idea to credit the photographer when you can. Like this one, you might want to use here. It’s not entirely obvious where it is but easy enough where people will get it.

That’s the trick: you don’t want to make it too difficult so nobody knows what it is, but you can’t make it so easy where everyone knows where it is because people might not even guess that way. Although it’s better to do that than if nobody knows, I suppose.

So like I said, using these local photos on Facebook and running a contest once a week — we’ve had great success with that with some of our clients. And it’s something almost any small business can do. It’s a great way to get engagement on your Facebook Page.

With that I’ll wrap things up. I’ll see you again next week for How-To Tuesday.

Lift Shaft by Blakey3

As the marketing world wakes up to the fact that the Internet’s endless sea of data has essentially commoditized users’ attention, the importance of having superior content cannot be overstated. This rings especially true from the perspective of a small business owner struggling to carve out their own piece of the market no matter how local or global their scope may be.

Content marketing is essential to just about every aspect of your small business’s online persona. Depending on the specific demographic of your consumers, the Internet might very well be the primary medium by which people conduct business with you. From your “about” pages to product or services descriptions and social media profiles, keeping your content engaging needs to be a high priority.

The best way to maintain a successful business online is to generate appeal for every phase of your buy cycle all at the same time. Since users are accessing one common site in order to fulfill a range of needs, your web presence needs to be as far reaching in terms of content as possible.

It’s important to keep in mind that people don’t always seek out your specific products or services. If you’ve positioned yourself to score among search results through effective SEO, you should count on attracting people who accidently stumble onto your page in order to find answers to broad search queries.

For these cases, content can be the key to not only answering their questions, but also funneling them into your buy cycle all the way to the checkout page. Regardless of what your audience is looking for, content can be a guiding force that satisfies everyone’s needs through a common medium. Here are some tips to boost yourself up by your content:

1. Make Your Product And Service Descriptions More Approachable

Giving detailed information about what exactly your product or service does is certainly important to include, but humanizing your content can make your information more enjoyable and engaging than cold, hard facts. Make sure you are giving equal attention to the “why’s” and “how’s” of your business rather than just the “what’s.”

A major sub-goal to remember when crafting content is to keep it memorable. Your audience won’t spend all day looking at just your site so it’s up to your content to keep your brand memorable after they leave. Let’s not forget, the Internet allows consumers to compare products and services among different companies as much as they want. Creating something memorable requires just as much creativity as it does effective writing skills.

2. Generate A Sense Of Community Through Engaged User Reviews

With online communities becoming an ever more prevalent aspect of internet interaction, incorporating reviews, ratings, or testimonial features to your business’s site can act as virtual spaces for theses communities to propagate and interact socially.

This is true no matter if you market your goods or services directly to consumers or if you’re a B2B –– both are driven by referrals and peer recommendations. Keeping users on your site for as long as possible will maximize the chance of lead conversion, so creating a space dedicated to well-moderated discussions can help people solve their problems without having to look elsewhere online.

If you do decide to take control of a reviews section, there’s no need to filter out bad reviews. Studies have shown that customers value honesty over complete (many times illusionary) perfection. If a customer offers their advice on what can be improved, a polite and thankful response can be seen to show a degree of humility that customers value quite a bit.

Dominos took this concept of honesty to the brutal extremes by posting unfiltered customer reviews to a gigantic electronic screen in Times Square. As you can see, they didn’t hold back when it came to criticism:

Working as just part of a large-scale rebranding effort, their efforts paid off financially by gaining an unlikely degree of trust after losing it due to poor product reception.

3. Take On Non-Written Content Projects

If your small business doesn’t have the resources to hire a dedicated content team to craft consistently strong text, try alternative media to get your ideas out.

Taking a holistic approach to content creation can actually be an advantageous strategy even if you do have successful writers on board. Photos, videos, and infographics are an excellent means of spicing up your company’s content presence. Depending on what market you’re in, you might be given vast opportunities to use visual content as a major advantage.

If, for instance you are showcasing the success of a client service, video testimonials are a great way for potential clients to see and hear the successes of your service straight from the mouths of fellow customers. Remember that content should mean more than routine text posts. Exciting aesthetics can help to attract new business and form a reputation of professionalism in the early stages of your company’s development.

