You’ve probably done a few crazy things in your marketing stints online, right?
But, hey, we learn from our mistakes. Or we should.
I’m not perfect, too, so I’ve made a list of ten very common content marketing errors that I’ve noticed that are still trending at a popular pace online.
Online marketers, businesses producing content, and freelance copywriters at all stages are vulnerable to these.
Know, avoid, conquer (or something to that effect).
Keep reading and learn what to avoid so you can be 100% successful in your content marketing path.
10 of the Most Common Content Marketing Errors & Pitfalls
1. Giving Up Too Soon
Joe Pulizzi once said that content marketing doesn’t fail due to its content quality, but rather because it is inconsistent—or it just stops.
My simple advice as an avid content marketer for over five years now: never quit.
And along with that: don’t expect overnight results.
Achieving the below ranking took me–ready for it?–eight months.
That’s right: eight months after I published this long-form piece of content (a combination of an infographic + transcript in a blog post) I saw it hit the top three results in Google.
It can take a long time. But when you hit it, guess what? That wait, and that time and effort, was all worth it.
In fact, consistency is the greatest way to revitalize your content marketing program that has become stagnant.
This reminds me of the “don’t give up on your dreams” miner cartoon. Nothing puts it in more realistic terms (for me) than this simple visual. This exactly represents what happens when a content marketer turns away too soon: they just miss the diamond.
2. Ignoring Quality and Focusing on Quantity
Quality is important for many reasons. It increases your engagement, builds trust, and promotes thought leadership. But most importantly, Google thinks quality is important. Since Google is the boss when it comes to how it ranks and who it sends to your site, it gets to make that call. To make sure Google is viewing your content favorably, look for any obvious signs of trouble:
Prevent and remove any user-generated spam that appears on your site
Keep an eye on your site for hacking and remove such content as soon as it appears
Those are external factors. To really ensure content will achieve a high quality status, follow these easy guidelines:
Make use of internal links so users can easily navigate to other content on your site
Make your content trustworthy and accurate
Include helpful features like key takeaways, images or videos
3. Not Marketing Your Own Content
Hey, it’s called content “marketing” for a reason, right?
In Neil Patel’s The Advanced Content Marketing Guide, he explains that the secret to content marketing comes down to three things: coming up with quality content, ensuring search engines find it and promoting it.
If you fail to market your content, it’s never going to spread its wings and being new followers and fans, let along potential customers.
4. Your Offerings Have Become Bland
Leaving your content to sit and become outdated seriously hampers its ability to attract and audience and keep them engaged.
It also reflects poorly on your ability to related to readers and their current concerns or challenges.
Freshen up content with these tips:
Think outside the blog – experiment with new formats, such as infographics, e-books or webinars.
Paint a visual – use visual imagery as instant eye-catchers. But don’t stop at the odd photo or chart. Increase interest by creating visual-centric formats such as video or SlideShare.
Create conversation – content marketing works well when your audience can interact. Ask questions, make a controversial viewpoint and give readers the chance to weigh in on the discussion.
5. A Dead End to Your Storytelling
“Content marketing” in itself can be misleading. You may think that the content itself actually does all the marketing work.
Nothing is further from the truth: there’s no way you can just expect your readers to take in your content and instantly become engaged, loyal, paying customers. You need to guide your readers towards the next step in their purchase process or engagement, and that requires a very strong, clear call to action. Otherwise, you’ll make the worst snafu among content marketing errors: not turning your content into ROI.
Readers expect to be told what to do after they have read your content.
That’s the entire concept behind marketing – you want your readers to do something based on the information they have just received.
If you are not including a call to action in your blogs and other content forms, start right now. That call to action doesn’t need to include a million-dollar deal. It can be as simple as signing up to your mailing list, linking to another resource that you offer or any other conversion point you want to support. Without that call to action, your content is just leading to a dead end.
6. Failing to Write in Drafts
As a writer, you don’t simply sit down, pour sweat, blood and tears over your keyboard and hit the post button, right? What about typos? What about poorly constructed sentences? What if you lost your train of thought somewhere along page three?
And worst of all: what if you burn yourself out in one sitting?
You need time to think of your content as draft stages, so you can edit your writing. But don’t do it right away. Finish your piece and walk away. Go back and edit later when the piece is cold. You’ll view it with a fresh sense of perspective and curiosity.
Sure, not all writers love editing. But think of it like this: editing can turn your “great” piece of work into a masterpiece. Hubspot offers some great editing tips here that will help.
7. Failing to Proofread A Final Time
So you’ve written a blog, you’ve edited it; it’s good to go, right? Wrong. Go back and proofread it that one last time.
Editing is about making those big, deep-line changes. Proofreading is about all the nitty gritty changes to spelling and grammar. Perfecting means you take time for both.
By the way, you can never proofread enough. Make it a habit to proofread three to four times before submitting your work. You’ll be glad you did.
8. Neglecting to Do Solid Enough Research
You’re an absolute master of your subject and possibly the greatest writer to ever grace our earth. Fantastic! But that doesn’t mean you get away without doing any research on your subject.
