Last year, the Content Marketing Institute along with Brightcove produced a documentary about content marketing. With interviews and case studies, it offers a fascinating view of how marketing changed over the last century. Read my review here.
Archive for year: 2016
Ugh. “We need to talk.” Nothing good ever seems to comes after that… But seriously, there are some things we need to sort out together.
Let’s start with the good news: Content is hot. Positively en fuego:
● 90% of organizations market with content (source)
● 67% of surveyed B2B companies reported marketing content a top three or higher priority within their overall 2015 marketing strategy. (source)
● 78% of CMOs think custom content is the future of marketing. (source)
● 54.1% of marketers are prioritizing hiring for marketing content above all other marketing sub-groups. (source)
• CNNMoney even ranked content strategist among the 100 best jobs in America for 2015. Not a bad environment in which to be a content creator or content strategist, huh?
But with rapid growth come growing pains. And that’s the part that we need to sort out together.
We need to clearly define what content strategy is and who does it
• In 2014 the Content Strategy Alliance (CSA) conducted an international Content Strategy Survey. Out of 1,255 respondents, 72.3 percent identified “defining content strategy, best practices, and skill sets” as a concern they’d like to see addressed.
• The CSA also learned that a solid quarter of professionals engaged in content strategy have only 2-3 years of experience, and a full 80% are self-taught.
• Moreover, of the 90.5 percent of respondents who reported doing content strategy work, fully 61.7 percent did not hold the title “Content Strategist.” Not surprising, really. Graphic artists, copywriters, editors, brand strategists, SEOs, and public relations specialists all engage – even specialize – in content strategy and content marketing.
We need to practice teamwork
With so many professionals playing important roles in content strategy and marketing, it’s easy to end up with a bad case of too many cooks in the kitchen. You probably have a war story of your own about a content project gone horribly wrong. Please, share it with us.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s this: the problem isn’t how many cooks are in the kitchen – it’s how well we work together.
One project exemplified this for me.
A marketing consultant I know was helping a customer modernize their web presence. The customer engaged a separate web development firm to redesign their site. Six months into the project, the new website was going nowhere fast and the customer was growing frustrated. So, my friend hired me to diagnose and fix the problem.
What I learned was that while the marketing consultant was convinced the web developer was incompetent, she was actually waiting on him to deliver content – content he didn’t even have. It had to come from the customer directly. Simply put: these cooks couldn’t even agree on the recipe.
Ultimately, I was able to get the project back on track and finished in no time simply by facilitating some much-needed communication.
•
And that’s what it’s all about, my friends: communication. Particularly, when one customer hires multiple contractors (or multiple firms) to develop content.
Smoothing out the wrinkles in content projects
I have a 3-step formula for fixing some of the most frustrating problems that arise in content projects.
Step one: talk to each other
Ahead of time.
Let’s engage in networking to get to know each other. Find out what other professionals are struggling with when it comes to content projects, and what kind of support we can lend each other.
Step two: talk to each other
At the beginning of each project.
It sucks to be the last one brought in on a content project. Like the copywriter who has to figure out how to sell a product in just three lines because the design is finished and that’s all there’s room for.
Let’s not do that to one another. If a customer hires you to do design/copywriting/social media/whatever use the network you built in step one to get everyone involved from day one.
Step three: talk to each other
During the project.
Let’s face it, customers don’t always understand what goes into a content project and consequently kinda suck at coordinating their contractors. So it’s up to us to work together as a team.
Having learned this lesson I’ve begun offering project management services, taking the lead to make sure the SEO gets consumer insights from the market researcher, and the copywriter gets keywords from the SEO, and the designer gets copy from the copywriter . . . you get the picture. This kind of coordination results in higher quality content projects that finish faster with fewer headaches all around.
How you can get involved to improve content for everybody
The Content Strategy Alliance (CSA) is working to support content strategists and content marketers everywhere. They’ve begun assembling resources like Content Strategy Tools & Templates: A Best Practices Handbook Tools & Templates Handbook, a mentorship program, and an upcoming certification program to aid and educate the industry.
But the CSA needs help. They’re looking for smart, enthusiastic volunteers like you to shape the future of content strategy. Become a member to get involved and have your voice heard.
