Content Marketing - Binary - Ecommerce Experts

Top Content Marketing Trends to look out for in 2018

Post author By binadmin
Post date 28 Jan 2018

After reading and Experience of last year’s working closely with clients, we have found out that there are two things which very much critical for any Brand to stay on top in 2018

1) Relevant Content Creation as per Customer Persona
2) Mapping or Distributing Content according to Buyer’s Journey

So let’s find it, which are the trends to watch for the year 2018

1) Creation of Niche content

This means if Brands wants to stand out then they have to drill down or have to take deep dive to understand their ideal customers and its behavior. They have to do customer segmentation and deliver the content according to the journey customers are into.

What Brand can do to follow this trend?

So for Exp: If you are targeting Travelers then instead of targeting “Top Travelling Destination” Brand has to be specific on “Top Adventure Vacation for Couples”

A Brand who is into fitness and bodybuilding should explore niche target audience to start with rather than generic. What we suggest by this, instead of targeting Bodybuilding they can identify targets like Bodybuilding for 40+ Dads

2) Adaptation of Voice based search or Content

According to Garner predication, the world is moving to screen less search, recent trends have been seen that younger people have started using voice search on their mobile. It means that your future customers are more likely to use Voice search or Voice Assistant like Google or Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa.

What Brands can do?

Since there is always a difference between the way we speak the way we type, brands have to adapt to natural language search. Instead of focusing on particular keywords, a brand needs to focus on long tail phrases or answering questions the way Human speak to each other.

Few thing a Brand can do

Create more relevant content with long and specific phrases
While keeping in mind keywords they have to keep word which speaks to naturally
Majority of Voice search is from mobile so have to see content presented very on Mobile devices (Mobile Friendly)
For Local “near me” searches, brand has to optimize their content as per local language

3) Smaller but relevant content

It was recommended earlier that if your article is long and having more than 3000 words, it’s more likely be featured on search engines. This is all good if your intention is to rank in SERPs, but remember nowadays social is driving more traffic then lengthy content.

People prefer to consume same content via Videos or Visuals rather than reading them on mobile

What Brands can do?

Create Infographic
Create Videos related to relevant topics, which can be shared via Social Media Channels easily

4) Change of Influence Marketing

Past all research shows that 90% of people trust on a recommendation by individuals over brands. Even Google trends show steady growth on the influencer marketing YoY basis we are not denying that influencer marketing is one the key areas of the Brand which needs to be addressed while they make their marketing strategy.

But we recommend that instead of aiming for volume, a brand needs to identify influence which has common values and target audience. So key aspect needs to be addressed rather then connecting them only for promotion of Brand or product, a brand needs to collaborate with them for a long-term

What Brands can do?

Identify Kep influencer based on Product or objective
Create a Campaign directed to that Influencer
A Brand can create secondly campaign for influencer to drive awareness
Regularly track metrics related to awareness, sales, and Engagement

5) Transparency to Customer

Younger Audience is tired of Push Advertising. They want to associate with Brand which has a transparent approach in terms of communication. So For Exp if the Brand is talking about Organic Food then they want to have more information as well as want to see practically brand guidelines related organic living, health or food

What Brands can do?
A Brand can associate or accredited themselves with some government authority for regulations.
Even Brand release certain research or whitepaper, or do events on a line which they want to position themselves. This way customer directly associates with brand

6) Video will continue rise

Rather than reading large content people prefer to consume video on that natural languages, they can associate them very well. All the content which Brands is creating in form of text should be transferred and convey via video.

What Brand Can do?

A Brand can create Youtube channel where they can explain the feature of products or Application of products or Unboxing and Product demonstration can be done. A video has always been a very interactive form of communication on the internet.

Brand can also cover their events or seminar via Live Video on Facebook or Educate Customer by taking Seminars

Even Interactive Question and Answers Sessions also going to be very helpful

7) Creating and Marketing Content Mapping Buyer Persona

Nowadays cost of acquiring a new customer and retaining them is very vital for Brands. CRM play an important role in retaining existing customers. It becomes necessary for a brand to create a content strategy which engages the audience throughout their life cycle if form email or connecting them to Social media or traditional channels.

Here is what brands can do

Creating details buyer persona with their Demographic and Psychographic
Mapping the Content around customer Journey and communicating with them on each stage Reach, Action Covert, and Engagement. All stages will require different set of content to be created for customers

That’s all for now

Let us know your feedback on above content marketing trends? Which one do you prefer for your Brand? and Why?

How to create social media content strategy and plan

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 10 Aug 2017

Social Media is whole and soul of any business marketing strategy, it may not essentially guarantee a big bang success but it gets you closer to your goals and business objectives. Smart content marketers exactly know how to develop business ideas and what works best for their business and how social networks can be effectively used in making the sales and engaging the customers. Social alignment is highly important when it comes to maintaining consistent style of communication with customers.

Get your content right first

Social Media networks are heavily used by people for connecting with family and friends and moreover it takes a leap ahead by helping business to involve and engage their customers. Customers are looking for relevant content online, so blasting too much content is not a right technique towards attaining one’s business goals. Brands need to take time to learn the facts about their customers, what they like to watch and read and the channels that are most useful to them.