People are not impressed by personal opinions. They want data, evidence, studies and anything else that will give weight to your opinion.
I’m not going to kid you: research is hard work, especially if you do it right. It’s not only a science, but it’s also an art and combining the two is no mean feat. Research requires hard, honest work, plenty of perseverance and patient by the bucket load. We’re not all born writers and many an author has been heard of falling ill with headaches during the process of sifting through research!
There is an upside: research can be fun. Not only do you get to learn something new, once you realize that you’re offering your readers immense insight and knowledge, that simple writing project soars to a whole new level of excitement.
9. Failing to Define Pronouns
Pronouns? Not defining them? What?
Let me elaborate. These are pronouns:
That
It
Those
These
This
That’s not all of them, there are tons in the English language. Pronouns are important, useful and helpful parts of speech.
So what’s the fuss about not defining them? Let me show you:
Get rid of these. Get rid of what?
That’s pretty bad. What’s bad?
It’s going to be a problem. What’s going to be a problem?
That’s no good at all. What’s no good?
See what I mean? You need to be clear. Define all pronouns, be it within the sentence or within the context of your writing. Undefined pronouns equal unclear writing and result in content marketing errors that are otherwise easy to fix: with lack of clarification, readers get bored, confused and bounce (click away).
10. Failing to Understand Who You Are Writing For
If you want to improve as a writer, you need to understand who your readers are. It’s really as easy as that.
Incredible writing is about connecting with your readers in the most meaningful way possible. You’re not going to be able to achieve that unless you’re able to really get into their heads.
Are you up for a challenge? Try this: before you put a single word on a page, go and do as much research as you can and gain as much understanding as is possible of your potential readers.
It’s actually a simple, and kind of fun exercise, of creating a reader persona. Once you have created that person, you can remind yourself of that person every time you sit down to write.
BONUS: Common Content Marketing Errors to Avoid
11. Not Outlining Your Content Before You Write
Outlining an article is simple, and one of my secrets to success. I always, always start a great content idea by outlining. It never fails when I create this way.
All you do here is create a structure for the article.
I start by jotting down a brief introduction and conclusion which helps me lead into the subject matter. Then I sum it up. This helps me fill in the empty spaces with meaningful and relevant content.
Generally, your outline only needs a couple of bullet points. Your goal should be to write down the main points you want to discuss. They don’t even need to be complete sentences. It’s no big deal, you’re not actually writing the article at this point, just outlining it.
The entire process shouldn’t take you more than ten minutes, but in the long run it’s going to save your hours. And it lends clarity to your article.
Conclusion
There you have it, in ten simple steps: common roadblocks in a content marketer’s success path. Now that you have them, know your pitfalls, avoid the common content marketing errors, and go forth and conquer the content marketing world!
Need a great writer (or two) to balance your content marketing to perfection? Express Writers can help.
“If only I could get more people to my site, they’d see how cool we are.”
Great, but it’s not just about getting the traffic, but keeping it. So, how do you do it?
One way to succeed big time is by creating some really, really good content marketing.
That’s awesome, right? But now you’re wondering, “How do I do that?”
I’ve got you covered with some inspiration.
There are a bunch of companies who are getting content marketing right, from brand new startups to tried and true giants who only get better and adapt to it over time.
To get your juices flowing and tweak your brain with some perspective, let’s look at these companies who are dominating the content marketing arena.
And since you want to know how to do it, too, we’ll take a look at the end on how you can use what they’re doing right to help you create what makes the most sense for your own business. I’m using an 8-point system upon which I’ve based why these particular companies are masters at content. We’ll dive in to all that later.
Ready? Let’s go. I’ve divided up the fifteen winning brands into seven segments of categories. Then, keep reading for the 8 points that make all these brands stand out. Enjoy!
I. The “Taste” Makers: More Than Just Another Drink or Meal
1. Coca-Cola
On the face of it, it’s just soda pop, but this iconic brand has positioned itself to be synonymous with emotion. Their content is vivid and fresh, and they’ve figured out how to stay current yet nostalgic at the same time. Creating a feeling of inclusion and diversity is key for them, because they clearly understand their consumer is everywhere. On their site, they post a lot of content about current events (especially sports), which further appeals to and brings in current readers and consumers by their interests.
And by pushing a feeling of comeraderie, it makes you genuinely believe the way to someone’s heart is through sharing a Coke and a smile. To still be able to evoke that sense with your content after 130 years is pretty stellar.
On Twitter, they pull in celebrities to talk about why they love Coca-Cola, making them even more relatable to “today’s” market.
2. Red Bull
“Red Bull gives you wings,” and they definitely ensure their content drives that home. This energy drink has become the gold standard by which all others compare, and for good reason. Their marketing has been pushing their extreme sports/lifestyle tone since day one and has continued that intensity even they’ve grown.
One thing they win at online that you might not have known about is in interactive cartoon collections. It’s some of the most creative stuff I’ve ever seen, and solidifies that content marketing is done very well when you bring in custom artist illustrations (I do this quite a lot to make a good point, see my copyrighting vs. copywriting cartoon here). Check it out at My Wings and Flying Planet – be sure you have a few minutes before you click. 😉
And, they show the deep global roots of their product in The Red Bulletin.