A helpful tool in establishing an online presence through quality content is our Digital Marketing eBook which covers all the basics of online marketing. Download it free here.

Thinking RFID by boetter

I’m sure by now you’ve heard about Pinterest. It’s been making waves in the social media marketing world since last year, and with over 47 million users (still growing!) spending an average of 14.7 minutes on the site per visit, it’s undoubtedly true that it’s one of ‘the next big things’. Just take a look at this infographic from ExpandedRamblings.com -

Part of the infographic

- or this blog post from social media guru Amy Porterfield, or one of our own blog posts about Pinterest and you’ll be thinking that you need an account by, oh, yesterday. But wait! Before you get ahead of yourself and start setting up your Pinterest page and profile, there are a few things you ought to understand.

First, Pinterest is a highly visual medium.

It’s been compared to a scrapbook, with users ‘pinning’ things they find useful or interesting or inspirational onto boards which they can create and which others follow. Much of what is pinned and re-pinned (pinned onto your own board from someone else’s) are photos, infographics, and videos, so it is best suited for businesses that create products rather than sell services.

The most popular pins, boards, and brands on Pinterest right now usually have something to do with clothing, DIY projects, food and cooking, home decor, so if you have a physical thing you can take a picture of, you’re going to get more out of Pinterest than other businesses who don’t.

Second, Pinterest is a community, not a tool.

That means you’ve got to give as much as you take. It means you’ve got to commit time and hard work to interacting with users and the industry. It’s more than pushing your products in front of as many eyes as possible. It’s about  making connections, being helpful, and adding value to the community.

By interacting, creating, sharing, curating and being present, you’ll build a reputation as a company that is there for the long run and for the benefit of the users, rather than one that is just trying to sell services or products, and those users may be more willing to trust you with their business later.

Third, consider the audience.

80% of Pinterest users are female. This may change as time goes on. We’ll just have to wait and see. However, there are already alternate sites with the same layout and functions as Pinterest, but aimed at males. We’ve mentioned Gentlemint before, in a previous post. Though it isn’t nearly as popular as Pinterest, you’d be better off in the long run marketing products to and interacting with people who would better appreciate your brand.

Now that you’ve learned these things, take a step back and consider. Sure, Pinterest is a pretty amazing site, but it may not something your business absolutely needs. If you’re still convinced that it would be beneficial to your brand, brands like Better Homes and Gardens, Nordstrom, and Whole Foods have a really great presence on there that you could look into to gain tips and insights.

Looking for other ways to market online? Download our FREE eBook “A Step-by-Step Guide to Facebook Marketing“.

… black and white TV sells radio by x-ray delta one (NA)

Ask your parents what marketing was like when they were growing up. Chances are they’ll tell you about the corny commercials, the increasing use of billboards, and the dinnertime phone calls. And while you can surely relate, as these outbound strategies are indeed still used, you have to admit they’re a lot less common.

Companies across industries are trading out old school strategies for inbound marketing techniques. Why? Well, as your parents will be quick to testify—traditional tactics don’t work. Outbound marketing (generally) is annoying and interruptive. Billboards, cold calls, and mailings send a message, sure, but it is one that falls on many closed ears.

Though outbound techniques allow companies to reach a large audience (you can’t miss a billboard), it’s the wrong audience. The random passer-by or bored channel changer is, more often than not, uninterested in the message they see.

Inbound marketing is designed to attract customers who are interested, to reach only those who want to buy. By honing in on this audience you can save your company some serious time and money.

Here are 4 ways to reach the right customer:

1. Define your brand

Customers won’t come to you unless they know exactly what you offer. So before your start building an audience, think about what it is you can provide them. What do you offer that no one else (at least in your area or industry) does?

Communicate your unique offering(s) to your potential customers is as many places as possible—your About Us page, your social networks, and your blog, to start. To ensure consistency across these platforms, develop a mission statement.

2. Know your customer

Once you’ve pinpointed your company’s offerings, you can begin to think about who would be interested in them. What sort of person would want your product or service? Take some time to flesh out your buyer persona. Have several? Consider segmenting your potential customers so you can send a tailored message to each group.

Target by Jasper Johns by cliff1066 (NA)

3. Offer value

It seems backward, but before you expect to draw in business, you have to provide your potential customers will something of value. Yes, for free. For most inbound companies, this “thing” is content.

