YouTube is a destination for hosted video, but may soon become a social network. According to a report from Venture Beat, YouTube is working on a project known internally as Backstage that lets users post text, video and polls to their personal channel page. Those posts may also be made available via other services. If you posted a funny picture to YouTube, there may be an option to send it to Twitter, Facebook or other services, much like the Instagram previews and links you see on Twitter. It's an interesting move for YouTube if it pans out, and might see…
Have you marketed on Facebook but haven't seen any significant improvement in your sales?
Sometimes it may seem easier to focus your energy elsewhere in your business rather than pursue a medium that is constantly evolving and changing.
However there is a simple 4-step process which is achieving amazing results for businesses world-wide and it can help to bring your Facebook strategy back into focus.
It follows the funnel strategy that you have probably heard about before but may not know how to effectively implement on Facebook.
It looks like this:
Step 1: The top of the funnel
Here, the strategy is simple. You are merely trying to get on our prospects radar.
It doesn't matter what you are selling, the important action in this step is to provide value to the prospect. This is done by providing content that relates to them and strengthens their belief that we share a common interest and values.
It's too early to be pitching a sale to this prospect as they haven't had a chance to develop confidence in the brand or service.
A simple video of a ring can create a perfect initial engagement with a prospect and begin to offer them value.
A quality video, boosted to the right audience is a great first way of connecting with potential prospects.
Another way is simply a “Like” ad. With this new group you can begin filtering through to find the ones that actually are interested in your offering. They make themselves known by liking your page, which is invaluable as we move through to step 2.
(an example of how a Facebook like ad appears in the news feed)
Step 2: The Middle of the Funnel
In the middle of the funnel we have now isolated an audience group that have indicated some interest in our offering and are primed for further engagement.
Website custom audience (those that have viewed your website in the past 90 days)
It's important to think of the amount of trust and engagement that is needed to make a purchase, and to vary the engagement strategies accordingly. For example someone looking to choose an accountant may need months of nurturing with good content. This is because people don't select an accountant very often and a lot of trust may be needed for a prospect to come to a decision.
Conversely a product like a $100 watch may be bought on impulse. You may just need to show a few images of some influencers wearing the watch and some text on the watch features to prepare them to make a purchase.
Often, the less common a decision is made, the more expensive the purchase and the more research a customer will need to do before deciding they are ready to purchase. Which means the longer duration in the step 2 phase.
Step 3: The middle of the funnel…again
Ok, we have built an audience, we have engaged the audience, now what?
Well, remember that we don't own the audience. Facebook can change their algorithm at any time (although they are aligned with the best interests of the advertisers). Now is the perfect time to start building your email list. It's also great to have touch points with your audience on multiple platforms and email performs as well.
Facebook is an amazing platform to build your email list. It's very scalable & extremely effective.
There are usually two main strategies implemented here to make the email acquisition strategy as effective as possible:
The Viral Promotion
The Opt-In Offer
The Viral Promotion – This is a strategy that involves a significant giveaway that ensures those that enter are potential customers. If you are a bike store, you can give away a helmet or bike gear. It can get a little trickier if you are in a services business like an accountant so you may have to get creative, perhaps giving away a business book pack or seminar tickets.
The “viral” secret – It's always better to have a way to encourage those that enter to share, which is why you build a viral thank you page where the entrants can invite friends to win either more entries or more prizes. We find that this viral element on average increases the number of entries by 40%!
The Opt-in Offer – This is simply a free “giveaway” in exchange for an email and it can come in many forms. Webinars, e-books, free samples, audio clips, video series, content extensions, seminars & more.
Find something that is providing value to the audience and also suggests that they could be a potential buyer of your product. For example a scarf company may giveaway a book on 25 different ways to wear your scarf this summer and an accountant may giveaway 5 tips to minimize your tax leading up to the end of the financial year.
Step 4: The bottom of the funnel
You've selected an audience, isolated them, engaged them and even added them to your email list. Now it's time to convert this investment into revenue.