3. Whole Foods
Whole Foods is touted as “America’s healthiest grocery store” for a reason. This brand truly wins at everything. Not only are they known for their name, but they’re known for their mission, purpose, and values–which they convey excellently online. One way they win (out of many) is by putting emphasis on the consumer.
“Your Stories” is a featured tab on their home page, right next to Our Stories; and it goes to an Instagram feed where anyone posting with the hashtag #foods4thought can be featured. Good move, Whole Foods, good move.
II. Fresh, New Stories with a Colorful Edge
1. Poo~Pourri
You already know how much we lovethis adorable site. They call their visitors Poo Pals, have an Alice in Wonderland meets every iconic music video theme ever intro that will make you blush, giggle and dance, and a slogan that touches on hidden concerns.
But what makes them queens of content marketing is how in your face they are with what their product is in a way that makes you feel like they don’t just know you, but get you. And it’s pretty. Their entire site—how they present the product, the fonts they use, and the colors they’ve chosen—is beautifully whimsical. Even their social media icons are uniquely them.
2. Squatty Potty
“Healthy colon, happy life” sums it up in one wonderful slogan for this creative company. One way they absolutely win is the clarification of exactly how the product works on their home page.
Oh, and their superbly creative YouTube video story that involved a prince, rainbow ice cream, and a pooping unicorn that won with 24 million views to date. (Involve all those protagonists in a story, and you can’t help but win.)
(And all evidence to the contrary, we promise we’re not obsessed with bum issues.) However, when someone takes on a subject matter that is so uncomfortable in a way that makes you readily embrace it, you’ve got to sit up and notice. Or squat, in this case. Different from the cute Poo~Pourri, Squatty Potty gives a medical reason for their product, but in a way that’s so relatable, you can’t resist it. No bells, no whistles, just straightforward yet creatively crafted content.
III. The Movers: Cars Taken to a New Level
6. Subaru
Subaru tapped into the depth of why you want a car that runs well like no one else did. They’ve done a great job of creating content that marries the durability of their product with the emotional resonance that creates.
Turning a car into a friend as opposed to a status symbol isn’t new, but how they do that and continue to play on that feeling to keep you coming back for more is a winning combination.
7. Mini Cooper
When you think Mini Cooper, you’re thinking something cute to zip around in and they know that. So they’ve created content marketing to change that perception. Their campaign “Those Who Defy Labels Define Themselves” is a great tool to give them a more serious tone while maintaining their aspirational feel.
It’s sleek and beautifully created, using personal stories and the very opposite of “stereotyping” (rather, what we all have in common) to build a relationship with their consumers. It’s not just about a “car” anymore.
IV. The Shakers: Brawn with Heart
8. NFL
These guys are one of the best examples ever of understanding your consumer and keeping them engaged. While other league sites definitely get their fans, the NFL has a way of staying dynamic and vibrant even in the off-season. With up-to-the-minute stats, live highlights, fun games at NFL Rush and more, you’re immersed in football and everything that stands for. Besides all the sports glamor, they even run some donation campaigns for great charities that help combat hunger in other countries.
Their approach is very rah-rah, which completely reflects the whole of what they embody, and it is carried through even when they are presenting their community involvement. That consistency goes a long way towards establishing and maintaining a strong relationship with their consumers.
9. Nike
This is one of those companies that have engaged their core consumers so well and consistently for so long, it’s imperative to bring them up. They follow a formula that’s as simple as possible: know your customer and reach them. Period.
They’ve reacted to the desire for sustainability, concerns about childhood obesity and fair treatment of their craftspeople by creating a link to Nike Better World, which outlines their efforts to address all of that in an active, realistic way. Their content marketing goes beyond their “Just Do It” catchphrase, while all the while making you feel you can.
V. The People Pleasers: Your Style, Your Way
10. The Land of Nod
“Design for kids and people who used to be kids.” It’s on the homepage and you believe it, because they show it. The Land of Nod doesn’t belabor their obvious adorableness by being overwhelmingly earnest and nuanced. Their goal is to sell that “handmade with love” feeling, so they let the product talk for itself as well as highlighting their artists with a “nodcast” on their Nod Network to support what they know their consumers want.
11. Free People
Can you say visual? Add to that the beautiful boho style Free People is known for, and you have their entire basis of online presence. Their site is 100% visual–and it’s stunning.
A flowing, beautiful product is Free People’s trademark and it’s reflected in their content. From how they present their fonts to their photos and everything in between, the whole Boho Chic style is presented for your full immersion. There is a consistent prompting for viral sharing so that all of their customers feel they have a voice and content is consistently updated to reflect how on trend and in the moment they are.
VI. The Perception Changers: Taking the Everyday to the Next Level
12. Saveur
This magazine giant of the culinary world has mastered embracing the net to give a broader perspective on how to engage with food. It’s visually stimulating and delves into how to create true dining experiences in a way that shows they clearly know their readers/consumers well. They’re ahead of the curve more so than a lot of print mags: they’ve figured out how to keep their ink-on-paper magazine relevant by bridging the two beautifully with an entire online portal called Magazines, where you can browse each issue.