Design your site to be a resource. Publish blog articles your target market will find useful. Are you a start-up law firm? If so, perhaps your local audience would be interested to know the regulations for cell phone usage in the area or would benefit from a write-up on traffic citations.

If your targeted customers seek advice on these issues and find helpful information on your site, they’ll be all the more likely to come back when in need of your services.

4. Ditch campaigns

At its core, a campaign is an outbound tactic. It’s designed to send a message, to reach an audience rather than attract one. Though campaigns can be successful, their rewards are short lived. You may boost sales with a weekend special, but after a few days business will return to normal.

Inbound marketing is much more about continuity. As writer Kevin Daum state in his recent post for Inc., “continuous engagement is the new campaign.” Consistently interacting with potential customers allows you to maintain top of mind awareness and keeps you ever aware of their needs.

Social media marketing is a great way to maintain this engagement. Through Facebook, Twitter, and the like you can interact daily with your leads (all without ever leaving the office).

Old Books go to the Dumpster…so sad by brewbooks (NA, BY)

For a comprehensive overview of digital marketing, check out our Essentials eBook.

At CloudTactix this week, we say a heartfelt “bon voyage” to a truly awesome member of the team.

Mary Wagner has, up until this week, worked as CloudTactix’ primary copywriting intern—but as you’ll see in my brief interview with Mary below, there’s no such thing as a traditional “intern” at Madison’s youngest digital marketing agency.

If you’re a regular reader of the CloudTactix Blog, you’ll recognize Mary’s name from the nearly 100 blog articles she’s published on behalf of the firm over the last 8 months. In addition to penning posts about all things digital marketing, Mary worked heavily on the content production team, providing critical client services support to everyone from small local businesses to publicly-traded enterprises.

So in honor of Mary’s departure, I interrupted her in the middle of lunch to bother her with a few questions about what’s next for her.

Me: So, Mary, you’re leaving us? What’s next for you?

Mary: I am going to be a campus missionary with an organization called FOCUS. I’ll be heading to a college campus—not sure where yet, but definitely in the US—and I’ll be doing missionary work with students.

Me: What made you decide to become a missionary? Have you always wanted to do missionary work?

Mary: Well, I think that once I heard about FOCUS I was really attracted to it, and it’s really the perfect time for me to do this—I don’t have any real commitments just yet. I can go anywhere and really devote the necessary time to it.

Me: So, from now on any time someone Google’s your name, they’re going to find pages upon pages of marketing-related blog posts. Obviously, we hope you’ve enjoyed writing about digital marketing, but what’s the next topic you plan to write about? How do you plan to apply the skills you’ve learned as an intern here to future writing projects?

Mary: Oh, I definitely enjoyed writing about marketing. And FOCUS actually has a blog, which the missionaries contribute to regularly. Missionaries also send monthly updates to their mission partners—the people who help fund them—and often those updates are in the form of blog posts, articles, and other things like that.

Me: What has been your favorite part about this job?

Mary: This has been a great job. I think my favorite part was the culture here—the atmosphere, the trust and freedom to pursue different aspects of the industry. And it’s been great having everyone so close together and being able to learn directly from other people. That was really helpful.

Me: You also had another internship while you worked with us. I won’t say where else you worked specifically, but I will that the organisation is in the traditional publishing industry. Which internship was better for you?

Mary: I think if I were to pursue a career in writing, I’d do so within the publishing industry. But, with that said, this internship felt a lot more like a real job than my other internship. I was able to accomplish a lot more here—I was actually writing everyday, all the time. That wasn’t true of the other internship, just because of the nature of the program.

Me: Would you say, then, that you learned more from “doing” in this job?

Mary: Yes, the job at the publishing company was much closer to an internship in the sense that, in addition to writing, I was doing some of the more mundane tasks that just needed to get done. And I didn’t have any experience in publishing prior to joining that company, so it was a little slower getting started.

Me: I think I remember you telling me when you started that you had a goal of becoming a better writer as a result of this internship. Are you a better writer than before you began with us?

Mary: Definitely.

Me: Was that just from writing a lot every day?

Mary: Yes. That’s the only way to become a better writer—that’s the only way to become better at anything.

