Now imagine that you’re approached by a salesperson who empathizes with your needs, understands what you’re looking for, and even tells you story about their own coffee-based issues. You’re likely to find that person far more relaxing, and trustworthy, than someone who simply shoves products into your face without any emotion – bleating out statistics about coffee grinds and milk.

This is why emotional selling works.

I’m not saying you should be crying over a tub of Ben and Jerry’s with all your leads – but a little emotional connection can’t hurt.

Though all of your prospects won’t necessarily respond to your messages in the same way, the chances are that you’ll get an overall more positive result from turning on the emotional faucet. According to the Harvard Business Review, when a bank introduced a credit card with marketing designed for emotional connection, use among the Millennial segment skyrocketed by 70%, with new accounts building by 40%.

Today, good sales tactics aren’t just about having an awesome product. You’ve got to get a little touchy-feely with some emotional copy too.

CRO Step 1: Implementing Emotional Copy

So how can you implement this emotional mumbo-jumbo? The first step is to change the way that you word things throughout your website and advertisements.

In economics, a world based on cold, hard statistics, we typically assume that people make decisions rationally, based on maximizing utility options. However, if this was true, then buyers would be constantly choosing the products with the lowest price for the highest features. In other words – marketing would be redundant.

Clearly, that isn’t the case – because we still have a job.

We know now that emotions play a huge part in determining consumer behavior, and everything from nostalgia (your favorite childhood toys), to brand loyalty and emotional reactions to cute puppies on marketing materials can change the way you make buying decisions.

Okay – so where does the emotional journey start. Well, your copy should include a range of important features intended to persuade your target buyers. These features should be:

1. Ethos: The appeal to credibility or ethics. For instance, you might try and sell someone a chocolate by saying that your chocolatier friend of 40 years thinks it’s the best thing he’s ever tasted.
2. Logic: This one speaks for itself – it’s not enough to say your product is amazing, you’ve got to make it plausible too. For instance, telling your buyers that on a blind taste-test, your volunteers picked your chocolate 98% of the time.
3. Emotion: Finally, you appeal to something important to your market. Something that will spark their emotions. For instance: this chocolate will make the perfect gift for friends and family.

The chances are you see that stuff all the time in market. However, after a while – it’s all too easy to become numb to lists of features and expert testimonials. That’s why emotional triggers can help to jolt your readers out of their bland indifference, so that they make the decisions you want them to make.

Emotional copy works because it makes you stand out from the crowd. It makes your marketing unique, and helps potential customers to care more about what your product can offer. If you can convince someone not only to be interested in your product – but actually care about your company, then you’re far more likely to get a sale.

After all, you’d be much more likely to buy something from your friend, than a stranger – right?

Come back next time for more insight into the world of touchy-feely marketing, or get in touch here to start your own journey into emotional copy.

The post Touchy-Feely Marketing: Making Emotional Copy Work for CRO (Part 1) appeared first on Carter Content.

There are numerous ways in which people can produce content today, but blogging is by far one of the most value-enhancing and direct methods of all. Perhaps even more so than infographics or video, blogging delivers compelling content that really makes a difference. Of course, writing the best blogs means accessing the right talent – which is where ghost bloggers can come in handy.

Working with Ghost bloggers

You’ve heard of ghostwriters – the individuals whose work makes up about half of the bestsellers list of the New York Times at any given moment. Ghost bloggers work in a similar way – spending time getting to know your business, your audience, and your values so that they can produce a piece of work that benefits your identity and speaks in your voice. You may offer your ghost blogger ideas to write about, or the individual you’re working with may be able to provide some potential concepts that they think would be good for you. Either way, you end up with blog topics written from your point of view, conveying the vision and values of your brand.

So Why Use a Ghost Blogger?

There are plenty of reasons to consider working with a ghost blogger, for example:

• Quality – you might be an expert in furniture, gardening, or accounting – but the chances are that you aren’t an expert writer. Ghost bloggers, (like myself), are equipped and trained to deliver persuasive, compelling, and highly engaging content designed to reflect positively on your brand.
• Time – Obviously, if you have a ghost blogger creating content on your behalf, then you get to benefit from free time to focus on different areas of your business.
• SEO – although frequent blogging isn’t a guaranteed way to achieve SEO success, quality posts can help to provide some meaningful boosts in the search engines.
• Vision – A good ghost blogger, like a good professional writer, will work to ensure that the blogs they create stay in tandem with your other online assets – holding up the values and voice of your company.
• Engagement – Ghost bloggers recognize that your blogs need to prompt customers into action, and as such they work to make their writing as engaging and exciting as possible.

