Crowd funding seems to be the latest trend nowadays. Projects like “The Veronica Mars Movie Project” received half of its funding in 4 hours on Kickstarter and musicians have shaken up the industry by relying on fans to finance their next albums. Crowd funding could be the newest way anyone can invest in projects or causes they care about, in addition to being a powerful and often viral marketing tool. Crowd funding not only opens the gates of creativity and innovation, but some projects can also change peoples lives, helping those in need who otherwise wouldn’t have access to the kind of help offered. GoFundMe, a rapidly growing crowd funding site, helped Farrah, a girl injured in the Colorado theatre massacre, pay her medical bills through the kindness of others. In this specially designed infographic, learn more about different crowd funding sites out there and how this growing trend could be here to stay.

Embed This Infographic On Your Site:

<a href="http://www.verticalmeasures.com/internet-marketing-2/crowd-funding-an-analysis-of-various-platforms-infographic"><img title="Crowd Funding: An Analysis of Various Platforms [INFOGRAPHIC]" src="http://www.verticalmeasures.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/crowdfunding.jpg" alt="The Final Four and the Floor [INFOGRAPHIC]" width="670" height="4200" /></a><br /><a href="http://www.verticalmeasures.com/internet-marketing-2/crowd-funding-an-analysis-of-various-platforms-infographic">Infographic</a> by <a href="http://www.verticalmeasures.com">Vertical Measures</a>

I’m back again with another best of content marketing for the automotive industry and if you weren’t able to catch the first one I did, you can find that here. As you may have noticed, many car manufacturers are increasingly using their marketing budgets in new and creative ways in order to entice potential customers into purchasing one of the myriad of products they offer. The automotive marketers use of social media, SEO, and other avenues of online distribution in their campaigns and I have compiled a list of the best automotive content marketing examples in this post.

Automotive Infographics

Custom designed infographics for the automotive industry are all the rage nowadays. Nissan created a great infographic and accompanying campaign to kick off the launch of their new 2012/2013 commercial models. The anchor vehicle in that marketing effort was the New York city Taxi cab. By redesigning the infamous yellow cab for a modern driver and passenger, they aimed to solve the problem of the aging taxi fleets that currently occupy the streets now. They then tied the whole experience around a unbranded domain name of Taxi Of Tomorrow.

The modern car has been around for quite some time over 100 years to be exact and the good people at Go-Part created a compelling visual representation of the evolution of the automobile. While this particular question is not on every car buyer’s mind, it provides a interesting topic that most individuals old enough to drive would find worthwhile reading, as the topic is broad enough to engage many different readers.

Via: Go-Part.com

Source : http://www.go-part.com/100-years-of-automotive-evolution.html
By Go-part.com

One of the largest purchases that most Americans will make besides housing is the purchasing of a brand new car. Lab42 has put together a very high quality infographic on the process of buying a new car. Not only is it a great design, but it also answers a question many new car buyers ask: “How exactly does the car buying process work?” They have hit the nail on the head and provided immense value to their readers with a tangible answer to an often asked question.

Mobile Apps in Automotive Marketing Campaigns

The next step in automotive content marketing is the use of mobile apps within marketing campaigns. Leveraging the capabilities of mobile apps has been a mostly car manufacturer effort as the cost to create these branded user experiences can be quite costly.  BMW and Mercedes Benz apps provide videos of their latest car models and Audi provides consumers with related news, videos, images, and model information for their entire automotive family.

You can even create your very own Rolls Royce Ghost model customizing the exterior, or interior, choosing leather or wood veneer to complete the ultimate in luxury vehicle to share with your associates and family. Rolls Royce has created a branded user experience that offers personalization and keeps their audience engaged for longer periods of time.

