8 Essential Concepts Every Digital Marketer Should Understand
There’s an old story about a reporter who visited a skyscraper construction site. He approached one worker and asked what he was doing. “I’ve got to pour this cement before it sets, don’t bother me,” was the reply.
The reporter asked another man the same question. “I’m setting this rebar, don’t bother me,” the man said. Over and over, when asked what they were doing, each worker irritatedly explained their task at hand.
Finally, the reporter interviewed the lowest man on the job totem pole—the hod carrier. His job was to scoop up clay on a flat board, then hold it for someone to trowel it onto a wall. Not exactly the most interesting or inspiring work. “What are you doing?” the reporter asked.
The young man stopped and looked up to where the top of the building would be someday and said, “I’m building a skyscraper.”
There is no shortage of specialties in an average marketing department. There is certainly no shortage of small, incremental tasks to be completed, either. But it’s important to ask yourself: Am I pouring cement, or am I building a skyscraper?
The most successful marketers tend to be skyscraper builders. They understand how their role fits into the overall plan. Which means they have a base understanding of what everyone else is doing, too. Having that context can only make your work better. What’s more, you can avoid being commodified—being thought of as “the content guy” or “the SEO woman”—and expand your role.
You don’t have to be an expert on everything, of course. But even if you never touch one of them in your current role, it’s important to have a basic understanding of these eight concepts:
#1 – SEO
SEO is rapidly becoming a highly specialized field. It’s one of the fastest-changing aspects of marketing, too, as search engines continue to refine their algorithms to provide a better searcher experience. A major part of SEO now is simply having content that is the best answer for your potential customers.
That said, there are some old-school basic SEO elements that every piece of content should have:
A title tag fewer than 80 characters long, to avoid being shortened in results pages
A meta description that describes the content in 160 characters or fewer
Header text (H1 tags) for the most relevant text
Alt descriptions for images that describe the content of the image
Descriptive text for links (not just “Click Here” or “More”)
If you want to dig deeper into SEO basics, Google’s SEO starter guide is a great resource.
#2 – Optimizing Content for Web Reading
Even if you’re not a content creator, it’s important to know how people read content online versus print. Online reading habits affect everything from SEO to design.
People tend to ‘scan’ online content rather than read it top-to-bottom. Long paragraphs and lack of navigational elements can send readers back to their search engine results for a more reader-friendly page.
Keep paragraphs short and to the point. Just two to three short sentences is enough, for the most part. Make sure there is plenty of white space breaking up your content into snackable sections.
Add headers (with the H1 tag, as above) for each topic. That way, skimming readers can see your most important points at a glance.
#3 – Content Planning
As a content creator, this is an important bit of context that I sometimes have to go out of my way to get. It’s easy to relax into being told, “here’s your topic; fill up a bucket with words and send it off.” But that’s ground-level thinking. It’s important to know how content planning works, where the topics are coming from, and how to do that research for yourself.
Learning the process of content planning can help you achieve content mastery. You’ll write better content because you fully understand the need you’re trying to meet.
#4 – Full-Funnel Content Strategy
We have a three-stage funnel model at TopRank Marketing: Attract, Engage, and Convert. Buyers in the Attract stage may not be actively looking for a solution. They might not even be aware they have a problem. Those in the Engage stage are looking for a solution, researching their options. Those in the Convert stage have made a decision to buy, and need a final nudge to our client’s solution.
That model drives nearly everything we do. We develop content for each stage of the funnel, each with radically different SEO strategy, amplification strategy, and targeting. It’s important to know your funnel, and how your role fits into the overall full-funnel strategy.
#5 – Paid Social Media
It used to be simple to get reach on social media. You put out great content, build an audience of followers, and they shared your content to their networks. Easy. Simple. And above all, free.
Now, the big social media guns like Twitter and Facebook are undeniably pay-to-play. Without advertising, you’re only reaching a fraction of your followers, let alone attracting new ones. Even on LinkedIn, which has yet to embrace the algorithm scourge, you can reach a much broader audience with a little strategic boosting.
Pay per click (PPC) is for organic search what your paid social media is to your organic reach—a way to reach a broader audience and prioritize your content over others. For a price.
