Fibre Marketing

Tag: Content Marketing

7 Ways to Come Up with Engaging Content Ideas

Posted on by Chloe

In order to create a solid content marketing plan, you need to be coming up with fresh new content ideas constantly.

These ideas need to cover topics your audience loves, solve their problems, answer their questions, address their needs and build loyalty. If that wasn’t enough, you need to make sure these ideas are also good enough that they can boost your Google rankings and continue to grow your business.

It’s certainly not an easy task and pulling a few ideas off the top of your head isn’t almost certainly isn’t going to deliver the results that your business deserves.

If you want to stand out in a crowded market and more effectively market your business, you’ll need to do your research before you start creating your content. Here are seven of the easiest ways you can get started.

1. Ask your audience

Creating content your audience will love is key when it comes to building your business and increasing your search rankings.

For that reason, one of the best ways to get content ideas is to reach out and ask them. Post a question on social media, create a poll or even send an email to your blog subscribers and ask them what they’d like you to help them with.

Not only will this leave them feeling like you care about your customers, it will also help ensure you’re writing for your readers, and not just the search engines.

2. Use your analytics

You can use your Google Analytics, Google Search Console and social media analytics to find out which of your content pieces your audience resonates with the most.

Ask yourself questions such as;

  • Do they prefer your posts on a particular topic?
  • What do they like and share the most?
  • How did they find your site and what keeps them there?

Once you’ve gathered your information, you can use it to create ideas for new content that are likely to generate interest and engagement from your readers and add value.

3. Explore Google’s ‘People Also Ask’ feature

Have you ever done a Google search and, as you scrolled down, noticed a box titled ‘People also ask’ with drop down answers on the page? As the name suggests, this nifty feature uses an algorithm to connect your search term with other similar questions, making it really useful when coming up with new content ideas.

If you use these queries to create your content, and make sure it’s concise and well written, you could improve your rankings and appear here too.

But that’s not all. As Search Engine Watch points out, the People Also Ask feature could also help you develop more long term content plans; “…[People Also Ask] serves a more practical goal, beyond understanding your audience and topic better. If you search Google for your target query enough, you will soon start seeing certain searching patterns.”

4. Look at ‘Answer the Public’

Do you feel overwhelmed when given spreadsheets and big lists of keywords? Then you’ll love Answer the Public.

This tool gathers together current search engine data and uses it to generate phrases and questions that people are actually searching for. Then it gives you the results in a user-friendly mind-map format or easy-to-use data sets that you can instantly use to create new content.

If you haven’t tried it before, we highly recommend that you go ahead and do so.

5. Follow the latest trends

What do people are about at the moment? Are there any trends on social media and in news that are relevant to your business? If so, these can be a great starting point when it comes to generating content ideas. For maximum impact, make sure you don’t just share the news, but also adds something new and relevant to the conversation.

Staying up to date is easy to do. Simply read the news, check social media, research any national/international days relevant to your industry, and subscribe to the useful Google Trends notifications.

6. Check your competition

What are other businesses in your industry or niche creating content about? Have they covered topics you’ve not yet covered?

This can often be a great guide that will spark your inspiration and help identify any topics you’ve forgotten to talk about so far. You can then use this to add even more value to the conversation by perhaps sharing a different option or even going more deeply into a topic.

7. Use Google Search suggestions

Many businesses find they have plenty of general topic ideas for content but they’re not sure exactly how to refine these into high performing pieces of content. A great solution in this case is to turn to Google Search suggestions.

Simply type your core content idea into the search bar and it will suggest related phrases based on what you are searching for.

For example, if we were thinking about creating content on ‘remote working’, we could input these sentences and be given the following:

  • Remote working is bad uk
  • Remote working 2020
  • Remote working jobs

Again, these are based on real keyword searches so are likely to perform well when turned into content.

 

As we mentioned at the start of this post, finding new ideas for engaging content isn’t easy. But by using the tools and tricks we’ve suggested here, you’ll find plenty of inspiration for content that will keep readers and search engines happy.