Me: Other than the culture, what will you miss about CloudTactix?

Mary: I’m definitely going to miss this job. I’m going to miss all of you, first and foremost. And I think I’ll miss being productive the way you have to be here. In this job you have a list of tasks that need to get done—I’ll miss that feeling of having to churn it out.

Me: You’ve seen a few different iterations of CloudTactix—you’ve watched us go from a tiny one-room office to a much larger office, and you’ve seen the staff grow since you started. How have we changed during your time here?

Mary: I’m amazed by how much has changed and how fast we’ve grown. It actually seems like a lot longer than eight months. It’s exciting—the quick growth is a reflection of the passion here. We’re continually striving to grow and change and be better.

Me: Would you ever want to come back and do this?

Mary: Yeah, I think I would. Obviously, I’m going somewhere pretty unrelated next, but it’s been a great job. I hope to stay in touch with everyone.

Me: We’re going to miss you.

Mary: I’ll miss you too.

You can follow Mary on Twitter @MaryWagner9. For more information about digital marketing, download our classic no cost eBook, The Essential Guide to Internet Marketing.

Tapping a Pencil by Rennett Stowe (NA)

All you bloggers out there—how long did it take you to craft your latest post? Twenty minutes? Two hours? Your entire shift?

If you’re anything like me, it likely took you longer than you care to admit. And you shouldn’t beat yourself up over this. Your blog is important and the more polished and professional the content, the better.

But is all the time you spend on a post solely devoted to adding value? Or are you merely wiling away minutes going back and forth between topics, rambling on, and rewording near perfect sentences?

If you’re guilty of the latter, and trust me I sympathize, it’s time to switch up your strategy. Wasted time is wasted money. Spending hours on a single post is not only frustrating to you; it’s harmful to your business.

Here are 3 easy ways to pick up the pace:

1. Create a calendar

A common tool among bloggers is an editorial calendar. This is essentially an outline of everything you want to cover in your blog in a given month. Your calendar can be as detailed as you like, but it should definitely include the following:

• Date and time for each post to be published
• Assigned writer for each post
• Topic for each post

As Corey Eridon mentions in her latest post for HubSpot, some bloggers also like to include links to articles for curation and keywords to target.

And yes, creating this calendar will take time, but I guarantee that once it’s established you’ll find it makes your day to day work a lot less tedious.

2. Curate

In the information age it’s almost impossible to write anything completely original with regard to business, and often, not advisable. Regardless of the topic of your post, there is a great deal of information out there on it.

Rather than ignore this existing content, leverage it. Once you’ve decided on a topic for a post, do a quick search online to see what related information you can find. If you find valuable content, use it to inform your own post.

This process is called curating—compiling existing information, organizing it around a central theme, and adding value to it. Employing this process will save you a ton of time.

If it feels like cheating, consider it from the point of view of your readers. Obviously they want the best information out there, the clearest examples and the most convincing studies. Without the use of outside resources, you won’t be able to provide this for them. Just remember to credit your sources and add value to each post.

Use what’s out there and make it your own. Even kids can do it.
Building blocks by superhua (NA)

3. Consider a new format

Don’t get caught in the trap of only producing written content. If every day you’re churning out 600+ word posts, sooner or later you’ll run out of things to say. Only so many analogies can convey the power of content in digital marketing.

If you find yourself continually struggling to meet your word limit, consider a new format. Maybe the information would be easier to digest in a visual form. Peruse the internet for an infographic or create one of your own. Maybe you’re outlining a process. Wouldn’t it be nice if your readers could see the process in action before attempting it themselves? Post a how-to video instead of a written guide.

Always strive to present information in the clearest way possible. If you do so, you’ll not only save time (it’s a feat to illustrate a complicated, high-tech process without the use of visuals) but you’ll do your readers a service.

If you’re hard pressed to find a topic and short on time, sift through your old content. Are there any posts that may be more convincing in a different format?

Does Your Content Stand Out?

For a comprehensive guide on content marketing, check out our Guide to Content Marketing.

Learn more about the lead generation capacity of content marketing with our free, comprehensive content marketing guide.

Video Transcript

Hi everyone, Sam Zastrow here back with another edition of How-To Tuesday on this glorious Tuesday morning. I’ve got all my windows open in my office, the breeze is blowing in, and it’s about 75 degrees; I’m loving it.

