Content Marketing Archive

In a digital world, content is the currency of influence. Obviously, most marketers nowadays are aware of the importance of content marketing: according to recent studies, 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing, and 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content each day.

Along with the explosion of content, marketers are challenged to make their voice heard. That’s why influencers should be a part of your content marketing strategy. Traackr Academy of Influencer Marketing recently brought us a new course, Confluence: The Meeting of Content and Influencer Marketing, to help marketers attract and convert customers by aligning influencer and content strategies.

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All of us here at Delightful have finished the course from the Academy of Influencer Marketing (AIM) powered by Traackr!

Traackr is a solid influencer marketing platform that Delightful has been using for 2 years to help clients set up and run strategic influencer marketing programs. We love Traackr not just because it’s a great tool, but also it shares a similar methodology on influencer marketing with us which is building authentic and strategic relationships through a value exchange and mutual benefit framework.

The 1.5 hour course provided the Delightful team with a systematic crash course on understanding influencer marketing, identifying and engaging the influencers, setting up an effective influencer marketing program, and defining a measurement framework, etc.

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Earlier this month, we helped the Bing Ads team create a video of the awesome #JanesOfDigital event that took place at SMX West in San Jose.

The evening mini-seminar slash networking opportunity is the second in an on-going series of get-togethers designed to celebrate women in search and digital marketing.

We partnered with our fabulous editor, Andrew Goddard, at Cherry UK to produce a promo which really captures the atmosphere and buzz surrounding this most excellent occasion.

A particular call out to Sarah Wulf who did an exceptional job as anchor and for asking some great questions, which as you can see, garnered some great answers from the evening’s esteemed panel!

So here is the video. Hope you enjoy…

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Regards,

Mel

Keith Reinhard, the chairman emeritus of DDB Worldwide, reminded us on Adweek a couple of weeks ago that marketing and advertising have always been about connecting brands with people, and we need to remember that human nature stays pretty constant.

Although the technology landscape is constantly changing, it’s useful to understand and utilize the constants in our lives (and marketing plans) as well.

Twitter Analytics is one tool that can provide valuable data for marketers to understand people, connect with them, and tell stories they love.

Although we’ve been using Twitter Analytics since it was open to the public, the webinar hosted by Twitter last month gave me some deeper insights, especially on how to use the tool for content marketing.

Know Your Audience

Understanding who you are talking to is an essential step before you start talking. Twitter Analytics can help you with this by providing visualized and easy-understanding data about your followers.

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We had a blast at the Seattle Interactive Conference a couple of weeks ago. As always, we came back with the wisdom of some amazing speakers to share with you.

Geoff Colon from Microsoft, a former Brooklyn DJ, talking about “remix culture” was one of the most interesting sessions that shed some light on the future of digital marketing.
Similar thoughts on how digital was transforming the way marketers should be thinking about engaging with consumers were also shared by other speakers from the conference such as Joanna Lord from Porch and Michael King from iPullRank.

Remix is everywhere

According to Geoff speaking at his session “Social by Design,” everything is a “remix” because people are constantly creating value from value others have created.

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Next week I’ll be heading to Washington DC for the Digital East conference run by those lovely people at TechMedia.

I’ll be there with my Majestic Brand Ambassador hat on and speaking at 9.50am on Wednesday 10th September:

Agile, Delightful & Unexpected: When Social Media and Digital Collide for ROI

Big Data and Content Marketing are all the rage right now, but few marketers are nailing the opportunity they present or integrating them in a cohesive digital PR strategy. In this session, delegates will be taken on a whirlwind journey through what data matters, why content marketing is not such a new thing, how to reach influencers who’ll wax lyrical about your brand, and what it all means for your bottom line!

It’ll be the third TechMedia conference we have attended, and I must say I’ve been really impressed with the content and organization of the event.

If you have a chance to attend this show next week in Tyson’s Corner, then register here!

The cost for a ticket is very reasonable given the amount you’ll learn over the course of the conference.

Hope to see you there!

Mel Carson – Delightful’s Founder and Principle Strategist

Do you spend tons of hours searching for media coverage about your brand?

Well, judging from a 30 minute webinar we watched recently, CisionPoint might be able to help you out!

CisionPoint has been a popular tool for PR professionals since it launched at 2007. From identifying key influencers and connecting with audiences, to monitoring traditional and social media and analyzing outcomes, CisionPoint covers a PR project from beginning to end.

During the webinar, CisionPoint’s product manager, Sharifa Abubaker, and product specialist, Sonal Moraes, demonstrated several tips and tricks of monitoring media coverage with CisionPoint.

Below are some highlights of the product in terms of media monitoring that I found very helpful and wanted to share with you:

Solid Database

CisionPoint monitors over 300,000 outlets and has the information of more than 1,000,000 contacts. You can get relevant information from millions of social media sites and other websites, as well as traditional broadcast and print media in a matter minutes. Moreover, you don’t need to worry about getting overwhelmed by the huge amount of information. CisionPoint has detailed filter functions to sort all the coverage as you need.

