No one said this marketing thing would be easy, but it helps to stay on the cutting edge of the latest tactics and strategies used by the pros. In this post, you'll find the top 5 content marketing blogs from last week. Each blog includes a host of actionable takeaways that can help you stay on top of your game. Image Credit: Hubspot.com
10 Tips for Creating Content That Converts Like a Champ
In this post, James argues that the purpose of creating content is to make money and the only way to make money is to create content that strikes a cord with a web visitor to convert them from lead to a full-fledged, revenue generating customer.
The hard part is actually creating content that connects with people. James shares his 10 tips for creating content that is sure to convert. Things such as writing copy that excites emotions, motivates, and even ignites some fear can go a long way. This is only the 'tip' of the iceberg, so take a few minutes to breeze through James' content conversion advice.
7 Mind-Numbingly Easy Marketing Changes You Probably Haven’t Made Yet
Marketing is a never-ending cycle of research, planning, action, and measurement. It's easy to make suggestions to someone's marketing strategy, but it gets dicey when it comes time to actually implement those changes. Thankfully, Pratik wrote about 7 easy marketing changes you can make with the flip of a switch. Some of his tips are so obvious that it would actually be shameful if you haven't already done them. Blatantly asking for email subscribes, for instance, is one of the simplest ways to generate new leads. Chances are, with all the inbound marketers in the world today, there is someone who missed one of these steps. Check out his post to find out the other 6 mind-numbingly easy marketing changes.
There are two reasons web visitors fail to click on call to action buttons - friction and anxiety. That statement was made by Joanna Wiebe (@copyhackers) of Conversion Copywriter for Copy Hackers, who shared her insight with Jerod Morris of Copyblogger in The Lede - a podcast.
I love listening to The Lede, because it's a welcome departure from my usual routine - eyes glued to black type on a white screen. Joanna's advice is to increase friction and reduce anxiety when designing a CTA button. Sidebar - she mentions that a call to ACTION should actually be referred to as call to VALUE to emphasize the value gained for taking an action. I found that to be an interesting nugget of wisdom. Listen to The Lede to get the full scoop on how to increase friction and reduce anxiety, so people will click on your buttons.
14 Ways to Get More Use Out of Your Buyer Personas
Any content marketer worth their snuff knows the importance of buyer personas. This article is for those who seek to get more mileage out of what they've worked so hard to design. Think of the countless hours, days, and weeks of research, interviews, conceptualizing, pitching, ewk. Let's not go there. You've done the dirty work, and reaped the praise of your coworkers and leadership, so now you need to actually use them in more ways than one.
Erik gives us a total of 14 buyer persona hacks to help you seamlessly weave them throughout the fabric of your marketing. One of the ways is 'writing an eBook targeted to a specific persona', so in light of next featured post, apply a another B2B content marketing type here. Unless you've got a definite hit that hasn't been written and re-written by at least 15 other marketers.
6 Ways to Make B2B Content Marketing That’s Better Than the eBook
By JAY ACUNZO, @jay_zo
Before you pre-judge this blog by it's title, this is not an eBook bash. This blog is encouragement to explore better content types, because better, more effective choices exist. eBooks are so popular and commonplace that they're losing impact. Everyone with a blog is publishing eBooks, or some other long-form type, in exchange for something. But too much of anything is a bad thing. So, we all need to explore other B2B content types. I realize that's scary for those of us who have invested heavily in eBooks for our agencies and our clients. Content marketing is a new, and evolving field that's currently over-saturated with eBooks, which wasn't the case just a few years ago.
The good news is that there are better forms of B2B content out there and they don't require a million dollar marketing budget. Jay explores 6 ways to make B2B content marketing that's more effective than eBooks based on one simple question: Will this piece of content save our audience time, money, or both? If the answer is 'no' on one or both accounts, you shouldn't invest in it. If it's 'yes', you have a truly useful and valuable piece of content on your hands. Things like playbooks, guides, etc. get more use, because they can be used during the content creation process.
With that said, if you're ready to create killer CTA's (or CTV's), feast your eyes on the guide below.