By stage 4 your audience should have a connection to your product and they definitely have shown interest in it. There are many strategies you can implement during stage 4 but the most important to focus on are:
Emails asking for the sale
Retargeting from your website browsers but not buyers
Carousel/Direct ads from Facebook
Let's take a deeper look at each.
Emails – Once a user signs up for a promotion it's great to email them after the promotion to let them know the results. Then you can follow up with some emails introducing them to your company, what you stand for, why you started, what problem you solve & then ask for the sale. Emails are perfect for increasing customer lifetime and creating a foundation to build upon.
Retargeting – These are those ads that follow you around after you have visited a website. All the biggest ecommerce websites use this because it works. You can set it up on Facebook to follow around your website visitors that haven't purchased for 14 days with product shots to get people back and ready to buy.
Direct – This is a perfect chance to showcase your products to start cheaply bringing people to your website. A carousel ad can show up to 10 images for the cost of 1 impression and can be great to showcase many different benefits or a range of different products.
Wrap
By undertaking the 4 step funnel strategy you have developed a clear and concise path to Facebook marketing success that will continue to build meaningful relationships with your customers and create significant financial gains for your digital marketing strategy.
Happy marketing!
Guest Author: Helping businesses grow is what drives Maxwell Hertan. As the Founder and Director of Megaphone Marketing, his focus is on delivering data driven results, ensuring every client has the highest return possible.
These days everyone wants to become a freelancer and work for themselves.
The problem is that everyone who doesn't really have a marketable skill, but DOES have a computer and access to the internet, decides that they are going to be a copywriter.
All you have to do is string some words together to make a sentence, string sentences together to make a paragraph and string paragraphs together to make one whole page of words that kind of make sense.
That's easy enough and any idiot could do it right?
WRONG!!
SEO copywriting is not just about stringing words together, it is about finding the RIGHT words that do what you need them to.
So if you REALLY want to become a copywriter, here are some simple mistakes you should avoid at all costs!
1. Not doing your research
Before you put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, it is crucial that you have done as much research as possible and that you know as much as you can about whatever you're planning on writing about.
Now this does not mean that you need to be an industry expert before you can write an article about something. But it does mean you need to UNDERSTAND what you are going to say – because if you don't understand yourself, how is anyone else going to understand you?
This is ESPECIALLY important if you're writing anything that uses technical jargon of any kind, because an expert will know that you had NO IDEA what you were talking about.
The consequence? You're going to lose a client if you're freelancing, and lose potential customers/visitors if you're writing for your own site!
What you should do:
Research everything before you've even started writing
Don't rely on a single source for all your research
Don't stop researching until you understand what you're writing about, who you're writing for and every fact you're using for your piece
2. Believing your spellcheck is all powerful
Many inexperienced copywriters believe in the power of their spellcheck, but as this poem shows, just because your spellcheck hasn't marked a word as incorrect – it doesn't mean the spelling is right!
Most word processing programs also have a grammar check, but they use an algorithm to find and mark those errors. And when a computer is determining what is wrong and what is right – it is wrong A LOT of the time!
People like to make fun of the 'grammar Nazis', but ¾ of web users pay attention to spelling and grammar on a website, and over 50% of them will avoid doing business with a company that makes obvious spelling and grammar mistakes!
What you should do:
Never assume your spellchecker will catch every spelling and grammar mistake, or that it is always right
If you're unsure about the spelling of a word, then check it
Proofread what you've written, then take a break and read it again – and then another time!
3. Overcomplicating everything you write
Another thing that exasperates me? The propensity of alleged wordsmiths to employ grandiose or ostentatious verbiage, despite the fact that they could leverage unembellished and breviloquent phraseology.
Translation: Another thing that drives me crazy? The habit of so called writers to use big or fancy words, even when they could use plain and simple language!
So many writers who are not actually writers like to use big, fancy words and find over complicated ways to say anything and everything. The main reason? They're trying to convince everyone that they ARE writers and that they're really, really smart!