Communication and Content plan are important

Customers love when there is clear communication from the brands; the content that is shared should be totally aligned with the business goals. It is not specific to any social channels but the way communication is led across different channels. There are several ways through which social content could be made available to the users. Before you start posting the content, you may ask yourself some questions like –

What are you looking for in social media and how it aligns to your core business goals?
What is your story and how relevant it is for social audience
Customer profile and type of content that they will respond to
Current state of market and how competitors perform socially
Who needs to involve in content production and marketing
Measuring social content success, optimizing and improving

When you answer the above questions, you get a clear idea about what your audiences are looking for in your content. The plan provides for simpler guidelines that help to focus social marketers on what they are basically looking for in content marketing.

“Without a useable comms and content plan it is much harder to gain traction with your audiences. You may achieve siloed spikes in activity through individual campaigns but it is much harder to build momentum around brand awareness and engagement. By having a content plan in place that clearly answers the Why, What, Who and How, you will be able to be more adaptable and reactive with your content.” – Sejal Parekh, Brand and Creative Strategist.

Analyzing Competitor’s Social accounts

The markets are overly flooded with lot of competition and competitors, the new comers are still buzzing for opportunities. With the highly saturated markets, it makes sense to go with the flow. By this, we mean looking for contents that your competitors are creating and how they are attracting customers. A close looks up in their social accounts, studying the things that they are sharing or following or offering, shall give you a quick content gaps.

You would know –

The contents that they aren’t sharing
The topics that are poorly covered and you have the possibility to create a niche market

Original is the key to grab markets

Creating original and creative content helps to reach people’s heart and furthermost, the genuineness. These are the key components if you want to rule the market game. People are ambitious and hence inspiring things attract them. There are several media engagement programs that can be used to drive social engagement. Businesses can announce free events, live tweeting of events, famous personality speak, write-ups about events, interviews, etc. and if you see the after effects, the results are astounding. One may see increased event attendance, increase in the number of followers, increase in social engagement and more.

Social Media Content Calendar helps!

Your social media strategy does not have to be extravagant, keep it simpler for your customers to understand what you are sharing with them. A consistent strategic plan goes a long way in building engagement and loyalty. Work out on a quarterly plan and build your content on ideas aligning to previous content that is shared with your customers.

Planning a content that levels itself to high level content stories is a good idea since there is clear link in the overall content of the strategy. Hence, every time you plan content, it needs to contain a key story. Do not give irrelevant content with the customers for the heck of it.

Optimization a must!

Businesses should not restrict to the content that is just shared on social, there are numerous things by which they can create infinite content that can be unconditionally used for audience engagements. Customer executives spend a lot of time talking to users; they collect vast data in terms of user preferences, likes, dislikes, etc. Attractive posts on social accounts attract attention that can be linked to a more detailed landing page on your website.

Hooks are a major attraction

Content format plans should be rich in quality, creating regular posts helps people to come back to the brand. The below example shows the Twitter account of @Craft posts from its Flickr updates.

Hashtags are good means to get your brand popular, by tagging people or brand; it is more likely to be noticed since they are monitored. It further helps to build engaging communication. Social conversation threads can be created by the use of hashtags.

Expansion of Content Reach

Brands are always vouching to reach highest audiences so that maximum benefits can be attained by the way of campaigns. The social reaches can be enhanced by way of users sharing the brand content on their networks. How is that possible? Let us look down on few of the basic techniques to achieve this:

- Creating a lack of resource – It is not actually creating a lack, but for bigger promotions, it requires bigger marketing. So publicizing your product or event launch in advance helps to drive social activity and get people talking about it. The below example shows how Brighton SEO in UK grew the event into one of the leading European SEO event and tickets went selling too sooner.

- Offering Unique ideas – People look for content and ideas that are very unique in nature, and if they do not get to see uncommon idea other than yours then surely they are up running for you. It increases the chances of brand awareness and attention grabbing material helps to boost the engagement.

The above is good idea placed by Oreo, the brand created several spoofing videos for Halloween that are funny and liked by all hence people share it.

Amplifying the reach – Brands can amplify their reach by encouraging users to engage with their brands. The followers should be those people who are actually listening to and not just listed as followers. The actual followers who are interested will listen to brand and check for any posting updates and share it eventually.

Test and Evaluate

This is one of the most crucial stages for knowing what social media content is working for your campaign. The simplest way is finding through engagement metrics like the total number of likes on Facebook, Retweets on Twitter, etc.

For getting optimum benefits from running the campaign, one must do the following:

Campaign tracking to be put in all posted links.
Using social reports for monitoring social sessions and conversions, the referral reports can be used for comparing social domains to create referral traffic.
Using landing page reports and applying social segments to check social impact on web pages.

The Top Preferred Social Media Marketing Tools are basically a set of toolkit that helps to coordinate and automate social content marketing. The social tool helps the content to reach audiences more efficiently.