The Importance of Creating Content During the Coronavirus Outbreak

Posted on by Chloe

The coronavirus pandemic that the world is experiencing at the moment is affecting everything about our daily lives – from how much we can see our loved ones, to how we are working.

For many businesses, this is a worrying time as they try to contend with changes in people’s consumption and spending habits, to looking after their staff and protecting them both in terms of their health and financially, and of course, considering the implications of potentially having high percentages of staff off sick at any given time.

Although it might not be ‘business as usual’, it is important for businesses to prepare for when the outbreak is over. Just because you might not be able to operate as normal, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be working on certain aspects of your business – and that your competitors aren’t sitting around idle!

The world of marketing, for example, doesn’t stop. In fact, online marketing has never been more important as more people begin to operate and communicate online. And one major aspect of online marketing is content creation.

Content Creation for Marketing During COVID-19

As fewer people are travelling, fewer people are out of the house and fewer people are visiting events, offline marketing is becoming less effective than before. Likewise, the world as a whole is spending more time online, looking for information and to be entertained – in other words, looking for content.

Content marketing concerns the creation of content, firstly enabling businesses to communicate clearly and accurately with their customers – and potential customers, but also to help them to establish themselves as a source of useful and reliable information, getting to the top of those all-important SERPs, and building their reputation. Content marketing is a great way to ensure that you are effectively marketing your business, not being left behind your competitors, whilst also being able to communicate effectively with your customer base.

Keep Customers Informed

It is important to keep your customers informed as to how your business is reacting to the coronavirus outbreak. It is not only good business practice but can also help to build relationships with your existing and potential customers. There are several ways that you can do this through your website, including:

  • Making announcements on your website with regards to the measures that you are taking to help your customers and staff to get through this difficult time
  • Adding to your FAQ section to cover questions that customers might have regarding how your business is dealing with COVID-19 – food hygiene or customer contact questions, for example
  • Updating opening hours, delivery options and contact phone numbers or emails to avoid frustration
  • Consider what people might want to know about your business in relation to COVID-19 and answer these queries in your content

Google My Business, Local SEO and Reviews

Google has also changed some of its rules for the duration of the outbreak and it is important that you adapt to these changes.

They have announced that they are changing Google My Business profiles, so that businesses can now change some of the details about how they are operating, including their opening hours and whether they do deliveries.

Google has also disabled the ability for people to write business reviews. It is important to allow your customers to communicate any problems that they have directly to you, so you should consider a different solution for the time being.

Social Media

Social media is a great way to show the more personal side of your business to the world. It is an excellent way to engage with your customers and reach out to new ones and show your fun side. Some of the most successful businesses in terms of social media are devising ways to get their customers involved, respond quickly to actions and if they’re lucky, go viral…

Email

Email gives you as a business direct access to someone’s letterbox and this can be a very valuable tool. What you need to do, however, is make sure that any emails that you send out are not deleted before they are even read, and stand out from the rest of the many emails that most of us receive each day about ‘what we’re doing about coronavirus’…

Try adding a personal touch, making it light-hearted, interesting, and human. Remember that a lot of people have a bit more time on their hands than normal and take this all into consideration when you are thinking about what you are going to put in your email.

Although your business might not be functioning as it normally does, it is important that you adapt how you are working to help your business to still be as effective as possible, and still be seen. And content marketing is a great place to start.

Back to Basics: Building Your Content Marketing Strategy

Posted on by Chloe

Developing a rock-solid content marketing strategy is essential when it comes to marketing your business online. It helps you to focus on the unique needs of your customers, allows you to connect with them more effectively and get the results that you are looking for.

Without it, there’s simply no way you can be sure of success.

Even if your content is smoking hot and provides a ton of value to your target audience, there’ll be no way of knowing if you’ve invested your time and money wisely. It’s akin to playing roulette with the future of your business.

However, we understand that it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the mere thought of building a content marketing strategy. That’s why we’ve decided to put together this short guide for you. You’ll learn how to get the fundamentals of building a content marketing strategy so you can reap the rewards.