This LinkedIn Marketing blog post has a ton of resources to help you grasp the basics of PPC.
#7 – Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is rapidly becoming a go-to solution for co-creating great content and increasing content amplification. It seems simple enough—find influential people, get them to share your stuff, profit—but each of those steps has plenty of sub-steps built into it.
Influencer marketing involves content strategy, content creation, and amplification. Since it touches multiple roles, it’s a good idea for every marketer to at least have a grasp of the fundamentals.
#8 – Measurement
Unless your role specifically requires it, you may not need to know exactly how to track, measure, and report on the results of your marketing efforts. But it is important to understand your department’s overall goals, the goal for each piece of content, and how progress will be measured. Goals and metrics vary widely, so I recommend tapping the metrics & analytics experts in your organization for an overview.
Reach for the Sky
The difference between a ground-level grunt and a skyscraper builder is a sense of context. That knowledge of the bigger picture can inform how you do your day-to-day tasks, set you up for future success, and even inspire you to build a taller skyscraper. If you’ve had your eyes on the ground, get together with your team and share information about each other’s roles. Learn a little bit of what they all do, and make sure you’re all building the same building.
Need help with any of these 8 areas of expertise? Our team of skyscraper builders is standing by.
Cool video, this is mostly where I'm focusing my efforts to promote my physical products that I sell online. Have you had much success on this? Leave a comment below.
In a Content Marketing Slump? Spice up Your Program with These Tips
How can you turn out haute cuisine content on a fast food production schedule?
Your content team—especially if it’s a team of one—can be on the hook for creating a vast quantity of content. Between sales enablement, eBooks, white papers, and blog posts, it can be overwhelming.
The temptation to churn out uncreative but passable content is hard to resist, especially if you’re behind on the editorial calendar. This kind of rushed content can lead to each piece having a same-y feel—same format, same voice, same structure.
Not only is bland content hard for your readers to stomach, it’s not particularly inspiring to create, either. If you’re feeling like a short order cook instead of a celebrity chef, try these tips to spice things up.
#1: Freshen Up Your Research
A great content marketing initiative starts with thorough customer research. When you started your strategy, it was based on solid intel intended to help you create best answer content. Research shouldn’t be a one-and-done proposition, though. It’s important to keep evaluating, optimizing, and adjusting.
If your audience is unenthusiastic about your content, it’s time to refresh your research. First, see how your published content is performing. What’s resonating with your audience? How can you expand on the topics that are getting the most attention?
Then, revisit your sources for customer information—everything from Google analytics to customer surveys. See if there are questions that still don’t have answers. Or better yet, look for opportunities to answer questions they haven’t asked yet.
#2: Find a New Point of View
Ever feel like you’re repeating yourself in your content? Ever feel like you’re repeating yourself in your content? It’s understandable. You have the same team writing content to support the same solutions with the same talking points—at some point it’s going to feel repetitive.
So if you ever feel like you’re repeating yourself in your content, seek out new voices in your organization. Interview someone in sales, someone in customer service, someone in the C-suite. Sit down for a face-to-face if possible, and record audio for a podcast or create a video at the same time. You’ll end up with a fresh take on your content, a new authentic voice, and a spot filled in the editorial calendar with minimal effort.
#3: Balance Your Funnel
Part of a solid content strategy is developing content for the entire marketing funnel:
Attract content has broad appeal (while still being relevant to the target audience). It seeks to gain attention and define a problem.
Engage content is for people who are already aware they have a problem. It seeks to educate and entertain, while promoting the idea that the reader needs to take action to solve their problem.
Convert content is for those who are committed to solving their problem, and focuses on why your particular solution is the right choice.
Frequently, marketers feel pressured to write the bulk of their content for the Convert stage, as that content links most directly to revenue. But the majority of content consumed is in the Attract stage—so it makes sense to create great top-of-funnel content with clear next steps.
Conversely, if you find your content is getting a lot of social media love and pageviews, but it’s not translating to revenue, you may be missing the middle or bottom of the funnel. Balancing out your content load to cover the entire funnel will help guide customers to a purchase decision, while adding much-needed variety to your content offering.