13. Stouffer’s
Frozen food has come a long way, but Stouffer’s doesn’t sit back on their laurels. They were one of the first to create a different perspective on what to do with and what to expect from your frozen entrees and their content marketing clearly reflects that. It doesn’t focus on the convenience their products afford, but the different ways to enjoy their food to make a difference in your life. And their site makes you salivate–don’t look below if you’re hungry.
The flow, the look and the feel all draw you in and makes you forget that this is just a bunch of stuff you’ll find in your grocer’s freezer while still appealing to the simplicity their customers seek.
14. Blue Apron
Cooking’s a chore for a lot of people. As much as they wish they could have a home cooked meal, they simply don’t like doing it. Blue Apron has figured out how to change your mind about that, and their content marketing is as simple and natural as their products. From the moment you get on their site, you’re met with a video explaining how all of this works and you get engaged instantly: the tagline itself defines very well what you’re about to watch.
It makes you feel comfortable even if you don’t normally cook. While they certainly aren’t the only service like this, they’ve created a way of engaging their consumers that pulls you in and keeps you there.
VII. The Unavoidable: Making a Must Easy
15. TurboTax
Death and taxes are inevitable, but if you have to endure the tedium of the second, finding a business that presents its content in a way that makes you want to do them is pretty freaking awesome. Intuit Turbo Tax has figured out a way to get you in and out as quickly as possible while also making you feel like you know what you’re doing. They’ve also created some pretty cool tools that keep it from feeling so sterile with colorful icons, straightforward instructions and interesting links. There are contests, information on how to throw Turbo Tax Parties and more. You can also access their YouTube channel, which runs very funny and completely relatable commercials that basically talk you off the ledge of filing taxes. All of this is created to assure you that Turbo Tax gets you and will be so user friendly, you wouldn’t want to go anywhere else, and it works.
One simple way that Turbo Tax wins in their online presence is simply how well they’ve defined their product as soon as you land on your home page–they guarantee your tax returns, with a picture of a woman actually seeing her tax returns in dollar amounts. Talk about visually showing your product value!
Your Content Marketing Barometer: An 8-Point Win System
Each of these companies hits the 8-point system I’ve set (read below) as our barometer. That means that for your business to win with content marketing, you also have to be able to create something that will hit those on the head. And this (drum roll, please) is how you do that: 1. Readable
Your copy needs to be clearly written, reflect the tone of your company and convey your theme. 2. Visual
People are visual beings, and offering eye-grabbing graphics will keep them engaged and wanting more. 3. Radical
Even if you’ve discovered something unique and new to sell or offer, you want to stand out as much as possible while doing it, so think out of the box and take leaps people will notice. 4. Shareable
Offer content that provokes conversation and prompts consumers to forward and share it in any number of ways. 5. Findable
Make sure your site is easy to navigate so that those nuggets you’ve created to get some buzz aren’t so hard to find you’ll lose visitors. 6. Actionable
The point of content marketing is to market your service or product and that means you want to have calls to action to get people to do that, but be careful not to hard sell. 7. Understandable
This covers a multitude of things from stringing your thoughts together in a way that makes sense to clearly conveying what your company stands for and is offering. 8. Accessible
Your content marketing should be something people can relate to so they don’t feel spoken down to or excluded.
Conclusion
Nailing your content marketing not only gets people coming back to your site, but staying and sharing.
When there’s enough buzz, things will start to take off and you’ll feel the benefits.
I know that creating great content marketing takes some finessing, and no one expects you to be an expert on your own. Check out our content strategy services and get a feel for how, with a little help, you can push your content into the upper echelons. Know a brand that’s inspired your content marketing to take the next level? Share in the comments!
If you’ve spent much time on Reddit, aka “The Front Page of the Internet,” it’s likely you’ve run across the term “TL;DR.”
But, do you know what it really means? If the answer is “no,” you’re not alone.
TL;DR is a widely used slang that means “Too long; didn’t read.” While the term itself a bit vague, what you might not know is that there’s an entire concept behind TL;DR to take away and use as inspiration for better marketing in an age where everything (technology, people, time) seems to go at a supercharged fast pace.
We recently delved into researching what’s behind this term and how to take away the concept of too long, didn’t read as a marketing lesson. Keep reading to learn more.
[bctt tweet=”Clueless on what TL;DR really is? @JuliaEMcCoy explains what it really means and how you can use it for better content marketing.” username=”ExpWriters”]
The Concept of TL;DR: A Reddit Phenomenon
In a way, TL;DR describes our online lifestyles right now. Since people today have shorter attention spans than goldfish, fewer and fewer of us are bellying up to long-form content that takes a dictionary and a few advanced degrees to slog through.
Use Reddit and you’ll come across TL;DR sooner rather than later. Many other similar platforms have taken inspiration from this online short-style giant.
Why does Reddit love TL;DR?