So since so many of these are such strong examples of marketing automobiles in 2013, how do you get a jump on the competition? By being creative and leveraging technology you can create some very unique and interesting marketing pieces for your garage, dealership, or auto specialty service. But if you need a head start, here are some of the common questions your target audience could be asking:

• How does the car buying process work?
• What are the steps of financing a new car?
• How does the trade-in process work?
• Do you have tips on vehicle theft prevention?
• How often should my car be maintained (90/180/365 days)?
• What is the fuel efficiency of the car models you offer on site?
• What are the benefits of buying a new vs used car?

With content marketing you have the ability to reach and engage your audience in ways that have not been available to you in the past, choosing to pull rather than push your customer into your marketing funnel. This method can have terrific returns on your marketing investment now and in the foreseeable future.

Transcription

Hi. I’m Ben Holland, and I’m an Account Manager here at Vertical Measures. Today we’re going to answer a question that we get a lot around here: “How do you improve your website’s speed?”

There are lots of things that go into how long it takes for your website to load in the browser. A few things that you should take into consideration are the file size, both of your HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and your images, how many HTTP requests that your website makes back to the server, and if you’re using a slow server.

Some things that you can do to improve your website’s speed is having your website on a content delivery network like Amazon’s. This will allow it to hit a server that’s closer and a very, very fast server, so it will
eliminate the slow server issue.

You always want to compress your files using gzip compression. That’s going to make the file size very small, so it will load quicker.

You want to optimize your images, so they’re a very small file size. You want to keep them all under 50 kilobytes, if you can.

You also want to leverage CSS. Don’t use Flash. CSS3 has animations and transitions that Flash was used for, so you don’t have the need to use Flash anymore. It’ll also help you cutting back on JavaScript, which often takes longer to load.

You can use image sprites, so you can have all of your images on a single file, and then you can just dictate where it goes with the CSS.

And then you can leverage icon fonts, instead of using images for certain shapes.

After that, you don’t want to put your CSS inside your actual HTML or your JavaScript. You want to put these in external style sheets and files, so they can just hit the sever once, pull them, and instead of loading it every time your page loads, they just reference it once and cache it.

After you do that, you want to make sure your website doesn’t have any tables, unless you’re going to have data involved. You only need to use tables for data. They’re very code heavy, and they’re going to bog up your site speed.

And finally, if you’re hosting a video on your site, host it on YouTube or Vimeo or a service like that, because they have much faster servers than the ones that you’ll be using.

I’m Ben Holland, and thank you for watching.

Marketers today have access to more data on website visitors, e-mail subscribers, leads and social media fans than ever before. Leveraging this data, in addition to demographic data, helps to ensure marketers can produce the best content for prospective customers. That is, when it’s actually examined and used properly.

Many brands are new to content marketing and use of data, and properly laid out strategies often fall to the wayside. Harvard Business Review reports an estimated 89% of marketers make customer related decisions based on factors other than analytics. It’s imperative to understand how best to execute a data driven content marketing strategy for the best results in today’s online environment. This is especially true in the world of higher education marketing.

Today’s prospective online students are barraged with ads, e-mails, tweets, pop ups and other forms of marketing from the large array of schools offering degrees. Consumers are growingly aware of marketing tactics, which requires marketers to be extra creative. Learning to develop a data driven content marketing strategy will ultimately aid in being able to deliver the content students are looking for and improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

What is Data Driven Content Marketing?

Data driven content marketing utilizes data, statistics, market research, surveys and/or public data to dictate a content strategy. Producing content based on the backing of numbers and research is one way to tactically execute the development of content for maximum results.

The term is also used to describe the use of data to create content such as Infographics, case studies, blog posts, video and images. By discovering a unique idea to cover with data, asking the right questions, or adding the right data sets you’re able to create data-driven content. For the purposes of this blog post, however, we’ll focus more on the use of data to drive marketing efforts not data focused content.

Data Points Available for Higher Education Content Marketers

There are many third party data resources available to you as marketers. In addition, your own site can serve as a place to gather data too – even if you haven’t started utilizing a formal content marketing strategy. Here are a few of the data points you can use in higher education to help start driving your content strategy.