Here’s what’s we’ll cover:

Step 1: Outline your goals

Step 2: Decide how you will measure your performance

Step 3: Create buyer personas

Step 4: Assess your current position

Step 5: Decide on your content channels & content types

Step 6: Identify and allocate resources

Step 7: Create a content calendar

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

Step 1: Outline your goals

Start by deciding what is most important to your business and developing a set of content marketing goals.

Do this and you’ll develop a laser-like focus on what matters most to your business and increase the chances of achieving what you set out to do. You won’t waste time. You won’t waste money. But you will get results.

Your goals depend entirely on the unique needs of your business and where you currently are in terms of growth. Startups, for example, will often develop a vastly different set of goals to an established business with a great reputation.

That’s why it’s so important to consider what matters to you at this point in time. Do you want to increase revenue? Drive more business to your website? Boost engagement? Build authority in your field?

Whilst doing this, it’s a good idea to consult your team for suggestions on how you can grow your business. They usually have insight into specific areas of your business that you might not.

Once you have put together a few ideas, also consider how these could potentially benefit your clients and your business.

Step 2: Decide how you will measure your performance

The only way to understand whether you are achieving your goals is to develop a series of KPIs (key performance indicators) that will tell you whether all that hard work is paying off. These usually include measuring things like:

  • Mentions, shares, likes and comments
  • Time on page
  • website/ webpage traffic
  • Newsletter sign ups
  • Lead magnet signups
  • Revenue targets

By tracking this data, you will also be able to better develop your content marketing strategy and display the right information if you need to develop regular reports.

Step 3: Create buyer personas

You’d never try to teach a 10-year-old kid about the water cycle by using the kind of language or even content you’d find in a university lecture hall for adults, would you?

The same goes for when you create your content.

You need to understand exactly who you’re talking to and what they need so you can create your content with them in mind and become more strategic. It also vastly improves your chances of getting results.

This idea is echoed by content marketing experts The Content Marketing Institute who say;

“In light of what your customers likely look for in the content they choose to consume — not to mention Google’s ever-changing algorithms that aim to keep online content relevant and of a high quality — you can’t go wrong if you follow this golden rule: Write compelling content about the things your target audience would be most interested in.”

In content marketing, you do this by creating something called a buyer persona or customer avatar.

By gathering data on a range of factors such as key demographics (age, gender, education, income, etc) and factors such as interests, problems, preferred social media channels and so on, you’ll be able to better understand your customer and create content for them. You can find this kind of information from any analytics your business currently uses. Customer feedback, reviews and surveys also play a big part in the process.

Step 4: Assess your current position

By now you’ve figured out your goals, key metrics you want to track and who your customers are. Your next step is figuring out where you’re starting from.

Conduct a content audit, looking at what you already have including blog posts, guest posts, videos, and so on. Then consider how effective this content is by asking yourself:

This will enable you to better understand what improvements need to be made and help you identify your strategy moving forward.

Step 5: Decide on your content channels & content types

By doing this research, you should now understand who your audience is and what their needs are better. This will help you develop your content marketing strategy further and decide what type of content you should create and where.

Technology is continually developing, so trends are likely to come and go. However, blogging should remain a core part of your content marketing strategy, provided that you’re always creating highly actionable, high-quality and very useful content.

It’s also worth considering video marketing and live streaming as these look set to grow over the coming months and years.

Step 6: Identify and allocate resources

There’s no point creating a rockstar content marketing strategy if you don’t end up delivering the goods. That’s why you should make sure you plan the delivery phase as much as building your content marketing blueprint.

Yes, it might be dull, we know. But it’s the only way you can ensure you achieve those content marketing goals and continue to grow your business. Consider the following:

  • Who will be in charge of producing and maintaining the content?
  • What tools and resources will you need?
  • What will the workflow look like?
  • Are there any tools that you could use to simplify and streamline your workflow?

Step 7: Create a content calendar

The final step in building a content marketing strategy is planning the content itself. But beware- it’s not enough just to throw a few content ideas onto a spreadsheet and be done with it all. You need to be strategic.