#4: Change Up the Format
If your content is solid but is failing to inspire engagement, it may be the structure, not the content, that’s the problem. Try changing up the format: If the white page isn’t getting traction, distil the main points into an infographic. If the podcast is failing to connect, transcribe it into a blog post or add a visual element. If your blog posts are a snooze, add some fun images.
If you can serve up a variety of creative content forms, you can keep your audience engaged (and stave off your own boredom, too).
#5: Let Your Customers Do the Talking
Study after study shows that modern buyers want content that is authentic and transparent, like a handmade artisanal window. It’s definitely worth bringing your unique human voice into the content you create. But one of the best ways to create truly authentic content is to let your customers do the job for you.
The traditional case study is one way to go about it, as long as you give it a compelling narrative. Case studies can get too by-the-numbers if we’re not careful: “Customer had problem. Customer got our solution. Customer saw results.”
Focus on the people behind the story, instead: “Bob has a degree in Library Science. Now he’s ordering supplies for an oil rig. Lives are on the line if he gets the wrong brand of toilet paper.”
Letting customers tell their own stories works even better than case studies. You can use a custom hashtag on social media to collect submissions, then offer recognition and praise to anyone who submits a story. If your brand has a presence on visual sites like Instagram, you can quickly gather enough photos and stories to make a truly compelling blog post.
Variety Is the Spice of Life
With the sheer volume of content most marketers are called on to produce, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut. If you feel like your content is turning bland, add spice: pepper in fresh research, ask your co-workers for sage advice, gingerly experiment with new formats, and curry favor with customers for user-generated content. With these five tips, you can have a tastier content mix in no thyme.
Learning how to curate content is an essential task for social media managers. And time is short!Content is an essential part of your social media marketing plan. As a social media marketer, you need to both create original content and curate content from other sources. Time spent reading niche-related blog articles is important to keep up with industry news. Being a part of the conversation by sharing content with thoughtful comments and questions will help your brand be a sought-after source of knowledge as well. Still, feeding the content monster can take over if you let it. To help your content curation become less of a chore, let’s look at nine tactics you can use to maintain control and keep fresh. 1. Find Your Brand
Knowing what to share is the first step in making sure your content is on point. The key aspects of your brand’s content creation should naturally extend to other content that you share to build your content platform.
Your curated content and your originally created content should have the same tone, big ideas and overall fit. Your content platform’s output of original posts, curated content, graphics, Tweets and comments all flow together into what the public sees and judges you on. Yes, it’s important!
2. Stay on Target
I like to call this target the “brand seeds.” Find the three seeds that make up the heart of your social content, and stick to them. For example, if I were working with Sprout Social, my three seeds might be social media, social media management and social customer service.
I would find content that fit these three seeds and add in other content that was related and would be of interest to my followers. Sticking to a narrow focus helps build your area of expertise and knowledge base.
3. Be Organized
Creating systems for your social media consumption is important. If you don’t have something in place for reading content and finding great content, you’ll waste a lot of time. I like to use Feedly to create folders for the different types of content I create. For each folder, I add RSS feeds to fill the needs of different accounts and sometimes clients.
Sources to Find Content
Feedly: Add RSS feeds into folders for different accounts or topics.
Alltop: Create a MyAlltop page to see the blogs that I pull in to review when I curate from this platform. These are some of my go-to sources.
Pinterest: This never lets me down for great content when I search.
BuzzSumo: You can customize alerts in BuzzSumo by keyword, link, author and domain. I get an email for these each morning and check through on the website occasionally.
Planoly:You can find great user generated content by hashtags or keywords. This is perfect for brands or if you’re using a branded hashtag for social media campaigns.
A rookie mistake is sharing all your content at once in a huge bunch and then going long stretches without anything else. Don’t do this. Instead, create a steady stream of content that people won’t be overwhelmed with when they are live on social media.
There are many ways to share your content within Sprout on a schedule that you create:
Set up your Queueto meet your needs. Mine is set to publish four times a day so that I don’t have to think about an exact schedule. This makes it easy to add posts with one click to the Queue.
Use the Compose box to precisely schedule posts at a certain time.