Well, since online forums can give way to lengthy debates and complex arguments, the TL;DR tag is used to help people locate summaries. For example, if there’s a long thread that you’re interested in, but you don’t feel like combing through it to pick out the useful bits, you can scroll to the end of the page where you’ll typically see a bolded TL;DR section. This section offers a pared-down version of the page, which helps users navigate relevant content quickly and easily.
Here’s how that works on Reddit.
Because so few people are reading long-form content or, worse yet, digging through pages and pages of irrelevant results to find the content they want, Reddit has capitalized on the TL;DR phenomenon and created an entire TLDR section on their platform.
In this section, the curators behind Reddit have “condensed the best of Reddit” to make it easier for users to get easy access to quick, daily recaps.
If you’re having any doubts about the awesomeness of this, let me tell you that the headlines alone are enough to win you over. Example? “Germany recognizes the Armenian Genocide, Elon Must wants to launch people to Mars in 2024, and King Tut’s dagger was made from a meteorite.”
How’s that for scope?
Click on the TL;DR Reddit and you’re greeted by a handy page that breaks the topics down into subreddits like world news, science, technology, politics, and even astronomy. From there, you can navigate to the bit that you’re interested in and interact with all of the comments and shared links on that page.
By condensing information into simple TL;DR pages, Reddit and other online messaging platforms provide better service for their readers and help organize information in an intuitive and straightforward way.
[bctt tweet=”Reddit is the birthplace of TL;DR. Know how this concept can help you create better content marketing in this post by @JuliaEMcCoy” username=”ExpWriters”]
Why TL;DR Matters Today Now More Than Ever
In the last 16 years, the human attention span has taken a dive from 12 seconds to approximately 8 seconds, where it’s currently stalled out. The resulting forgetfulness and distractibility are evident in virtually everything we do. In fact, a whopping 39% of Americans have lost an important item or forgotten a critical piece of information at least once in the past week, and people working in office settings check their email approximately 30 times each hour. As it stands right now, the average American checks his or her phone about 1,500 times each week. Whew.
When you take all of this distractibility and partner it with online marketing, things get even more startling. Despite the time, energy, and attention most marketers put into their content, most users only read 20% of the words on a page and leave web pages within 20 seconds. Because of this, developments like Reddit’s TL;DR sections are critical to keep people interested and engaged with content.
[bctt tweet=”‘In the last 16 years, the human attention span has taken a dive from 12 seconds to approximately 8 seconds… developments like Reddit’s TL;DR sections are critical to keep people interested and engaged with content.’ – @JuliaEMcCoy on why TL;DR matters today.” username=”ExpWriters”]
Using the Concept of TL;DR to Improve Your Marketing: 5 Tips
If Reddit can do it, so can you! (Scroll down to see exactly how Reddit does it.)
While you don’t necessarily need to pare all your content down to bare bones (long-form content still converts better, after all), it is wise to organize your content in such a way that it’s easier for readers to pull what they want from it. Here are a few tips to do just that:
1. Focus on clarity
Making your marketing messages and content more clear is the first step to making it easier for your users to interact with. Do away with flowery language and unneeded words for simple, succinct writing that gets to the point. Break up long sentences, divide long paragraphs into smaller ones, and make use of headers, subheaders, lists, and bolded bits to help your readers find their way through your text. These are simple tips, but they’re important for people who want TL;DR-focused content.
2. Make it easy to navigate
When it comes to websites, blogs, advertisements, and social media platforms, navigability is essential. If users have to call in a Ph.D. to figure out how to get back to your home page, they’re going to leave your site and never come back. Because of this, ensure that every piece of your site is simple to navigate for all readers, including the newest ones.
3. Make it shorter
If you can cut your content down a bit, do it. While this doesn’t mean that you can’t write long-form content, it does mean that you should focus on keeping your marketing messaging short and sweet so that readers can understand and interact with it more easily.
4. Tell stories
Remember that Reddit headline? If you didn’t find the fact that King Tut’s dagger was made from a meteorite intriguing, I’m concerned about you. Humans want to read fascinating stories, and appealing to a person’s sense of wonder, curiosity, or humor in marketing is an excellent way to get them to click your content.
5. Use video
54% of people want to see more video content from marketers. In light of this, mix your content up by including video whenever possible.
[bctt tweet=”Read five ways you can use the concept of TL;DR in your own content marketing strategy in this post by @JuliaEMcCoy” username=”ExpWriters”]
TL;DR : A Powerful Tool for Your Marketing
While it may seem like a minor bit of Reddit slang, TL;DR is a tiny yet important phrase with a great deal to teach us about how to market to the modern population. To learn more about crafting effective content, contact us about our content marketing services today!
It’s what happens when consumers are so flooded with advertising material, blog posts, social media material, and visuals that they shut down and stop processing any information at all.
Unfortunately, content overload is becoming a larger and larger problem in our online world.
According to Buffer, 400 million tweets are sent each day, 4.75 billion dailyupdates are shared on Facebook, and a staggering 5.3 trillion ads appear online annually.
What’s more, the number of brand messages a customer encounters a day has skyrocketed from about 3,500 back in 2005 to over 10,000 today.