Student Demographic Data

An example of a higher education demographic study that can be used as a data point for content marketing. Source: Arizona State University.

As a higher education marketer you’re likely to have done extensive research on who the prospective students are for your institution. Each degree program is catered to a different student and having a handle on who that individual is will of course be important to any marketing initiatives. Make sure you’re examining this information and using this data to focus your content marketing efforts to attract that individual. Some third party resources are provided below that may help you understand students a bit better as well.

Using your website analytics program such as Google Analytics, you’re able to see some limited demographic data such as: language and location.  Dive deeply into the location of your visitors and review possible opportunities to focus content on a specific geo-area as well. Examine data on your Facebook page as well using Insights. You may find a lot of valuable information about your current student body or prospects. Insights helps you see gender, location, and age of your fans on Facebook.

Site Visitors: Visits, Time of Day, Time Onsite and % Return Visits

Another data source that can provide insight for content marketing is found on your site with visitor information, time of day, time on site and % of return visits. Looking at the content that currently draws in the most visitors, what time of day they access this content, how long they spend on that content and the type of content that visitors return to are all important areas to examine. Tailoring your strategies to address areas where visitors most frequent, return to often or stay on longer are all ways in which you can use data to support your initiatives. Develop the content that is already working for your site visitors, spend more of your efforts on those initiatives than ones that aren’t producing the same results. Analyze the numbers and get smart about why you’re developing content.

E-mail Open Rates & Click Through Rates

Do you send out regular e-mails to prospective students – maybe a newsletter or other marketing materials? Take the time to examine your e-mail open rates and click throughs on links contained within your e-mails. Which e-mails get opened most? Which links get clicked on the most? What insight can you gain from looking at this information?

E-mail subject lines and content contained within this marketing effort can provide you with insight that can be applied to future efforts. Examine this data, provide the type of content that performs well and you’ll be better off when trying to promote using e-mail marketing in the future.

Examining click through rates within your site, using Google Webmaster Tools and tracking URLs are also great ways to gather information on content effectiveness. Figure out why your prospects click on links, determine any patterns in the reasons why they perform that action and execute content initiatives that help replicate this pattern.

Third Party Data 

Polling

Have you ever used Google consumer surveys? These fast, affordable and accurate customer market research surveys allow you to discover key insights from users across the web. Learn how it works here, as a potential opportunity to gather data.

Consider also polling your existing e-mail subscriber base or setting up a poll on your website that visitors can take, helping answer questions such as: content type they like the most (blog, images, video, etc…), where they go to find content (trade publications, magazines, blogs, etc…), and what content helps them understand more about a degree program. The types of questions you can ask are are endless, just take the time to really think through the poll and what information you are looking to gather from it.

Gathering Data

Data.gov is another site with valuable information providing “public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.” Check back to see if any data is currently available to help you understand your demographic and changes that take place with those individuals on an annual basis.

Additionally research into demographic data and marketing strategy is provided below. Have an article that you find useful? Share with us in the comments below and we’ll add it to this list:

• Higher Education Market Research and Strategic Planning, ForwardAnalytics.com
• Higher Education Marketing to the Hispanic Student Population, Scholars.UNH.edu/honors
• A Comparative Student Between Non-Traditional and Traditional Students, TheFreeLibrary.com
• Marketing Strategy for Colleges and Universities: ‘Social Works” Author Micahel Stoner Talks to Marketing Smarts [Podcast], MarketingProfs.com

Preparing Your Site to Measure Content Data

Now that you have a pretty good idea on what data to measure, you’ll want to dive into preparing your site to gather information and setting up baselines.