Use the Chrome extension to add to your Queue or schedule at a certain time.
Important social media metricswill be based on your overall social media marketing strategy. This is a bigger conversation that you should have worked into your plan, but the basics are:
Growth in follower count
Number of +1s, Likes or shares
Customer engagement with content
If you notice these things taking a dive, it’s time to rethink your content strategy.
6. Cut What Isn’t Working
Sometimes you hit a sweet spot with your content, and everyone loves it! Then the algorithms change. Again.
If your former best type of content is falling flat, it’s time to remove it from the repertoire. Use your metrics to see what’s working, and do more of that. This is common-sense advice that people fail to implement every day.
7. Ask What People Want
In one of my most difficult-to-manage social media communities (read: low-tech industry with many lurkers), I asked what type of content they liked best and wanted to see on the Facebook Page. It was great to get feedback that reinforced what I was already doing and gave me some ideas for future content.
Now I feel more confident that I’m sharing the content they love, and my Page is doing better than ever. I think many communities want to dictate what they want to share, when the goal should be to give people what they want.
8. Keep Your Sources Fresh
I keep my RSS feeds in Sprout and Feedly full of great blogs to read, but if I find myself skipping over blog articles in my feeds, I reassess whether I want to have them in my daily content to skim and read. Cutting them out here means more efficient curating later.
9. Maximize Your Content
Be there when you share your content. You are the X factor in your social media content curation. Managing the brand online with comments, questions and conversation is what ultimately draws people to your content over and over again. The best-laid social media strategy in the world will fail without people to manage the social media listening and interaction.
I hope these pro tips give you some ideas to tweak your content strategy and create a compelling plan for your future social media marketing efforts.
Brands on Instagram are also seeing huge amounts of engagement on Instagram. According to Forrester Research, per-follower interaction rate is 2.3 percent- way above Facebook (0.2%) and Twitter (0.02%).
That all sounds incredible, right? But how do you find time to dedicate to growing your brand on Instagram? From planning and editing to posting and engaging with your followers, there’s a lot on your plate when it comes to Instagram marketing.
We’d love to help you achieve more with less on Instagram.
In this post, we’re sharing nine time-saving Instagram marketing tips to help you achieve incredible results with less time and effort.
Let’s get started.
1. Create Instagram posts on desktop instead of mobile
Thanks to the great amount of tools out there, social media management has become much easier than it was a few years ago. While Instagram still doesn’t allow publishing through its web application, there are many tools that allow you to create your Instagram posts on desktop first.
Creating Instagram posts on desktop can be a massive time saver. Here’s why:
Creating your graphics or editing your photos on your desktop can be much faster than doing so on your mobile.
Most Instagram scheduling tools save you from the hassle of transferring your graphics and photos from your desktop to your mobile.
With Buffer for Instagram, you can upload your image and schedule a post on your desktop. When it’s the time to post, you will receive a notification on your mobile, and we’d have transferred the image to your mobile!
If you’re preparing your Instagram posts on desktop, here are some useful images sizes to ensure your content always looks great:
Square Image: 1080px in width by 1080px in height
Vertical Image: 1080px in width by 1350px in height
Horizontal Image: 1080px in width by 566px in height
Editor’s note: For more on the perfect images sizes for Instagram (and all other major social media channels) check out this post.
2. Repost quickly with permission
A study by marketing startup, Crowdtap, and the global research company, Ipsos, found that user-generated content is 35 percent more memorable and 50 percent more trusted than traditional and non-user-generated media.
A great way we’ve found to share user-generated content on Instagram is to repost images from our community. This strategy has helped us grow our Instagram following by 300 percent under three months. (If you want to learn how we find the best user-generated content for our account, here’s a short video by Brian Peters, our social media manager.)
A typical way of reposting an image after asking for permission looks something like this:
Take a screenshot on your mobile
Crop away everything apart from the image
Copy and paste or type out the caption
Add your own caption
Finally, publish the user-generated content
Apps like Buffer and Repost allow you to skip all the tedious steps. Simply copy the Share URL of the Instagram post you want to repost and open the reposting app. The post, with both the image and original caption, will be generated for you in the app.