Intrigued? Get in contact with me to learn more about ghost blogging and the blog-maintenance packages that I can offer you. Or, if you just want to find out more about online marketing – why not subscribe to my very own blog?

The post The Biggest Benefits of Working with Ghost Bloggers appeared first on Carter Content.

Sure, there might be a few nifty tricks out there that will help you to speed your way to the top of the list without doing all that hard work – but it’s hard to manipulate an algorithm that’s constantly changing beneath your fingertips. In other words, the more you sneak your way to a higher rank, the harder you’ll fall when Google catches you out.

While there are a number of SEO mistakes that can put a damper on your digital marketing efforts – some of which we’re going to address here – the biggest factor you should take away from this article, and many of my others – is that gimmicky services, underhanded solutions, and out-of-date methods don’t work.

What does work? Incredible content, constant promotion, and a comprehensive plan for the future.

SEO: You’re Probably Doing It Wrong

As a freelance writer, and business consultant, I frequently see companies searching for shortcuts that might help them to manipulate the search engines into giving them a higher spot on the ladder – without them having to put in any time, effort, or patience. While tricks like this used to be very possible – the truth is that Google is way smarter than you think – they’re building cars that drive themselves, after all!

Chances are – as smart as your business might be – you’re not going to trick the big dogs at Google, which means you need to go about things in a more legitimate way. Sorry.

Plenty of the SEO “tricksters” you see on the web today made a fortune a few years ago, when search engine optimization was all about hiding important words on pages and repeating the same thing hundreds of times through keyword stuffing. But the things that used to work no longer make sense to Google, and as such – sticking to old ideas could hurt you, and your business.

Everything Takes Time

As much as you might want to jump head-first into online success – who doesn’t? – the truth is that if you start a new website, on average it will take around 6 months for Google to even begin to trust you. Before then, you’re going to be placed in your own box until Google figures out what you and your business is all about.

Even after the six months have passed, it’s going to take time to start making an impact. If your first few months in the limelight are riddled with SEO mistakes – then success could take even longer.

So what are the most common SEO mistakes out there today – and what can you do to avoid them?

SEO Mistake 1: Assuming Everything Going to be Easy

When’s the last time that something really important was handed to you on a silver platter?

Just because SEO doesn’t have a place in the physical world – doesn’t mean that it’s any different. If you take the time to understand SEO, then you’ll quickly figure out what it means to rank on the first page – and usually, you’ll be able to recognize that the road ahead isn’t going to be easy.

First of all, you need to figure out how to create incredible content that’s going to draw in your readers. This is going to take time, and money to craft – no copy and pasting your favorite quotes from other articles allowed. Once that’s done, you need to work on making sure that people read the content you create – and that means promoting it – through social media, PPC, or any other method you like.

All the while, when you’re trying to make a splash in your industry – you’ll be competing with a range of other national companies that generally have huge audiences, spend a bundle of their budget on content, and even have access to influencers in almost every field. In other words – you’re starting with a huge disadvantage.

So what can you do about it?

Not much – the best way to avoid this mistake is to be realistic about the challenges that you’ll need to face when crafting your digital presence. At least that way, you won’t be disappointed when you’re not ranking first on Google within a couple of days, or weeks.

SEO Mistake 2: Living in the Past

As I already mentioned above, there were plenty of things that used to work in the SEO world that simply don’t work today. Not only will trying to make the easier options produce results for your company leave you with a wasted budget – but it will also raise your chances of getting penalized for your poor-quality content.

When businesses approach me today asking for a piece of work that contains so many keywords or phrases in a very specific way, I need to look at that content and see whether keywords can be implemented naturally, or whether it’s going to look messy and “stuffed”. If the second eventuality is true, then I talk to my client, and work to convince them that what they’re trying to do, isn’t going to get them the results they want.

It’s time for companies to start catching up with the changes that Google have made over the recent years. Yes, the frequently fluctuating algorithms can be hard to follow – but remember that not all content writers will be willing to inform you when you’re doing something bad for your business.