One suggestion is to set up Google Analytics to understand how prospective students utilize content onsite to gather information during such a long customer cycle. Josh Braaten, Sr. Online Marketing Manager at Rasmussen College, describes how he has worked with Google Analytics to set up multi-content funnels. This helps him to examine how users interact with web content on their path to conversion, and he’s able to make changes based on the path a user takes. This is a worthwhile read for anyone in higher education looking to gather content data and prove the value as well.

Having the means to gather data is important to the entire process of data driven content marketing. Ensure that your site is ready to gather data and use a reputable website analytics program. Test out the program and make sure code loads properly and is tracking effectively as well. Write down baselines and examine those monthly, quarterly, semi-annually and yearly.

An example if a Muti-channel funnel in Google Analytics

Data Driven Content Marketing Best Practices

Lastly, it’s integral for your success to cover some of the best practices that are important to thoroughly understanding data driven content marketing. Here are just a few…. Feel free to add your own in the comments below.

1. Segment and/or update your subscriber lists – make sure you have your e-mail marketing lists set up to accommodate promoting niche e-mail users. It’s pointless to promote niche content to prospective students who aren’t interested in that degree program, so make sure your e-mail lists are segmented to accommodate.
2. Focus on quality over quantity: clean up your lists – have you de-duped your e-mail subscriber lists lately? How about checking for spam and validating e-mail addresses? Spend some time every few months ensuring you have a quality list of e-mail subscribers.
3. Share data across departments – it’s always wise to share data that you gather from your research with other departments. Sometimes data you glean from how content performs on your site can help your PR department as well as sales or account managers. Imagine if a piece of content was providing a lot of use for online visitors, don’t you think a sales team or account management team could provide this content to help sell a student as well? Ensure you’re sharing data across multiple departments.
4. Execute using the data you find – certainly it’s one thing to research and have a lot of useful observations available, but how well are you actually executing? Make sure your follow through matches your intent with data driven content marketing.
5. Don’t make assumptions about your data – an incredible piece of advice is to really understand the data you’re looking at and avoiding assumptions with data. Avinash Kaushik has an insightful blog that provides great digital marketing advice, and one article “Eight Silly Data Myths Marketing People Believe That Get Them Fired“ is an awesome read. He goes over several myths with data that you should avoid, and helps you in understanding some of the basic concepts data should help you observe.

Data driven content marketing is the smart way to execute content. Use these tips to help you propel your content marketing strategy to the next level.

Attend our upcoming webinar about data driven content marketing to learn more! I will be hosting it on June 11th at 11 AM PST/2 PM EST and it’s free to join.

Content curation on your website can be a very powerful tool. Curation can create brand authority and awareness, all the while connecting your company to outside sources that can help to improve your blog presence. I sat down to chat with Pawan Deshpande of Curata and Bill Flitter of Dlvr.it to talk about curation’s benefits for businesses and the best tools to use to get the most out of your effort.

Transcription

Arnie:  Hello, everyone. I’m Arnie Kuenn, with Vertical Measures. Welcome back to another Google Hangout. Today’s topic is going to be ‘Content Curation for your Website.’ I’ve got 2 great guests with me today; Bill and Pawan. Why don’t you say hello.

Bill:  Hello, guys.

Pawan:  Hey, everyone.

Arnie: Actually, what I thought I’d just do real quick here is maybe have Bill give a quick introduction of yourself, and then Pawan, and we’ll start off with the questions.

Bill: Perfect. Thanks, Arnie. Thanks for having me. My name is Bill Flitter, I am the Founder and CEO of dlvr.it, dlvr.it is a content syndication engine.

Arnie: Great. Pawan?

Pawan:  My name is Pawan Deshpande. I’m from Boston, Massachusetts. I’m also a Founder and CEO, but of Curata, which is a content curation platform.

Arnie: Great. As I mentioned and you just covered as well Pawan, we’re going to talk about content curation. I do have a couple of questions. The very first one, I think I’ll let Bill field this one, is what is curation and what are the benefits for a business?