Today we’re going to talk about 5 core strategies that any business can use to come up with ideas for blog posts. One of the questions we get here all the time, maybe the most popular question we get as content marketers, is “What do I write about? What can I blog about? My business is boring, my industry is boring. What can I write about that people are actually going to want to read?”

So we’re going to discuss 5 strategies that just about any business can use, particularly the first 4 I think are core strategies that you see all over the place, and I’m going to show you some examples for each one.

On the screen here is our first example. This is from the Ruby Receptionist blog. Ruby Receptionist is a virtual receptionist service. Their digital marketing is fantastic; their social media and their blog is great. The strategy they’re using here is answering frequently asked questions.

Any business you’re going to get, in person or online, you’re going to get questions people need answers to. So why not use a blog post to answer that question? Not only are your customers going to find this useful, but you’re going to reap the search engine benefits as well. And what I mean by that is if people have a question about something, chances are other people have a question about that as well, and they are going to be searching for the answer using Google or other search engines.

You can see here, clearly Ruby Receptionist is getting the question “Can virtual receptionists make calls on my behalf?” a lot so what they did is they titled their blog post that very thing, they answered the question, and then provided some other value here at the bottom, and of course had a call-to-action here at the end which any blog post should have.

Strategy number two is newsletter style posts that run through some of the most interesting stories of the week in your industry. HubSpot does this every Sunday on their blog which we see here and basically they run through 5 to 10 in digital marketing that week, and the added benefit of doing this is not only does it show that you are an authority and you’re keeping track of what’s going on in your industry, you can also throw in some stories that you’ve produced yourself which you can see HubSpot does here. They throw in an eBook of theirs that they’re promoting.

The third strategy you can use is commenting on industry news. That’s kind of tied in with the last one, but if there’s a big hot story in your industry, it’s not a bad idea to go ahead and write about it an give your take on it.

The reason this is a good strategy is these posts tend to go viral; you never want to say posts “tend” to go viral, but they have a better chance of going viral and getting spread around.

You can see back in August, early August late July last year, there was a big story about a young writer who wrote about social media managers being under 25, and I wrote for Social Media Today some lessons that we learned from the big fire storm of follow up because lots of people were, you know people over 25 were saying “You know, I’ve been doing this for years, I’m very successful, why do I have to be under 25?”

And I just kind of commented on it; I didn’t really say anything, I just kind of gave my even-handed take on it—it doesn’t really matter who’s 25 or under—and you can see I only put three or four hundred words on it here, and you can see this post ended up getting shared over 600 times. And you can see I got tons of comments on it as well down here.

But if you can comment on hot stories in your industry, the chances are people are going to find that through search engines.

Another really easy strategy you can take is making list. It’s a lot easier to write about 10 little things than it is about one big thing. So if you are short on time and you need to get a blog post out, do a tip sheet, a tip list of 10 things.

Buzzfeed, which is the site you’re on, which you’re seeing on the screen right now, is the master of lists. They have a kind of unique social storytelling approach that is really unrivaled I think in the online world.

You can see the title of this post “25 Easy Breakfast Hacks To Make Your Morning Brighter” and they just run through 25 recipes, really from other sites it looks like, along with nice big pictures. Certainly you’re probably going to provide more information than just having a photo and a link here, but it’s a strategy that you can certainly copy in effect.
People like lists. They’re easier to digest than a big long story and they’re much easier to write as well.

The last strategy I’m going to talk about is from our blog here. We do this with a lot of our new hires especially those who are just getting their foot wet in digital marketing. We have them blog about, they curate content for their blog post.

And what that means is they take a blog post or in this case a video blog from an established industry leader, they kind of summarize it, and then they give their take on it as well and then also credit the original piece they curated from with a link here, giving them a link which certainly is going to prevent people from getting mad you’re taking their content when really you’re not taking their content, you’re just kind of summarizing it and giving your own take on it.

And if you really can’t think of anything to write about original, this is not a bad idea to kind of scour the web for something that you can curate.

With that I’m going to wrap it up, those are 5 strategies you can use to come up with ideas for blog posts. And I hope they’re actionable, and I hope to see you again next week for How-To Tuesday.