With all that content flying around at the speed of light, it’s easy to see why creating unique, original content that stands out has become so difficult.
Luckily, you have a secret weapon.
It’s called “The Three E’s:” and I’m here to help you learn how to use it.
Content Overload: An Unfortunate Truth
Wouldn’t it be great if you could sit down, write up a piece of content, send it out to your followers, and just trust that it’s going to go viral? While this may be the stuff of dreams for content marketers everywhere, it’s an unrealistic expectation. Today, the explosion of digital platforms like websites, blogs, social media sites, and forums has saturated the content market and companies of all shapes and sizes across all industries are using these platforms to reach their readers. As it stands right now, 94% of small businesses and 93% of B2B companies are using content marketing as a significant portion of their marketing strategies.
Unfortunately, this explosion in the popularity of content hasn’t coincided with an increased human attention span or ability to digest content.
According to recent research, most modern humans have attention spans (8 seconds) that are shorter than that of a goldfish (9 seconds on average).
Because of this, it’s critical for content marketers to learn to craft content that goes to the heart of readers and produces quick, effective engagement.
Content Marketing’s Secret Formula for Success: The Three E’s
How, you might ask, do I create unique, engaging content for people who pay less attention than shimmery yellow fish?
Great question.
The answer lies in the three E’s.
Engage
With so much content out there for consumers to interact with, your primary tool for ensuring that they interact with your content first is to get them engaged. This, however, is easier said than done. Engaging your customers means identifying a target audience and knowing how to reach them. This allows you to understand the specific issues and questions your audience is grasping with and provide them with content that helps to answer their questions, address their concerns, and provide value.
Once you’ve determined who your target audience is, you’ll need to keep monitoring and updating it to accommodate the changes in your brand and your customer base. By doing this, you can ensure that the content you post on social media and other online platforms is valuable, original, targeted, and engaging for your target audience. Only once you’ve got engagement down can you move on to the remaining two E’s.
Educate
When consumers go online to search for content, what they’re looking for is information. Because of this, the second critical “E” you need to think about during the content marketing process is how to educate your customers. Once you’ve gotten them engaged with your content, you need to reward them by offering educational, exciting content that they can connect with. While there are various ways to educate your customers, one of the easiest and most reliable is to answer questions and address concerns.
While it’s obvious enough that writing informative, industry-specific blog posts is one good way to educate your followers, you can also educate them by taking steps to make your brand more accessible and human. This means offering outstanding customer service, granting coupons or discounts, and taking every available opportunity to educate your consumers about your company, mission, and products. In addition to providing value to your customers, this step also helps deepen the relationship with your brand and solidify your presence in your clients’ minds.
Or even Mint.com, which uses its blog to help its primarily young user base navigate life’s pressing financial challenges in intuitive ways (even more appealing featuring a hipster surfing the web on an IKEA-style couch with his dog):
Through high-quality yet accessible education, these brands have managed to make names for themselves as industry leaders while also encouraging their customers to stay engaged with and interested in their content.
Excite
Once you’ve engaged and educated your reader, it’s time to close the deal by exciting them about your content or topic. Because there’s so much content available to today’s consumers, ensuring that they’re excited about yours is one of the best ways to ensure that they keep coming back for more. By doing this, you can generate content that helps create conversations within your follower base. This, in turn, keeps you relevant and ensures that customers will be thinking about your content, even when they aren’t actively engaging with it.
While there are dozens of ways to excite your followers about your content, some of the most common involve giving them ownership of the content in some way, shape or form. This explains the current popularity of user-generated content. User-generated content is content that brands encourage users to create and, when used correctly, it can have a significant impact on the success of your overall content marketing strategy.
As it stands right now, a full 64% of millennials want to be able to share their opinions with brands. What’s more, the vast majority of consumers place lots of trust on user-generated content, so including it in your marketing strategy is a great way to both excite consumers and inspire confidence in your brand.
Starbucks, which virtually broke the internet with its 2014 White Cup Contest (and followed up throughout the years with other “hot” cup styles)
Or ModCloth, which features the submitted photos of its customers in the “Real Weddings” portion of the site (just another reason I LOVE this cool brand):
By encouraging the submission of user-generated content, your brand can succeed in encouraging customer conversations about your products, goods, and services.
For added benefit, offer a small gift or prize to people who take the time to submit content. It won’t take long, and you’ll be leaving your customer with a happy little memento to remember your company by.
The Three E’s: What’s in it for You? 6 Key Benefits
If you’re wondering what using the three E’s will do for your brand and content marketing, here are some of the most obvious benefits:
1. Wider brand recognition
By using the three E’s in your content marketing strategy, you succeed in creating unique content that your users enjoy, which in turn leads to increased brand recognition and more visibility on your various social platforms.
2. More customer loyalty
According to Convince & Convert, 53% of customers who use social media to follow brands remain loyal to those brands. By using the three E’s on your social channels, you inspire brand loyalty and build a strong base of returning customers
3. Higher conversion rates
Whenever you publish something on your social platforms, you give customers a chance to convert. What’s more, whenever you post something that utilizes the powers of the three E’s, you increase your conversion rates and provide your consumers with valuable, exciting content they’ll want to share.