About the author:
Alexa Steele is a copywriter and marketing consultant specializing in digital communications. She has been writing premium marketing content since 2009, and is now available to manage your content projects from concept to completion.
Connect with Alexa on LinkedIn.
(This is part of a series of articles highlighting the templates from Content Strategy Alliance Tools & Templates: A Best Practices Handbook we created in 2014. Check back at the end of 2020 for a revised and expanded handbook.)
By Lisa Trager
The best way to rank organically for search is to develop great content! When people search, they are seeking a solution to a question to help them learn, shop, fix, or understand something. Develop a content strategy that addresses how to best inform and answer questions that your target audience is interested in reading, watching, and generally engaging in through the content you build on your site.
A key strategy is to keep content fresh and relevant to your audience. Integrating a blog or adding whitepapers is a good way to stay on top of trends and keep people coming back to your website. Videos are also great vehicles to drive brand awareness – and don’t forget to encourage social sharing as social signals are becoming an influencing factor in SEO. A huge no-no is duplicating content within your website.
Recent google algorithms place more emphasis on site authority. One tactic that can help increase your site’s authority is to include outbound links to government or educational websites, which already have indisputable authority. Even better, is to have a site considered to have high authority link to your site. These can include media or news sites, government, or even sites representing large organizations.
There are mechanics as well as strategies that are considered best practices for SEO. From a build perspective, the 3 most important elements of the page include:
- Page titles that target your audience with key phrases.
- URLs that are clean, reflect hierarchy of information, and can be read by human beings
- Content that is relevant to a specific topic, which is linkable, responsive, and loads quickly
Although most people know the importance of keyword research, the real value can come from finding the “long-tail” words or words that will not be highly competitive in search engine results. Long-tail words are great for inspiring new topics to consider. However, when contemplating the best word for a page title, I’ll often consult Google Trends and go for volume. Once you have determined the best word to use as the subject of your page, be sure to include it in the URL, page title, in the image alt tag, and several times in the text in the body of the page.
Metatags are the language of robots. Be sure to use them and consider the following guidelines:
- Leverage URLs that are short and keyword rich. According to Google, the first 3-5 words in a URL are given the most weight.
- Keep page titles under 55 characters to ensure that they display properly in search results.
- Keep in mind that search engines may choose to display a different title than what you provide in your HTML. Titles in search results may be rewritten to match your brand, the user query, or other considerations.
- Recent updates Google made to their CSS has resulted in variations to how many characters will be displayed in desktop. According to research done by Hobo-web.co.uk, you can use as many characters that fit into a “block element that’s 512px wide and doesn’t exceed 1 line of text.”
- Google enables longer page titles in mobile.
- Use upper and lower text in the meta-title tag versus all caps.
- Use H-tags for all headers and sub-heads
- Never use registered trademark symbols (e.g. ® or ™) in meta tags because they can hurt your page ranking and look strange in search engine results, which lessen click-through rates
When in doubt, I highly recommend the following resources:
- Moz The Beginner’s Guide to SEO
- Search Engine Land Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors
- Google Webmaster Guidelines
- BackLinko Google’s 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List
It’s here! The CSA queried businesses about their content strategy practices. Thanks to all who participated. Download the report below.
By Khaled Aly
CSA Member
Content components are modular information units, marked up according to XML rules. XML is a meta language that supports content structuring by enforcing a grammar to each communicated dialect. Documents, service specifications, or messages… Content servers communicating to human users, or cross-communicating provisioning (web) servers… The content lingo is not free form but rather well defined so that machines cannot miss any semantics and publishers can maximize utility by reusing it within a typed context. That is, each piece of information, regardless of its length and hierarchic composition, has a named (transformable) type and ID to associate with.
Content components mainly refer to text documents that may contain media resources by reference. So, resources are there to visually and/or audibly enhance content deliverables, which when well assembled produce an information product of focus value to a business group/objective. As standard types and transformation technology broadens, components become unrestricted to source information. Rather, they may be recyclable targets that can be transformed differently by other engines to serve other purposes, keeping in mind conditional source transform processing that is becoming abundantly possible as platform suppliers have embraced its prominence.
Omni-channel publishing involves temporal, end-user device-dependent, selection and arrangement of content components, to deliver the right information, in a suitable form to the requester, at the right time.