Bill: What is curation and the benefits for business? I always think about curation as the side dish to your main course; it’s the vegetables to that steak dinner that you’re having. It connects you to outside sources of content that might help you improve your own blog, Twitter feed, or Facebook feed, whatever it might be. It helps you create awareness with customers and prospects, it keeps you top-of-mind. I think of it as that filler between your blog posts on Mondays, and you might curate a few pieces on Tuesday.

It creates awareness with your peers. If you’re looking to connect or network with other people, I might say, “Pawan is the expert in curation. I might want to start following him.” It’s a great validation for Pawan, and I might start bringing in his content and commenting on it. Most people are following where their own content is going. It’s really that little nudge that says, “Pawan, I’m here. Come check me out, too.”

Lastly, thought leadership; what do you want your business to stand for? It just reinforces. It’s another building block you can add to reinforce what you want your brand to stand for.

Arnie: Super. Pawan, I guess maybe you could talk about also . . . I think we have the description, but maybe the benefits to a business. Also just how our clients or businesses can go about and curate content or aggregate content for their website.

Pawan: Sure. Content curation, there’s a lot of definitions floating out there. My favorite one is one by Roje Bargo and it goes something like this; these aren’t the exact words, but he says it’s the process where people are continually finding, organizing, and sharing the best and most relevant content online on the specific topic or issue. I think there’s a few key parts of the definition there that really resonate with me: One is that it’s a person; someone is doing it, it’s not an algorithm, it’s a human who’s going out there and curating the content. Two, is it’s something you continually do. It’s not a one-time thing, but you’re constantly staying on top of the latest and greatest content on your specific topic or issue. The last piece is just that; it’s on a specific topic or issue. You’re not trying to find everything under the sun, but only the best and most relevant content.

In many ways, an easy way to think about this is think about what curators do. Curators in the old world, in museums or art curators, they’re going and finding interesting pieces of art, bringing it together in a gallery, organizing it, adding didactic labels to help you describe what that content is. Then lastly, open up to a larger audience. In the online world, you’re doing a very similar thing; you’re bringing together content, adding your own perspective and value, and then sharing it with a larger audience. You’re adding value not by creating original content or writing blog posts, which you can do independent of curation, but you’re adding value by bringing together other peoples’ content and creating an experience for users.

When we think of benefits of doing that, it’s the same benefits you get for any content marketing program. Content can help with search engine optimization, it can help with thought leadership as Bill mentioned, it can help with brand awareness, it can help with social media, lead generation, driving traffic. You get all the same benefits, but with curation, you get to be more consistent, more regular about it, than creating all the content yourself which can be, frankly, very tedious.

Arnie: Absolutely. Maybe I’ll ask both, I’ll switch back to Bill real quick. Have you found your …. 7 times a week? Once a week?

Bill:  Arnie, can you repeat the question? I’m sorry.

Arnie:  Did I freeze up a little bit?

Bill: Yeah, you froze up a little bit.

Arnie: Okay. I was just wondering. It was a long question; but I’m just wondering if you saw any best practices from a curation standpoint, whether people post once a week, 3 times a week, 7 times a week, and what the ROI might be if you’ve seen trends along those lines?

Bill: Yeah. It’s something that I recently have looked at quite a bit, because we do a lot of curation on our own blog and our social media streams. I find that if I have a steady stream of content, be that my own or from third-parties, our traffic to our website stays very constant, even signups. Even if I’m pulling in third-party content, let’s say from Pawan, and I want to do something on curation, what I’ve noticed is signups for our service delivering increased. When I don’t do that, they drop down. We’re seeing on any given day, 100 new signups if I keep it steady.

Again, I write some original content, that steak I talked about, then I’m pulling in the vegetables, those side dishes here and there. If I can keep a steady rhythm of that, we personally are seeing a definite increase in our traffic to our website, but also signups to our service.

Arnie: Wow. That’s some great insights. Pawan, what would you say would be best practices from a frequency standpoint?