4. Increased expertise
Establishing yourself as an authority in your industry is tough, but the three E’s can help. When you utilize the three E’s in your content marketing, you establish yourself as a credible, reputable authority people feel they can trust
5. Greater SEO
Improve your SEO and earn more prominent Google rankings by giving the search engine more content to index and making yourself more visible to users.
6. More inbound traffic
As you share content on social media, your readers will share it again for you, creating a chain reaction of quality content that reaches around the web and helps boost your reach and improve your inbound traffic.
While there are countless benefits of using the three E’s in marketing strategy, these are some of the most obvious.
Transform Your Content Marketing
Today, content marketing is more challenging than ever before, and it takes a unique set of skills to make your material stand out.
Luckily, the three E’s are a fantastic way to ensure your content is more valuable than the rest of the online muck and that, rather than being a part of the content overwhelm problem, you’re a part of the new solution.
No time to create outstanding content? No worries! Visit our Content Shopto hire skilled writers for your content marketing needs.
Imagine this: you’re surfing the web one day and you come upon a website with copy that looks surprisingly like yours.
The headlines, slogans, content is nearly identical, the layout is a duplicate, and the images are so similar that pretty soon you’re grinding your teeth in anger. Who dared to steal your work in such a disgraceful, copycat way?
Well, instead of just fuming, let’s talk about the action steps that you can take to identify and stop content theft from happening in it’s tracks. As expert online copywriters, we know exactly what you can do—and we’re sharing it here!
Content Theft: What In The World Do You Do?
We’ve had many people pose as us, since a successful writing agency seems to be the perfect candidate for struggling writing agencies to mimic. (In this case, flattery is not the best compliment.) Some have copied our service pages word for word. The good news is, these posers didn’t last.
While content theft is a tragic and infuriating scenario, it’s one that affects many writers and marketers every year. From large-scale operations that duplicate entire websites to lazy bloggers who are happy to just copy and paste your text into their content fields, there are dozens of ways for people to steal your content. Luckily, there are also dozens of ways for you to go after them when they do.
Let’s talk business.
Stolen Content: The Writer’s Worst Fear
While it may seem insufferably audacious for anyone to steal content and use it as their own, it happens literally all of the time. According to a 2013 statement by Google’s Matt Cutts, anywhere from 25-30% of the web is made up of duplicate content. This is a shocking number, I know, but I have something else that’s even more shocking for you: Google doesn’t penalize duplicate content.
Because there are many different types of duplicate content (including legitimate, syndicated duplicate content that’s been published or shared on a variety of platforms) Google refrains from punishing duplicate content unless it is obviously spam. While this approach is meant to prevent webmasters who have duplicate content published on multiple URLs from incurring penalties, it also makes it difficult for Google to smack down people who blatantly steal your content.
Even though Google doesn’t out rightly penalize people who steal your content, stolen content hurts in a myriad of ways. Most notably, stolen content makes it harder than it already is for your site to rank well in the SERPs and gain the traffic boosts high-quality content typically affords you. When a person steals your content, it’s possible that the blog post you spent hours writing, proofreading, researching, and editing will be doomed to the fifth page of a search result while a stolen copy ranks as #1. Because Google doesn’t always understand who is the original owner of a content, this outcome is not only possible but probable.
Luckily, all hope is not lost. While it may be difficult, there are many effective ways to go after people who steal your content.
Locating and Addressing Stolen Content: 5 Proactive Steps to Stop Content Theft
To discover and address stolen content online, follow these steps:
1. Use a plagiarism checker to find stolen content
Plagiarism checkers are some of the most effective tools for locating stolen online content.
While these may be simple tools (they work by scanning input content for duplicate words or phrases on the web), they’re reliable and are by far some of the easiest and most reliable sources to begin addressing stolen content.
Here are two good plagiarism checkers.
Copyscape:Copyscape is a simple, easy-to-use platform that scans the web for duplicate content. One of the most frequently used tools for copywriters and editors, Copyscape offers both a free and paid service. The paid service is more extensive and it’s what we at Express Writers use to check all of our content for plagiarism and theft.
To use Copyscape, simply purchase credits (a steal at $0.05 each) and then input your content to find out if it shows up anywhere else on the web. Check out what happens when I put in a snippet of a recent blog post titled “25 Reasons Every Business Needs a Go-To SEO Copywriter:”
If you hit Compare Text, you can see exactly how much of the content is “duplicate” and where it’s found–and how much duplicacy is there (they give you a final percentage).
Copyscape is effective, simple, and cheap enough that even small businesses can use it to find out if their content has been stolen or not.
2. Grammarly: Grammarly is an online grammar and spelling checker that’s become popular in the online marketing community. What many people don’t know, however, is that Grammarly also has a powerful plagiarism detector that checks over 8 billion webpages. Check out what happens when I input the same blog snippet for “25 Reasons:”
Ideal for finding exactly the URL that’s stealing your content, Grammarly is a powerful tool that can help you track down stolen content quickly and easily.