SEO Mistake 3: Buying the Wrong Services

If you see a website that claims it can get you to the first page of Google within a number of days, then avoid it at all costs. It’s not realistically possible for anyone to tell you that you’ll achieve such a result within such a specific period of time – particularly when there’s so much uncertainty surrounding Google, and your website.

Many of the SEO services that seem too good to be true – are – and Google will be all too happy to penalize you if the efforts of your new partners seem to indicate that you’re attempting to manipulate the system.

SEO isn’t about buying your way into the top of the club – it’s about thinking on what your customers want, and need – and serving their interests. The only services you need to buy for SEO, are those that can improve the content you produce, and help you to promote that content in an effective way. Everything else isn’t worth the cash.

Feel like being more awesome? Get in touch to learn more about how you can maximize your online success with high-quality content, and content management.

The post These 3 SEO Mistakes Are Ruining Your Business appeared first on Carter Content.

Digital revamps are a crucial part of keeping track of your conversion opportunities, and making your website and online campaigns as effective as possible. After all, the world of digital marketing is in a constant state of flux, and it’s vital to keep abreast of the recent changes if you want to avoid the heartache and embarrassment of lagging behind the rest of the field with outdated measures and tactics.

If you’re a small business looking for a way to spring-clean your current marketing efforts, here are five ways in which a digital marketing revamp could help you get more from your online presence.

1. Better Keywords for Better Ranking

As the algorithms of Google consistently shift and change, keyword stuffing has become one of the very worst ways to try and rank higher in the search engine results pages – yet not so long ago, it was everyone’s favorite method of getting the top spot. A digital marketing revamp can allow you to look at your pages in greater depth and ensure that you’re using the right keywords, in the right ways, to rank authentically and organically for your customers. This not only helps you to avoid unwanted Google penalties, but may assist you in figuring out more appropriate key words and phrases for your campaign too!

2. More Effective Content

Maybe you recently hired a new content writer, or you write most of your content for your company yourself, and have improved your skills over the years. Either way, unique ideas, effective content, and relevant keywords all come together to make you stand out in the world of digital marketing – for all of the right reasons. Checking through your content and refreshing some of the static copy on your website to ensure it is properly optimized for the search engines will help you to better engage your target audience, meaning that you leave them with a more positive lasting impression.

3. Rank Higher Among Competitors

When conducting a digital revamp, you’ll have the opportunity to compare your website to what you might have seen being done by your peers or competitors. The more you can analyze your own efforts for positives and flaws, the more you can ensure a higher return on investment, as well as better traffic flow and more. There are rank analysis tools available that can even help you to figure out exactly where you stand in the competitive market we know today, and even give you an insight into what you might need to improve to gain the top spot.

4. Stronger Links

Once upon a time, most companies believed that they could achieve higher search engine rankings if they simply got as many people as possible to link back to their website. However, the manipulative link building methods of the past are long gone, yet links themselves still remain one of the most important factors for ranking your website higher than your competitors. When you’re performing a digital revamp, you can audit your pages and remove any less-than-high-quality links, and focus on building links that will have a truly positive impact for your company.

5. Improve your Optimization

Finally, one of the most important things that must companies attempt to do when revamping their digital marketing strategy, is improve their optimization for search engines. Revamping your online presence allows you to conduct an in-depth analysis of the features, functions, and other issues in your website, and remember that the back-end workings are just as important as whatever goes on at the front of shop – so to speak.

Optimizing Your Digital Presence

Most of the time, businesses need to access the help of a professional digital marketing company to help them understand how search engine rankings work, and how their business will be affected by newer algorithms, but even a simple revamp can do a lot in creating new success points for an existing company.

Need more help making your content strategy work? Contact me for awesome content guidance.

The post 5 Ways to Benefit from Revamping your Digital Marketing Techniques appeared first on Carter Content.

Perhaps the easiest way to answer this is to say that blogs are a great place for companies to answer questions that their buyers may have – but this can cause some companies to confuse blogs with longer FAQ pages. Both do answer questions, but blogs have advantages that FAQ pages can never truly touch.

Although they can be useful, most FAQ pages are written, posted, and forgotten about – contrived by people from your company on questions they “think” your consumers might ask. Blog pages – on the other hand – provide a catalogue of in-depth content that truly offers value to your customers.