But at the end of the day all you do is confuse people and ironically, the more big words you use – the less intelligent the average person thinks you are!
What you should do:
If you wouldn't say a word when you're talking to a friend, then don't write it
Apply the KISS principle and Keep It Simple Stupid
Avoid using words that other people might not understand, even if you do
4. Forcing your opinions as facts
I don't care how much of an expert you are on the subject you're writing about, unless you can back up what you're saying with verifiable facts then it is just an opinion. And even then, people can have the exact same facts and still have different opinions!
So avoid presenting your opinions as cold hard facts, because people might see that as you trying to force your opinion on them – even when you DO have facts to back up what you have to say. And I don't know about you, but I avoid anyone who shoves their opinion down my throat!
Your facts had also better be accurate, because I can guarantee that some, if not all of your readers, will check them! If they're wrong, there are people who will point this out and it won't be long before your credibility is destroyed.
What you should do:
Make sure you have facts to back up your opinions
Be clear about when something is an opinion, and when something is a fact
List your sources when you do use facts
5. Using your keywords like punctuation
When you're writing content that is going to be used online, you would do anything to find that ideal formula that will guarantee whatever you've written ALWAYS ends up on the first page of Google – or any other search engines your readers may use!
And while using keywords is an important part of helping your piece rank well in organic search results, trying to manipulate your position by stuffing your copy full of unnecessary and unnatural keywords is NOT going to work, and will actually harm your rankings!
You want to attract visitors to your site, but you want anyone who arrives on your site to stay there. But using keyword stuffing as an SEO tactic often results in whatever you've written sounding like a load of gibberish – which will just make any visitors hightail it out of there! If you want to get better at search engine optimization, it might help you to do some research on the topic, for example by looking for professional literature at Kohl's.
What you should do:
The quality of your content is more important than how many times you use a keyword
Make sure your keywords flow naturally with the rest of your piece by focussing on the topic
Check how effective your keyword use is by using an SEO plugin or third party software
6. Not being clear about what you're saying
I can't tell you how many times I have read or heard something and then spent several minutes trying to figure out what exactly that one sentence is supposed to mean, before finally giving up in frustration and finding what I need elsewhere.
Sometimes this is because the copywriter didn't actually understand the word they used, or because they've accidently put the right word in the wrong place – thus changing the meaning of the entire sentence!
Other times, this is because someone is not writing in their native language. They know what they want to say and maybe they're brilliant wordsmiths in their native language, but they are not as bilingual as they like to believe they are!
What you should do:
Make sure you know exactly what every word that you use means
Avoid confusion by making sure your grammar is perfect
If you're unsure whether your meaning is clear, then change the word or the sentence until it is
Closing thoughts
If you've done copywriting for more than a week then you know that it is not as easy as you thought it would be, and that it is a lot easier to get it wrong than it is to get it right. In fact, there are loads of OTHER copywriting mistakes I haven't even mentioned!
But if you're determined to turn copywriting into a full time career, and you're serious about being the very best copywriter that you could possibly be – then don't stop writing and don't stop asking for feedback on your writing!
One last question – what embarrassing copywriting mistakes have you seen lately?
Guest Author: Megan Govender is a born and bred South African with a passion for the written word who is happy to be earning a living while doing something she loves. She has been a copywriter for quite some years now and is always glad to help others discover more about the art of writing.
Campaign marketing is the essence of any traditional promotion for almost any brand or business. Summer sales, Easter sales and stock clearance sales. The list goes on.
But there is another type of marketing that is often overlooked.
Continuous marketing.
Other naming options? “Marathon” marketing, “Forest Gump” marketing and “Always On” marketing. On the global web that never sleeps this content marketing strategy is key to success.
Silence is not golden for content marketing superheroes who want to stand out and save the world and their business.
Google and social networks don't tolerate silence
Think you can just use content every now and then? A blog once a month, a Facebook post once a week and Twitter every second day?
