Ever start writing a piece and wonder if anyone’s even gonna read it?
Not to make you paranoid, but … you should be paranoid.
Chartbeat conducted a study in 2013 that indicates most readers are only getting about 60% of the way through a piece of content. The other 40% of the stuff you wrote? Well, you could’ve gone home early that day. (You can read more about that study here.)
This post originally appeared on HubSpot’s Agency Post. To read more content like this, subscribe to Agency Post.
Imagine that a couple of your friends convince you to give speed dating a try.
“It’ll be fun,” they insist.
Struggling to earn the trust of potential new customers?
Before you can expect them to open up their wallets, you need to start the sales process by demonstrating your ability to deliver on what your product or service promises.
Sure, you could tell them that you’re great at X and that you’re light-years ahead of the competition when it comes to Y and Z, but at the end of that day, that’s just lip service.
Unsatisfied by his current job, Tom Dickson found himself with three things: the need for a change, a passion for bread making, and a $10 vacuum motor.
In search of a way to combine them, Dickson started his own blender company, Blendtec. Unfortunately, he quickly found that generating buzz for blenders wasn’t all that easy.
Then one day, his marketing director found inspiration in a pile of sawdust left behind by one of Dickson’s “blender durability experiments,” and proposed an idea that would soon propel Blendtec to fame.
Restaurant Owner Roy. Caregiver Katie. Landscaper Larry. Do you know who your business’s buyer personas are? And exactly how much do you know about them?
Buyer personas (sometimes referred to as marketing personas) are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. Personas help us all — in marketing, sales, product, and services — internalize the ideal customer we’re trying to attract, and relate to our customers as real humans.
Do you know how your content marketing team stacks up? It’s incredibly useful to have an idea of what other content marketers are up to and how they’re doing. Not only will it give you a feel for the performance level other content teams are achieving, but it’ll also help you find and fix gaps in your own team’s processes and performance.
In the ever-evolving world of content marketing, staying on top of statistics, benchmarks, and trends is especially important.
Wouldn’t it be great if creating infographics was as simple as writing regular ol’ text-based blog posts? Unfortunately, the reality is that making visual content like this usually takes a lot more time, effort, and let’s face it — skill — than the written word. Usually.
But considering the popularity and effectiveness of visual content in marketing today, you can’t just afford to throw in the towel.
You all know the Old Spice guy, right?
The years-old “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign was memorable for many reasons, but one of them was that it gave Old Spice a voice — voice that came through in every video, commercial, tagline, Facebook update, tweet … you name it.
As a marketer, every day I hear something new. People are always trying to come up with the next big slogan or rhyme scheme. Due to the rigors of client demands and the drudgery of approval processes, when marketers are actually allowed to unleash their creativity on their colleagues and competitors, some pretty unusual terms get invented.
According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2015 B2B and B2C benchmark reports, less than a quarter of marketers are able to prove content marketing ROI. Measurement is a key area of difficulty: 49% of B2B and 51% of B2C marketers were challenged with measuring content effectiveness in 2014.
While definitions of effectiveness may vary by team, it should at least be simple to figure out if you’re successful once you define what “success” means. Here are two simple steps to establish a baseline for content effectiveness and prove if it’s failing (or not).
You’ve probably heard how paramount blogging is to the success of your marketing. Without it, your SEO will tank, you’ll have nothing to promote in social media, you’ll have no clout with your leads and customers, and you’ll have fewer pages to put those valuable calls-to-action that generate inbound leads. Need I say more?
So why, oh why, does almost every marketer I talk to have a laundry list of excuses for why they can’t consistently blog?
These days may go down as the best of times and worst of times for the corners of the internet that are usually too shadowy for the general public.
BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol that’s been used to power hotbeds for pirated content like Pirate Bay, is relishing the present.
This post originally appeared on the Sales section of Inbound Hub. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales.
Read the following two sentences:
1) My session at INBOUND will make you see
As much as we hate to admit it, sometimes the headline of your blog post can be even more important than the article itself.
Think about how many headlines you read every day while searching online or checking social media. What makes you actually click on the article and read it? Usually, it’s the headline — which is why it’s so important to spend time coming up with a good one.