Decide first how often you want to publish this new content and what channels you will be using to market this content. Once you’ve done this, you can plan exactly what to plan and when.

Many businesses are tempted to skip this step and end up struggling when they realise that they have just a day or two to come up with an idea and to create it. Don’t let this happen to you!

First gather your content ideas by brainstorming, looking at customer feedback, reviewing your FAQs, looking at keyword search terms and asking your colleagues. Then you can slot them into your content calendar and stay ahead, reduce your stress and be more likely to crush those content marketing goals.

Building a content marketing strategy can be complex and time-consuming. But any investment you make at this stage pays off significantly in the long term. Work through these steps and you will create a robust content marketing strategy that gets you results.

If you’d prefer to hire an expert, reach out to our team here at Fibre Marketing. We’d love to help.

A Day In The Life Of Content Marketing Specialist, Chloe Price

Posted on by Chloe

Last month, we kickstarted our ‘A Day in The Life’ series with Search Performance Manager, Ed, taking centre stage. This month, we’re gaining an insight into the day of a Content Marketing Specialist.

Link building is one of the top three ranking factors and yet can be one of the hardest things to master. As more content marketers and webmasters work to improve their backlink profile, more and more barriers are installed, and so the need to adapt and create new strategies is essential in this role. Link building also requires a lot of time, something that not everyone has – which is why many businesses turn to SEO professionals.

So, without further ado, let’s take a look at a day in the life of our Content Marketing Specialist, Chloe Price.

What Does Your Morning Routine Look Like?

The first thing I do is check my emails from both my primary accounts and outreach accounts. I reply to all that I can or note down what needs doing in order to move on to the next stage. I run our social media accounts, so I also schedule posts, join in with online discussions and see what’s trending. Following this, I’ll read SEO newsletters to see what’s happening in the industry.

What Are You Responsible For?

I manage our link building team, so I’m responsible for making sure that all clients meet their targets each month. This involves arranging their monthly outreach schedule, arranging brainstorming sessions for content, testing new strategies, and liaising with the rest of the team to make sure that we’re exceeding our clients’ targets.

As well as this, I manage our team of freelance writers, so I pay their invoices, check availabilities, edit content, and keep an eye on client budgets.

I’m also responsible for social media and our search marketing blog.

What Does A Typical Day Look Like for You?

I try to split my day into halves. I’m more awake in the morning, so I focus on link building. I could be pitching titles for guest blogs, useful link building, going through competitors’ backlinks, or pitching news-worthy titles to journalists. A lot of time goes into creating a natural link profile for a website, so it’s essential that I do this whenever I can.

In the afternoon, I work on a variety of tasks such as editing content, working on the Fibre Marketing blog, social media tasks, paying invoices, and responding to any emails that have come in over lunch. It changes every day.

What’s Your Memorable Work Moment?

When I first started, a team member saw on mobile that a SERP featured fourteen Ads on the first page. We posted this on Twitter, and it went viral! We even featured in Search Engine Journal and SERoundtable. As I was the only one working on social media, I had to spend a fair amount of time responding to comments and retweets. It was pretty exciting for my first month!

My other most memorable moment was building my first link from my trial shift – I wasn’t even working for the company at that point!

What Do You Get Up to After Work?

Alongside my work at Fibre, I also have a few ongoing projects. I read people’s novels, collaborating on edits before they send to literary agents, and review books for publishers and indie authors.

Alongside this, I take photos for my Instagram account, which involves me awkwardly posing with piles of books in public places and receiving quite a few stares in the process. I also run my own blog.

When I’m not doing any of the above, I like to take day trips with my family and friends, exploring different places throughout the country that I’ve never visited before.

What Do You Want to Achieve in Your Career?

I want to improve my link building – I’d love to get a client on the BBC one day!

I also want to expand on my knowledge of content marketing and try out new things, and even conduct my research into the world of digital marketing, seeing what businesses can do to build their brand.

What’s One Piece of Advice You’d Give to Someone Wanting to Work In SEO?