Do that and the search engines will think you are irrelevant. The obsessed social fans will think you have taken a holiday or maybe even died.
So, campaigns are still vital but “always on marketing” is now essential.
The content marketing beast needs to be fed. The search engines require tickling and the prospects need to be reminded that you are alive and kicking online.
Content needs to move to get discovered.
Brand building requires more than unique content, mind bending insights or ideas with gravitas. It needs to ripple across the web. Dropping into inboxes, events, LinkedIn and online conversations.
Just having it sit on your site is not enough. It needs to go on a journey.
Content has many goals
It was a conversation in Dublin over a pint of Guinness.
A discussion about the transforming content landscape. Led by Buzzfeed and Snapchat. In a noisy world that has the human attention span below that of a goldfish we are almost required to resort to the inane to capture the initial response.
Now we need to add a bit of augmented reality. Pokemon Go. Also add a dose of scarcity. Content that only lasts 24 hours, Snapchat and Instagram stories.
Read and view it before it's gone!
Get your attention with cats and babies and then I will send the serious stuff!
So content has a few goals to achieve.
“Content needs to educate, inform, entertain and inspire”
Content creation tension
Content marketing has a constant tension between what can be seen as two polar opposites. Attention seeking and trust. But they have to work together.
Buzzfeed and the tabloid press are kings of the clickbait headlines that begs for attention. Trustworthy quality content – In old media this is investigative journalism and all that surrounds it. The world and the marketer needs both.
As content marketers we often want to get that piece of content to go viral. So how far should we go with using babies and cat videos? There is no right or wrong answer.
For the sake of simplicity we can break up content marketing tactics into 3 types.
A: Traffic generation – Tempt people to click through to your website, blog or landing page and share.
B: Engagement – The strategic use of educational, informative, entertaining and inspiring content that builds credibility, trust and linking
C: Conversion – Capturing those all important leads and producing sales is the real end game for traffic and engagement. Otherwise it is just noise.
But the reality is that they don't stand alone and they are often woven together in a matrix of attention, engagement and a call to action. Although some are better than others at traffic generation and some stand out for engagement.
Let's dive in and discover what are the different types of content that will help make you a superhero for your brand.
Traffic generation
Web traffic is the foundation for success online. It is the oxygen that a blog, a website needs to grow, survive and thrive.
So what types of content can drive traffic?
#1. Photos and images
The mobile obsessed world we live in has made this a core tactical skillset for the modern marketer. Using screenshots, authentic and personal content. Images that touches hearts and minds. Pictures that pose a question, pique our curiosity or intrigue.
Buzzfeed's photo of a young girl standing in front of a burning house with a devilish grin is one of those.
According to knowyourmeme.com, the original photo was posted to Buzzfeed on October 27th, 2008 with a follow up post the next day highlighting the best derivatives, followed by similar posts on Digg, TrendHunter, eBaum's World Forum and Best Week Ever. Over the years, it appeared on Cracked and also the Huffington Post.
These work well on Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Embed them in blog posts and people love to share them.
It's light snackable content.
It's the start of brand awareness building. Its the equivalent of the baby or cat image for the quasi intellectuals.
This one tweet with an infographic received 70 retweets, 26 likes and 26 link clicks for a total of 126 total engagements. It generated those all important clicks to the blog and sharing.
4. Headlines
Headlines are the shortest type of content that we have in our marketing toolbox.
But don't be beguiled by what at first seems a simple skill that you should ignore. They are maybe your most important tactic. It's where the customer seduction begins.
David Ogilvy the “Advertising Guru” was known for agonizing over the headline.
Why?
Because 5 times more people read the headline than the article, advertisement or your post.
What are some headlines that work?
There are many formulaic headline types. And these work for ebook titles, blog posts and news articles. They are required for video titles, white papers and even downloadable PDF's.
ViralNova's headline specialty is the curiosity gap tactic. You might not want to take their tactic that far. But the use of people's innate curiosity to drive traffic and engagement is a proven winner.