Ready to Share

One of the solid functions of CisionPoint is that it can automatically generate a nice formatted report for you. By clicking “create press report,” you can customize what you want to include in the report, such as media type, outlet, publication date, full text, etc. A cover page with your company logo is also available. For PR agencies, it’s obviously important to keep your clients updated. CisionPoint allows you to set up and customize email alerts for external recipients, which makes keeping your client “in the know” a lot easier.

Fully Integrated

Besides reporting needs, monitoring coverage can also help you with media research and competitive analysis for a PR campaign.   Using CisionPoint, you can directly transport the coverage information you gather into a media list saving you a lot of time by killing two birds with one stone.

We don’t use CisionPoint yet, but we like to keep up with Cision’s useful webinars which include a lot of helpful hints on how to stay relevant as a digital PR consultancy.

If you have used CisionPoint in the past or are using it right now, please do share your experience with us!

We’re always on the look out for new tools that do the job of monitoring social media well (and that are cost-effective), so let us know what you use and why!

Thanks for reading,

Bianca

P.S. Check out our thoughts on Digital PR and what companies need to be thinking about in an increasingly digital world.

I’ve not been to Cannes Lions for a couple of years now, but  I always keep up with what’s going on through these digestible snapshots of what went on on main stage via their YouTube channel.

Sir John Hegarty

In the below highlights from Day 6 last month, Sir John Hegarty from advertising agency BBH, talks brilliantly and hilariously about the (not so) new fad surrounding the obsession with “big data”.

Refering to advertising in particular he nails is by saying, “Data has always been important….it’s called consumer knowledge. The idea that this is going to be the solution to everything and it will give you the answer is BS.”

He continues that if everyone is looking at the same data, everyone will come to the same conclusions and they’ll all produce the same work.

“The idea of data is to take you to a point, and then you go now what do you think about it? What do you feel about it? It doesn’t have the answer. It just asks a set of questions…….call it what you like but it is just data.”

I’ve always felt the same way about the way people have talked about big data in the realms of digital marketing and PR. In our work with Majestic, the remit has always been to use the plethora of data they provide to ask just those questions. To use it to provide additional holes in a problem down which to travel and find a solution. Whether it be an issue with SEO, market intelligence or an opportunity to discover new opportunities to build relationships with writers and journalists.

Big data is not an end in itself as it doesn’t have all the answers. Businesses need to know how to slice and dice it to answer questions beyond the numbers. And those questions often involve asking your customers and potential customers how they feel, something the great Jim Sterne has always encouraged us to do.

When was the last time you got out from behind your analytics dashboard or scorecard and had a real life conversation with a customer?

Try it. You might be surprised by what you uncover and how it relates (or not) the the data you have.

Until next time,

Mel

One thing I was most proud of during my time at Microsoft were the videos we created at Advertising Week and the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

For about four years I’d travel to these events with a plan to bring them alive for people (as my former boss Jenny Leahy used to put it) “outside the room.”

The videos were then used to promote our presence, be repurposed for other marketing activities and really expand the reach of Microsoft Advertising’s investment in those industry get-togethers.

Recently, the guys from Bing Ads asked me to create one for them. This time I did much of the filming and photography myself and we crowd sourced the rest of the content from other Microsoftees on the ground at the event.

The footage was then sent to my go-to video people >> Cherry Media << in the UK who we worked with in New York and Cannes.

And this was the resulting edit:

You do have to invest in good equipment and editing to create great video, but it doesn’t have to cost the earth. With experience you can start to pick up techniques and visualize how an end edit might look as your filming content at events.

Make sure you check back to the Delightful Blog in a couple of weeks when I’ll be giving some tips on what to look for when filming events for social media amplification.

Thanks for reading/watching!

Mel

Representing Majestic SEO in the US as their Brand Ambassador, I not only get to work with some of the smartest minds in internet technology, big data extraction and actionable analytics, but I get to keep my hand in one of the oldest disciplines that exists in web marketing.

SEO (or Search Engine Optimization if you have stumbled upon this post in error but are still reading) has brought to my professional career some of the best conversations and most endearing relationships I’ve ever had. So when the chaps at the SEO software company, Linkdex, asked to interview me for an eBook on the state of SEO right now, I leapt at the chance to express some of my thoughts on where we are with SEO and what I’ve learned from those conversations and relationships, and what I’ve picked up over the last 18 months through client interaction at Delightful Communications.

You’ll hear not just from me, but read wisdom from people like Danny Sullivan, Bruce Clay, Marty Weintraub, Dixon Jones, Andrew Girdwood, Cedric Chambaz, Eric Enge, Marcus Tandler, Sara Clifton, Rhea Drysdale, Josh Braaten and Aleyda Solis to name but a few.

It maybe 300 plus pages but the insight you’ll glean from its pages will carry your understanding and effectively equip you to navigate SEO for the next 300 years (well almost).

Download the SEO NOW eBook……….NOW!