Follow as many social media accounts as you can. Most of my inspiration comes from trending topics and discussions, and it’s also where most of my SEO knowledge comes from. You learn what’s important and why, and the different tactics needed to conquer the many aspects of search engine marketing.

One of the reasons why I enjoy working in SEO is because it’s such a supportive community – everyone shares advice and quick tips, content that they’ve enjoyed reading or tools that make their lives easier, which really shows through social media. It’s what makes the SEO landscape an exciting environment to be a part of, as you can progress quickly and build strong relationships across the industry. 

If you’re interested in SEO and want to know more about working in the industry, follow us on Linkedin to see what we get up to here at Fibre. You can also find us on Twitter, where we share the latest updates within the search marketing industry. 

 

Reviving Blog Posts: How To Use Old Content For New Results

Posted on by Chloe

Producing great content is vital if you want people to be attracted to your brand and engage with it. Around 84% of buyers frequently or occasionally access business related content on their phones, while B2B marketers rated blog articles as the most effective content format in the awareness stage. These statistics can confirm that, right now, content is a vital for your marketing strategy.

It’s also important to remember that Google pays attention to the quality of the content that you produce. If the quality is high, your business is more likely to feature highly in search results. This helps to attract more traffic to your business website or blog.

The problem with creating great content is that it can involve the investment of a lot of time and effort. Reusing blog content that has been produced previously can help to reduce this investment without having an adverse effect on your overall content quality. However, you need to make sure that you reuse content in the right way.

How reusing blog content can work for business

Let’s start by looking at how reusing blog content can be good for your business. The fact is that a good piece of content can help you attract more traffic, strengthen your brand and improve your conversion rates, even if you use it more than once.

Getting this to work is all about repackaging the content in the right way. Doing so means that it can appear as something fresh and new to both current customers and potential customers that you are trying to attract. After all, everyone loves a good story or appreciates being provided with valuable information.

If your business has produced a blog post that has done either of these things well, there is a good chance that it still has a lot of life left. This is why you should always revisit your blog posts and not just consign them to the archives for good.

Which content should you reuse?

If you want to revive blog posts effectively, you need to understand which content you can reuse and which you should leave where it is. The two main criteria to use when deciding this are evergreen content and popular content.

Evergreen content is content that is not time bound. This means it continues to work well year-on-year. For instance, the advice in this article is evergreen. The basics of reviving blog posts do not change.

Popular content is time, season or statistic-heavy content that which has attracted a lot of interest. You can check the Google analytics stats for your business, to see which of your blog posts this applies to.

It’s important to note that you should not necessarily disregard content simply because some of the facts and figures used need updating. Think about the overall message of the content and decide whether it would still work if some updating work was carried out.

How to revive content

There are several methods that you can use to revive blog content so that it can work for your business again. Having decided which content you may be able to reuse, here are some ideas that can inspire you.

Create A Series

Choose a listicle that was previously created and create a series of blog posts from it. In order to do this, you will probably need to expand on the content somewhat, using each point as the focus for each blog. Consider the titles you use – if they relate directly to user intent, e.g. ‘How to’ and ‘why should…’ searches that are popular (For example – this article you’re reading!)

When writing these blogs posts, you can then improve your internal linking structure, directing traffic to the original content and other relevant pages on your site.

Create Visual Content

Repurpose your content by turning it into an infographic or visual data, which can then be used for link building purposes if you wish. Infographics are liked and shared 3x more than other types of content, so you’d be missing out on something if you don’t try this tactic out.

You don’t even need a professional graphic designer to create an infographic. Apps like Canva are perfect for this strategy

Update The Statistics

Update the content of a blog post to include the latest industry and technical information.

Internal Links

Create new, more appropriate, links within the content. If you have created pieces of content recently that can relate to one of the points stated in an old post, go back and link that new content in. It shows that you keep your posts updated, and as they continue to relate to current trends, you can share them across social media to bring in even more traffic.