Most boring industries struggle to write those attention grabbing headlines. It's seen as superficial and below the dignity of a serious industry. But it's a tactic you can't ignore if you want to make it bigger online.
Traffic is one thing and cats, GIF's and babies photos have maybe got your audience's attention. Now it's time to keep them on the page or start to believe that you are indeed a superhero.
What types of content have an edge in achieving this marketing goal?
5. Long form content
When digital marketers started to discover the power of content to improve SEO they started posting high volumes of blog posts. This was the quantity part of the SEO equation. But this also led to poor quality. Google then adapted its algorithms to reduce their effectiveness. It added tweaks that gave more value to quality content long form content.
Today we are seeing the rise of long form content from 1,000 words plus that have 2 major benefits for brand building and marketing optimisation
Positions your brand as the expert in your industry
It impacts search engine optimisation and link building for building website authority.
Great examples of this tactical content are sites like Buffer, Neil Patel and Canva.com. This post below on the “Design School” blog on Canva is over 3,000 words
On our blog we have a standard of 1,000 plus words for all guest posts. Often they are 1,500-2,000 words.
6. Short videos
These can entertain, educate or sell. My blogging course on Udemy was built on videos where were none went over 7 minutes. This was based on their engagement research.
Other research has shown that 2 minutes is optimum for maximizing engagement when you are not training but maybe just entertaining.
My keynote speaking showreel is no longer than 2 minutes.
Buzzfeed has taken social short video to a whole new level with it's new division – BuzzFeed Motion Pictures.
Frank Peretti (Buzzfeed's CEO) said the company's “little experiment” began when Facebook started allowing autoplay for in-feed videos.
A big part of this experiment is their “Tasty” Food network and is a great example of pushing your content to its own platform and also publishing on the world's biggest social network.
It is maybe the top performing video channel on the planet with over 360 million viewers a month. The Facebook auto playing videos are mostly under 2 minutes.
This one video has nearly 15 million views and counting.
7. Live streaming video
Thinking like a publisher for many means producing a book, a magazine or a newspaper. Then it expanded to bloggers but the game has got a lot bigger. Innovative content marketing has expanded the range to much more.
Welcome to “Live Streaming Video”
Live streaming video is one of the hot content trends. It sort of started with Google+ hangouts, Periscope hit the scene about a year ago and now Facebook Live is now trying to eat everyone's lunch.
A fun example of what could be called a “highly engaging” Facebook Live video is Candace Payne's “Chewbacca mask” video where she tries it on in her car in the parking lot and laughs herself stupid after buying it at Kohl's.
It currently has received over 160 million views. So from engagement to sales. The mask sold out at Kohl's, Walmart, Target and ToysRUs.com
What is great about this type of content that moves from engagement to sales is that it is not over produced and it's not about selling.
It's about starting with engagement. But there is no guarantee that it will go viral like this did.
8. Podcasts
Engagement with the written word is one thing but listening to someone's voice is visceral, magnetic and very human. That is the power of the podcast.
But Podcasts as content do not travel well on the social web. They are maybe close to the bottom of the sharing type content bucket. So building an audience first on either social or email with other more viral shareable content is recommended.
So for building trust, credibility and engagement they are hard to beat. Pat Flynn is one of the masters of this content genre.
9. Crowd sourced content
What is the biggest challenge for a content marketer?
It is a simple two word sentence. Content creation. Creating quality content takes time and resources.
One solution? Technology.
Software as a service platforms have made this possible to do at scale. Because at the end of the day content creation is one of the biggest challenges for bloggers and businesses.
Second solution? Trade attention for content.
If you have built up a blog or website that already has traffic then you can give that all important traffic and attention to other writers and new bloggers. This is guest writing. Often done for free to help up and coming bloggers and marketers to ride on the back of a credible site that already has traffic.
Conversion
This is a big topic but we will distil it into the top types of content reknown for turning traffic into leads. Here are five that you need to master as a professional digital marketer.