You can read more about how to repost in Instagram here.
Quick reminder: Before you repost, it is best to request permission from the original poster.
3. Plan the layout of your gallery
Instead of thinking about what you want to post every day on the day itself, a good approach might be to plan your posts with your overall social media strategy in mind.
Also, Instagram is becoming a curated platform where businesses and individuals only post their best photos according to specific themes instead of every photo they take. So, it’s important to have a well-curated and consistent profile gallery.
At Buffer, the themes we chose for our Instagram account are:
User-generated content
Digital nomad lifestyle
Productivity and motivation
Knowing these in mind allows us to plan how we want our gallery to look like. Hope our gallery is giving off these vibes!
4. Use tools to separate content creation and engagement
One of the most common productivity advice is to do one thing at a time.
A research by New York University business professor, Sophie Leroy, discovered that there’s a cost to switching your attention from one task to another — even if the switch is brief. Whenever our brains switch to a new task, the old task leaves an “attention residue” that reduces our cognitive performance for a non-trivial amount of time.
Multitasking actually cause us to take a longer time to complete all the tasks because our brains have to constantly switch between those tasks.
For Instagram marketing, there are usually two main things you would do:
Creating or scheduling content
Responding to comments and engaging with others
It is easy to be distracted by the notifications when you only want to publish a post.
A trick can be to use a tool solely for scheduling so that you can focus on creating content when you want to. Then, when you are in the Instagram app, you can focus on replying and engaging.
Taking this a step further, you could…
5. Create a week’s worth of posts in one go
Batching is a popular time management technique that aims to maximize concentration and increase productivity. The idea is to do similar tasks that require similar resources together.
I ended up spending 2.5 hours focused on my writing project and 3.5 hours focused on my research paper. That’s six hours, in one day, of focused work with zero interruptions; not even one quick glance at email.
At the same time, the careful pre-planning required to satisfy my batching rules increased the efficiency of my small task completion. Even though I dedicated 6 hours in one 10 hour work day to uninterrupted focus, another 1.5 hours to exercise and eating, and another 1 hour to a doctors appointment, I still managed to accomplish an impressive collection of logistical tasks both urgent and non-urgent.
Taking this technique to Instagram marketing, it could mean grouping content creation and scheduling together instead of creating and publishing posts on a daily basis or even several times a day. Creating the posts from scratch on a daily basis can be very interruptive to your schedule.
Here are some things you can try:
Plan a photo-taking session to take multiple photos that can be used for a series of Instagram posts
Create and edit all the images you want to post for the upcoming week altogether since you are already in the image editor
Upload all the images onto a scheduling tool and add captions to all of them in one setting
The additional benefit of creating a week’s worth of posts at a go is that your Instagram posts will be more consistent as you will be thinking ahead.
6. Schedule time to engage
Another task you can batch is responding and engaging with others on Instagram. By batching them and scheduling the time to do that, you gain control over your schedule instead of being dictated by notifications.
In the experiment above, professor and author, Cal Newport set himself a simple rule:
All work must be done in blocks of at least 30 minutes. If I start editing a paper, for example, I have to spend at least 30 minutes editing. If I need to complete a small task, like handing in a form, I have to spend at least 30 minutes doing small tasks. Crucially, checking email and looking up information online count as small tasks. If I need to check my inbox or grab a quick stat from the web, I have to spend at least 30 minutes dedicated to similarly small diversions.
Here’s what you can try:
Turn off notifications for your Instagram account.
Schedule 30 minutes to an hour on your calendar every day to reply to comments, like, and comment on your followers’ posts.
You could also schedule up to a few sessions like this in a day if you want to have a faster response time on Instagram.
This will prevent the notifications from disrupting your day when you are working on other tasks.
7. Prepare commonly used hashtags in an Evernote note
After analyzing over 65,000 social media posts for their study on hashtags, TrackMaven found that:
Instagram posts with nine hashtags perform best, with an average engagement of 28,548 interactions per post.
While engagement starts to decrease after this peak, posts with more than nine hashtags still have higher engagement than posts with fewer than eight hashtags. This suggests that on Instagram, it’s always better to err on the side of more hashtags rather than fewer.