Ultimate Guide

Use the information that you have within one or more blog posts to create a comprehensive guide, also known as an ‘Ultimate Guide’ or ‘Beginner’s Guide,’ etc. to a specific subject, which you can then link to relevant blog posts and pages that you want ranking. You may want to create this guide as a guest posting in order to raise the profile of your brand.

Using one or more of these methods can help you take the content that you already have and create something fresh and exciting.

In summary

There is no doubt that reviving blog posts can provide many benefits for your business. Doing so gives you the opportunity to bring excellent content to a whole new audience, attracting new customers.

Using great content in this way can also help you to feature highly in search results, which is obviously essential if you want to optimise the amount of traffic that your business attracts.

It’s also important to remember that you get all of these benefits without having to invest as much time and effort as you do when creating new content. Even if the blog posts that you are revitalising need to be updated, this is still less resource intensive than having to start from scratch.

Hopefully, you can see the benefits of reviving blog posts and have been inspired to look for content that you can reuse.

What Makes a Good Blog?

Posted on by Chloe

What makes a good blog can be broken down into four segments. Firstly, there are the different forms success takes, secondly there is the marketing boost that all successful blogs need, thirdly there is surprise, and fourthly there is targeting. This post covers all four elements of a successful blog, and also offers a little bit of advice about trying to replicate the success of others.

Success Has Many Forms

Take YouTube as an example: Pewdiepie holds the record for the most total viewers on YouTube, and it is just one guy who used to upload every day; then, take Lemmino. He uploads once per month at the most, and he has the most loyal followers. Both are working alone, both are incredibly successful, and yet both use a very different method for achieving their success.

The key to blogging success seems to be “Experimenting.”  i.e. trying out a bunch of different ideas until you find the thing that works. Many times, you are surprised by what works and what does not.

For example, there was a blog aimed at teenage boys, and the web master tried everything from fight videos to hilarious comic strips. He tried every cliché in the book to attract teenage males. Yet, the web master had his biggest run of success when he posted opinion pieces on local issues, but he put a joke or funny comment in every third line of his blog. That simple format attracted more of his target demographic than all the gun-violence posts he ever uploaded.

Your Face on A Billboard

You may have the highest quality blog of all time, but if nobody sees it, then nobody interacts with it, which means Google ranks it as number 120,000 on its results. You will need to give your search ranking a boost from time-to-time with search engine optimization. Just like putting your face on a billboard, you need to draw a little attention from time-to-time if you want to generate sustained success for your blog. Get people interested by optimising your website and its content for Google, and then, if your blog is good, it will be carried by its own success.

Think of the keywords that you want to rank for. The headlines you’re creating. Do you need visual content? Remember, do not keyword spam and do not make your post too long. People have shorter attention spans – keep content between 500-1,000 words, and use subheadings (H2s) and bullet points if necessary.

What Makes A Good Blog?

Targeting and surprise. Sadly, these are two elements that are often confused by bloggers and people in the publishing industry.

Targeting means you need to produce content that your readers are actually interested in. Your blog needs to fit your niche, and thus needs to appeal to those who are interested in it, while pushing away everybody else. It is the “pushing away” part that most bloggers mess up – many try and create content that would appeal to anyone in the hopes that they gain more traffic. The fact is that if you wish to target certain people, then you have to alienate others. need to alienate some people if you want to target others.

This also means that you need to have a thorough understanding of what your target audience wants and write directly for them. If you’re stuck for ideas, type in some keywords that you’d like to rank for, and look at the questions from the ‘People Always Ask’ section on the search engine results page (SERP). That’s what your target audience are searching, so make sure your blog has the answers.

Secondly, surprise means “unexpected.” It doesn’t mean click-bait titles, it doesn’t mean shock news, and it doesn’t mean being unorthodox.

Examining the Success Of Strangers

You should do learn from your success because they offer the most powerful lessons.

Should you learn from the success of others? You probably shouldn’t. Most people have no idea why they succeeded because they spend too much time examining why they failed and not why they succeeded. Secondly, repeating somebody else’s success is often harder than building a successful blog using your own trial and error.

A wise person examines the success of strangers and takes its lessons on board, but maybe doesn’t try to replicate the success directly.