10. Landing pages
Landing pages are often not seen as content. But they are an optimal intersection of a range of multimedia. Headlines, copywriting, videos, color and images. And with a call to action that is designed to generate a response.
To produce the right reaction they can use a range of tactics including scarcity, social proof and tempting value.
If you want to generate a tangible return on investment for your online marketing efforts then these are “ROI- 101”. Essential and necessary. They can be short and long.
Where do you use them? Everywhere.
Ebook opt-ins, registering for webinars, video sales letters and when launching a new product, an online course or a new book
Simple can work well.
SumoMe recommends that you use very minimalist landing pages for capturing email optins. Sometimes as marketers and designers we try and be too clever. You're just trying to achieve one thing. An email sign-up.
Landing pages in the past were major projects and expensive to design and create. Hire a designer, hunt down a copywriter, invest $2,000 and then wait for weeks for the developer to code the web page. That was the norm. Today with technology like Leadpages you can create them in minutes.
You can also see what are are the top performing landing pages based on the data. And conversion rate is the metric you need to be watching.
11. Webinars
Educating and building credibility and engagement at scale is what webinars do well. They are a combination of verbal and visual content. As a business you can use them to educate and even make special offers at the end of the presentation.
But they can be used to supercharge your conversions. When you collaborate with an influencer or non-competing business partner they are one of the fastest ways to grow an email list. So how does that work?
You provide the content (the webinar slide deck) and they then market it to their email list and social networks. To attend the webinar they have to enter their email address. You can add several hundred prospects to you customer database in a few days with this conversion content tactic.
Here is an optimum design that I used from Leadpages to create the landing page for the webinar that I ran with a good friend of mine Tom Poland.
What you will need:
Email marketing platform – MailChimp, Aweber or Infusionsoft
Webinar software or app – GoToWebinar or WebinarJam
Leadpages landing page – You can use the GoToWebinar registration page but it is far from optimum
Powerpoint or Apple's Keynote for the visuals
12. Ebooks
Ebooks are still one of the top performing lead magnets.
I have found that as a content opt-in tactic they surpass almost any other type of content. The downside is that a good one takes time to write and design.
The best performing ebooks tend to be created around one of the biggest pain points that your prospects and potential customers have. Often for a small business in a digital world it is getting traffic to your website.
My top performing ebook is “101+ Tips to Grow Your Web Traffic” that has been downloaded over 40,000 times. So…if you haven't got it then you can grab it >>> HERE
#13. Copywriting
The ultimate goal of copywriting as used in advertising is to sell products. They are at the sharp end of the content marketing funnel.
Great copywriting will touch hearts and minds. It gains attention. It invokes or suggests a response.
It is required for landing pages, blog posts, tweets and even sent with that image or photo (just to name a few). But email is one of the the core media types that requires skilled copywriting. It uses the power of words alone to cut through the clutter that bombards us every day.
It was an “aha” moment for me when after writing an email to market a conference I received a reply I will never forget.
The email:
The response:
It was the best “No” I had ever received.
But getting an email in return as if you had written to them alone is when it seems worthwhile. That is the magic of copywriting that touches a human heart.
And that is the true art of sales copywriting.
#14. Interactive content
It was in 2008 I stumbled upon Hubspot and discovered their website assessment tool. I registered and checked it almost every day to see my blog was progressing. It was the most powerful engagement content I have ever discovered then and since.
According to ION interactive Quizzes, calculators and assessment tools are some of the top types of interactive content and Buzzfeed uses them a lot.
Quizzes are one of the most shared types of content on the web. According to BuzzSumo data the average quiz gets shared 1,900 times. And one of the top shared quizzes (with 4 million shares) was “What Color Is Your Aura”
One of Buzzfeed's most popular with over 2 million views is “Why Are You Single”
However, they have a more serious superpower. Converting traffic and sharing into an email. So how effective are they in turning traffic and engagement into leads and sales?
According to a case study where Media Vision Interactive ran an Interactive content focused campaign where they increased their warm leads by 300%.