However, typing nine or more hashtags every time you want to publish a post can be very time-consuming. A solution is to create a few sets of commonly used hashtags for different themes in an Evernote note or your preferred note-taking app.
This way, you can simply copy and paste the hashtags without having to re-type them every time. Then, you can also add more hashtags that are specific to each post.
If you are creating the post using a desktop (as mentioned in the first tip above), this process becomes even easier as it is much faster to copy and paste on the desktop than to switch between apps on mobile, selecting, copying, and pasting the hashtags.
8. Use the same filter and/or edits
Here’s another trick to help you save time and create a consistent profile gallery: use the same filter and/or edits for most — or even all — your images.
A lot of the time spent on publishing an Instagram post is usually spent on editing the image. By using the same filter and/or edits for every image, you can drastically reduce the editing time. This not only saves you time but also helps to keep your Instagram posts consistent.
If you use a photo editing application on your desktop like Lightroom, you can save a filter and the edits as a custom template.
9. Repurpose posts on other platforms for Instagram (and vice versa)
Your Instagram posts don’t have to exist on Instagram only, and that’s the same for your other social media content.
Instead of re-creating new content for each social media platform, you could repurpose your posts on other platforms for Instagram and vice versa. This increases the impact of your content and saves you time from creating new content.
His strategy is to record a video or audio every week and turn it into four long-form articles and 40 social media images. The concept is that a Facebook or YouTube video can be turned into numerous multi-media content for all other platforms. I think this is a great way to make full use of your content.
Using Buffer, you can easily schedule the content you have made for other social media platforms for Instagram as well. For example, if you have created a short clip for Facebook, you can also cross-post it onto your Instagram profile.
Similarly, you can do it the other way round. If you have prepared a photo for an Instagram post, you can also schedule it for your other social media profiles.
Over to you
And that’s the nine time-saving Instagram marketing tips to help you achieve results for your business with less time and effort. As a recap, here are the nine tips:
Create Instagram posts on desktop instead of mobile
Repost quickly with permission
Plan how you want your gallery to look like
Use a tool to separate content creation and engagement
Create a week’s worth of posts at a go
Schedule time to engage
Prepare commonly used hashtags in an Evernote note
Use the same filter and edits
Repurpose posts on other platforms for Instagram (and vice versa)
Are there any productivity tips you have for fellow Instagram marketers?
SEO is rapidly becoming a highly specialized field. It’s one of the fastest-changing aspects of marketing, too, as search engines continue to refine their algorithms to provide a better searcher experience. A major part of SEO now is simply having content that is the best answer for your potential customers.
Even if you’re not a content creator, it’s important to know how people read content online versus print. Online reading habits affect everything from SEO to design.
As a content creator, this is an important bit of context that I sometimes have to go out of my way to get. It’s easy to relax into being told, “here’s your topic; fill up a bucket with words and send it off.” But that’s ground-level thinking. It’s important to know how content planning works, where the topics are coming from, and how to do that research for yourself.
We have a three-stage funnel model at TopRank Marketing: Attract, Engage, and Convert. Buyers in the Attract stage may not be actively looking for a solution. They might not even be aware they have a problem. Those in the Engage stage are looking for a solution, researching their options. Those in the Convert stage have made a decision to buy, and need a final nudge to our client’s solution.
It used to be simple to get reach on social media. You put out great content, build an audience of followers, and they shared your content to their networks. Easy. Simple. And above all, free.
Pay per click (PPC) is for organic search what your paid social media is to your organic reach—a way to reach a broader audience and prioritize your content over others. For a price.
Influencer marketing is rapidly becoming a go-to solution for co-creating great content and increasing content amplification. It seems simple enough—find influential people, get them to share your stuff, profit—but each of those steps has plenty of sub-steps built into it.
Unless your role specifically requires it, you may not need to know exactly how to track, measure, and report on the results of your marketing efforts. But it is important to understand your department’s overall goals, the goal for each piece of content, and how progress will be measured. Goals and metrics vary widely, so I recommend tapping the metrics & analytics experts in your organization for an overview.
