Knowledge is power, there is no doubt about that. It enables us to take raw data, turn it into relevant information, and importantly, make key decisions. There are many who prefer making gut-based decisions, but me personally, I always like making decisions based on data. Data-driven decisions can be mistakes too, but you know that you made the best decision possible with the information you have. It puts the “educated” in “educated guess” and so on.

Kissmetrics, the popular content marketing blog, calls content marketing both an art and a science. I fully subscribe to that theory. Below is a piece of an infographic they put out that summarizes this balance quite nicely.

Simply put, many content marketers focus more on the content and less on the marketing. To be effective, it takes an understanding of both sides of the coin.

On Jeff Bullas’s blog, writer Aaron Agius, highlights some key metrics to bridge that knowledge gap, as follows:

1. Time on site
2. Unique visitors
3. Returning visitors
4. Total leads
5. Bounce rate
6. Volume of organic leads
7. Natural inbound links
8. Cost effectiveness
9. Lead-close rate
10. Call-to-action click-through rate
11. Total social shares
12. Keyword rankings
13. Landing page views
14. External referral sources to landing page
15. Internal referral sources to landing page
16. Leads by keyword
17. Reader comments

More details on the blog post. They are very useful and realistic and I myself have used each one in some way or form to make real-life business decisions, not just for blogging but for anything from email marketing to A/B testing and landing page optimization.

Knowing these metrics cold will be very, very useful, in most areas of digital marketing.

If you have any metrics or best practices to share, please comment below. Good luck!

Signing off,
Navin

Article: http://www.jeffbullas.com/2015/02/20/17-key-content-marketing-metrics-to-start-tracking-today/

There are so many articles out there emphasizing the need for SEO and SERP (if you’re reading my blog I’m assuming you know what these terms mean) and how tweaking them correctly in and of itself is the route to success! I’m here to tell you that while SEO/SERP are indeed very important, they are not as effective in isolation, and the combination of quality, targeted content with SEO is the way to go.

Over the last few years, Google has made updates to their algorithms (you may see this referred to as the Panda update) that had an “over-optimization penalty” which included tricks such as excessive backlinks and keyword stuffing.

SEO today prioritizes quality over quantity, which is why knowing your audience is so important. Just like creating a new physical product or service, an intimate knowledge of your target market’s habits surrounding the media they consume your content on is paramount to success. As Kathryn Hawkins of Eucalypt Media points out, “Including relevant keywords in your articles is important, but if those keywords aren’t placed organically in high-quality articles, they won’t do you much good.” 

In her article on Live Help Now, Kylie Gray takes this to the next step and provides some solutions to this problem, namely niche marketing, which she describes as “In an age of targeted advertising and increasing web personalization, consumers are accustomed to a more direct line from a company. Niche content marketing targets a specific subset of a consumer base with engaging articles and blog posts.”

Niche marketing, essentially, is creating content tailored to a target audience’s needs and wants, and provides some insight. The content should be specific to the keywords and demographics in your target audience. And here is where SEO is a factor, using the targeted keywords, share the content in the media (such as forums) where your target audience is likely to obtain the content from, and over time, this high-quality, consistency approach is what will drive up SEO!

A last thought from Kylie: “Think of SEO as setting the stage for success, while content marketing is the main act that get takes you there. By following common sense SEO guidelines, quality content builds true organic search growth.”

And there you have it, folks. I hope this shed some light on the nuances and intricacies in SEO and content marketing. As always, if you have any thoughts, please comment below.

Signing off,
Navin

Article: http://blog.livehelpnow.net/niche-content-marketing-trumps-seo-every-time/

Hey folks,

I love podcasts. I first discovered them through two very different sources: Freakonomics and IGN – a pop culture news and discussion site. This discovery came at an opportune time, as in my previous life as a consultant I often needed to drive long distances to client offices/manufacturing facilities in industrial estates on the outskirts of Bangkok, Thailand.

Podcasts further proliferated the mass consciousness through iTunes and like all other things on Apple’s app stores, have a rankings system. These top 20 podcast rankings are by category and are updated every hour! Thus begs the question, if your podcast makes it to the top of a competitive category, but chances are will only stay for one single hour, how do you market that?

Look at Bloomberg’s Masters in Business (MiB) podcast for example. I have never heard of it before and it only made it to the top 20 this morning. Most people, myself included, will likely not scroll past the top 20 on any given day, so how can Bloomberg be ready to market the s*** out of its podcast?

Is real-time marketing even real? How do you justify spending scarce resources preparing for an event that might never occur?

Perhaps there is a gap in the marketing automation market after all…

Signing off,
Navin

#bama513

Hubspot is known as a leader in marketing automation, with one of the best marketing blogs I have come across on the Internet and having worked for a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startup, the blog is also one I would highly recommend as a part of one’s daily reading.

In the article “2 Ways Hubspot’s Marketing Automation Can Benefit Your Sales Team,” Chris Osterhout – a VP of Business Strategy with solid technical experience – discusses the benefits of marketing automation for improving sales efficiency.

The key benefits – according to Chris – is the ability to understand your customers better as well as providing a list of qualified leads, i.e. prospective customers who have expressed an interest in the product/service you are selling.

Img source: http://www.meltwater.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Screen-Shot-2015-02-02-at-1.38.58-PM.png

While the marketing automation industry certainly has its fair share of benefits that provide incremental time and energy savings to companies, especially resource-stretched startups, we are in danger of gearing closer towards automation and losing that personal touch that is so crucial to being a world-class service organization.

I see a lot of parallels with the manufacturing industry, where warehouses are typically organized to be as efficient as possible, with little time lost in between processes. With my family’s business being in custom suiting, I have seen firsthand the difficulty in streamlining what is a very variable production process, I do believe there can be a “happy medium” achieved in the world of manufacturing through “mass customization” – though even that has its own downsides.

Speaking to marketing automation, while working for the aforementioned SaaS startup, I found myself having to use multiple tools in order to use the data gathered by marketing automation software just to have a small degree of personalization when talking to customers. It is very easy to miss one small step and lose that personal touch, which is extremely difficult to come back from.

I have yet to find a “silver bullet” solution to this that does not involve using several tools, which might be considered counterintuitive and uses up the same amount of time that you saved up anyway. Thus, the industry still has a large gap to fill and businesses will be empowered to an even greater extent with a solution that manages to automate and customize personalization.

Please comment below for any thoughts on this or if you have seen any solutions that solves this problem.

Signing off,
Navin

Article reviewed: http://blog.wsol.com/2-ways-hubspots-marketing-automation-can-benefit-your-sales-team

#bama513