2. Implement electronic alerts to monitor your content
Electronic alerts like those offered by Google Alerts are a fantastic way to get a heads-up whenever someone attempts to steal your content. Free, simple, and easy to use, Google Alerts allows you to input your content into the search query and get an alert if Google detects duplicate copies online.
Keep in mind that Google issues an alert for every single word you input into the search query, so not all of the alerts you get will be actual duplicate content. While it can be frustrating to sift through the results, this is an effective way to receive notifications about any duplicate content before it gets out of control.
With BuzzSumo, you can also set up content monitoring. I love this tool and have a daily email notification set up to come to my inbox anytime someone mentions “express writers” on the web. (On the plus side of brand monitoring, this has helped me find bloggers and businesses who were talking about me that I didn’t even know about–now I can go thank them!)
3. Know your rights
While you can’t totally prevent content theft from happening, even with the help of plagiarism checkers and electronic alerts, you can respond aggressively when you discover stolen content.
One of the best ways to do this is to know your rights as they pertain to private content and one of the best sources for this is the Google DMCA. The DMCA – or Digital Millennium Copyright Act – helps content publishers understand what they can do if their content gets stolen from them.
The DMCA, backed by the power of Google, offers helpful tools and information for people suffering stolen content and can actually scan your site to check for copies of your content anywhere else on the web. The DMCA offers both a free and a paid enrollment option and both are effective at helping you combat content theft.
This is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal when you go after content thieves. What’s worked for us is simply stating what the DMCA can do, if you file one. Check it out on our policy page:
4. Add a banner
Both Copyscape and the DMCA offer “Do Not Copy” banners you can easily add to your site. Most of these banners are free and can be exactly what you need to help would-be thieves understand that your site is protected and that you’re on the lookout for stolen content.
5. Trademark or copyright your work
The symbols above are trademark and copyright symbols: they can be expensive and time-taking to get, but worthwhile for your critical copy bits, the ones that define your business or sell your products.
While all content you write is automatically copyrighted, some content creators choose to take it a step further by copyrighting all of their work officially. While this approach involves a hefty level of paperwork, for those bits of copy you regard as precious, pick and choose what you want to protect the most. This process may be worth it for the peace of mind that comes with knowing that, if content theft ever strikes your company, that your content is protected legally.
Trademarking is equally important. For example, we’ve trademarked our slogans, and our company name Express Writers. This way, anyone who goes after recreating our company name and tries to steal on that large of a scale, they can’t—we can go after them legally and sue any second since we own the trademark to our company name. If you came up with a really cool, original slogan for your business, or have a catchy business name, stop and trademark now if you haven’t yet.
3 Writing Tips to Defend Against Stolen Content
While there’s no way to 100% guarantee that your content will never be stolen, there are some measures you can take to decrease the likelihood that thieves will get their dirty paws on your writing.
1. Include internal links.
Including internal linking in your writing helps increase craw-lability and make it easier for search engines to index your content, which can help ensure that your content (Rather than a thief’s stolen copy) is the what ranks in Google. Plus, if you take the time to ensure that your internal links point back to your own content, you make your content undesirable to steal, since all of the material within it just points back to your website.
2. Use first-person voice.
An anonymous, lofty blog post is a lot easier for a thief to steal than a personal, first-person, anecdotal story. Because of this, writing in first person is one of the easiest and most productive ways to ensure that your content stays your own. Because nobody can hijack your voice effectively, making your writing more personal is a great way to maintain ownership and discourage content theft across the board.
3. Design custom images.
Designing custom images and then referencing them throughout your content is an effective way to deter would-be thieves. While you don’t need to add a watermark to the images you create, plugging your logo into a picture or infographic and then referencing the image throughout the content (as in “see below image,” or “in our infographic, located below”) is a wonderful way to make your content harder to steal and deter would-be thieves.
Find Stolen Content? Here’s What to Do
Stolen content is a big deal and it’s not something to ignore. If you find stolen content online, here’s what you can do to minimize the damage and get the stolen content removed as quickly as possible:
Contact the webmaster. Sometimes, dealing with content theft is as simple as contacting the webmaster and requesting they remove the content. Use a site like com to find out who owns a specific domain and then write the owner and ask them to take down the duplicate content immediately.
File a complaint. If contacting the webmaster doesn’t work, file a complaint with Google on the basis of DMCA infringement. There’s a simple online form to do this, and Google may help you address the stolen content.
Let the hosting company know what’s going on. If all else fails, inform the hosting company of the duplicate content. Many hosting companies consider plagiarism a violation of their customer agreement and will take action to help you address plagiarized content.
Protecting Your Content by Knowing Your Rights
Stolen content is a maddening situation and, unfortunately, it happens to many content creators across the web. Luckily, there are several proactive steps you can take to protect yourself against stolen content and address the issue if it happens to you. From using plagiarism checkers to routinely scan the web for duplicate content to copyrighting all of your material, there are many ways to discourage stolen content and respond swiftly and sternly to any thief who places their lazy paws on your online writing.
Create unique content you’ll be proud of with our team of expert copywriters. Visit our Content Shop to learn more!