Pawan: Frequency, it really depends on the channel. If its email newsletters, a lot of our customers curate content everyday; they’re putting out email newsletters out there, which is unheard of for a lot of email marketers, they think they’ll burn the list. With curation, because it’s third-party content, it’s very informational. People actually want to get that content every day and the open rates tend to be very high, so it’s a different form of email. Social media, it’s more than once a day, but it’s not all at once. It’s not like you go curate it and push it all at once. It’s sequencing it throughout the day. Then your website, you want to update that incrementally, as well.

Normally, what I’ve seen is people maybe do a dozen curated articles a day, and then drip that out throughout the day so it’s roughly maybe once an hour. Then they write maybe 2 or 3 original pieces of content a week. Then every day they have a daily email news aggregate which is a digest of those dozen or so articles that they’ve put together. That seems to work well.

Arnie: Great. Then I have one last question. This one might be a little unfair for Pawan, we’ll start with you, but what tools would you recommend from a content curation standpoint? Did I freeze

Bill:  No, you’re good.

Arnie: I was sending that question to Pawan.

Pawan: I would say if you want to start curating, I say walk, jog, then run. If you want to walk, get comfortable sharing third-party content; you don’t need tools for this. If you already have a Twitter account, a lot of people just Tweet about themselves, a status update, or maybe a link to a blog post that they wrote. Start getting comfortable sharing out content that goes through third-parties. That’s the walk.

Next, if you want to jog, get a little bit more third-party content in your content marketing mix. Maybe if you have a blog, do a weekly best industry blog post roundup once a week. Find good third-party content, piece it together, make a digest, publish it out. Then if you want to run, that’s when you start to have to use dedicated content curation tools and that’s where out plug-in, our own product Curata here; that’s really when you want to do curation on a very consistent basis, and it really becomes a main part of your content marketing mix.

Bill: What we use, I use a series of tools. I go to Google Alerts, so I’ve created a word cloud of all the things that I want to be associated with, what I want my brand to be associated with. What I do is then put those into . . . or create Google Alerts from those. Then obviously, it’s scanning the web looking for content that matches those keywords and keyphrases. I bring those into our deliverate tool, and then that allows me to go one-by-one looking at those headlines to see, “That’s great. Yeah, I want to write about that.” I read through the article once I see that alert, or delete it if it doesn’t make any sense.

Then I also use . . . I follow hashtags on Twitter. I might look at #contentmarketing or #curation. I follow that on Twitter, looking through relevant content that people might add, and then easily just retweeting it through Hoots Tweet or whatever other tool I might be using at the time. Curata, great tool. Some people use Storify or PaperLead to assemble all the curated pieces and create a dedicated website for that.

I know Curata has a few plug-ins. I’m testing a few WordPress plug-ins. I haven’t found the ideal one just yet so I can’t make a recommendation there, but if someone does have a recommendation for a great WordPress plug-in to pull some of that content, then I am all ears.

Arnie: Remember, they can leave it in the comments below this blog post.

Bill: Exactly.

Arnie: Super. Listen; that is all the time we have. I want to thank both Bill and Pawan very much for your time. Some really, really rock-solid information there. I appreciate it. Stay tuned, we’ll have another Hangout next month. I don’t know yet what the topic will be, but I’m sure it’ll be a good one. Thanks guys for helping out. Appreciate it.

Bill: Thanks, Arnie.

Bill Flitter is serial entrepreneur with years of experience in online advertising. Bill’s newest venture, Dlvr.it, helps bloggers, brands and publishers syndicate their content and broaden their reach across the social web. He is also the creator of the Content Marketing Strategies Conference, a yearly event that fosters conversation around content marketing.

Pawan Deshpande is the founder and CEO of Curata. Pawan is responsible for the company’s vision, management and advanced development initiatives. Pawan has held software engineering positions at Microsoft, Google and other startups where he was awarded patents in social networking and machine transliteration areas.