Blogs Deliver Libraries of Information

The idea of a FAQ page is to quickly and efficiently answer questions about a service or produce. Usually, they’re pretty broad in focus and cover things like product specifications, usage, shipping, ordering, and customer support. This is great for small questions about what you’re offering to your audience, but a blog can be a complete information hub for your readers.

Think about every possible question your users have ever asked you – then write down as many as you can remember. If you can, compile the list you have into categories, and you’ll find that the questions range all the way from general industry questions to products about the actual service or produce. Although some will fit well in a FAQ page, others will need a more long-form explanation.

One tip you’ll frequently come across when it comes to coming up with new blogging ideas is that customer questions make fantastic blog topics.

Blogging Offers SEO benefits

An added perk that a regular blog gives you over a standard FAQ page is the fact that they have value in regards to search engine optimization. The more pages you develop on your website – the more pages search engines will have to index. This means that you get a better chance to rank in search when readers are looking for information.

Unfortunately, FAQ pages don’t do much to change your search ranking – simply because they focus too broadly on a wide range of topics. However, blog pages can significantly improve your website traffic on a regular basis!

Get Blogging!

There’s no need to trash all the work that you’ve done on your FAQ page if you want to get started with an active blog – just use your blog to enhance the information you’ve already given by providing an additional hub for resources. Whether you’re discussing issues about your industry, the people using your products, or the service you provide itself, a blog gives you the opportunity to delve deeper into the concerns of your consumer base.

To learn more about the benefits of blogging and content marketing, subscribe to my blog! If you want to know more about me, or would like to hire me as your professional, personal blogger, then contact me via Rebekah@CarterContent.com or fill in my contact form.

The post Discerning the Differences between Blogs and FAQs appeared first on Carter Content.

Most websites have hundreds of pages – from individual blogs, to pages on products and services. Among all of them, however – the most visited option is the “about” page – the location visitors go to find out whether they have come to the right place in attempting to solve a problem. The “about” page also opens up contact between you and your customer, creating a vital way of connection via phone, email, or even instant chat.

Writing an engaging “about” page for your website is essential – but it can be tough to do when you’re developing a sales pitch for your very own business. Like anything else – being too close to the matter to be objective can have a serious impact on the voice and message that you put across. You could easily leave out vital information that would stop people from doing business with you – or oversell yourself in a way that customers cannot connect with.

So what do you need to include?

The Aspects to Focus on In Your About Page

1. Start by introducing yourself, your business, and your message. Sure, your customers want to know what it is you’re selling – but they also want to get to know the people that exist behind the product too. Try starting your opening paragraph with keyword friendly copy, and make sure that you sum up what makes you different to your competitors.
2. Show your unique selling point – without bashing your competitors. Customers want to know why they should choose you over anyone else – so highlight your strengths, but try not to do it at the expense of other companies.
3. How long have you been in business? In some industries – the amount of time you have spent within the business correlates directly with how risky your customers perceive you to be. If your company is relatively new, spend some time talking about the success that you’ve had so far.
4. Contact information – for some people, it’s important to include contact information on just about every page of your website, whereas other people prefer to give the data its own dedicated spot. Give out your phone number, email address, skype contact info, mailing address, and anything else your customers might use to get hold of you.
5. An image – people want to know what you look like. I know it’s tough to show off your face to the public when you’re particularly camera shy, but remember that when it comes to connecting with your audience, people generally react better to someone they can put a face to.

For help writing your about page, or access to someone who can simply write a compelling introduction on your behalf, contact me at Rebekah@CarterContent.com, or fill in my contact form.

The post Writing the About Page Your Customers Want to See appeared first on Carter Content.

Sometimes, disappointing results occur because you’re so new to the industry that you haven’t given your strategies a chance to take root yet. However, before you ask “Why isn’t my content marketing strategy making money?” take a second to think about the reality of your situation. As beneficial as digital marketing is to today’s modern company – it’s not a solution for instant fame. Instead, content marketing, online techniques, and even digital advertising are all part of a long-term strategy for creating and maintaining an effective online presence.

On the other hand, if you’ve been online for quite some time now, and you’re still not having the impact you had hoped for, this could be a sign that you’re falling victim to one of the many challenges that online marketing can present. Fortunately, this also means that there are ways for you to identify and fix the issues with just a bit of time and effort.

Following, I’ll address just some of the marketing challenges I’ve seen my clients face over the years, and what can be done to overcome them.

Challenge #1: Insufficient Resources

Producing content – blogs, articles, press releases – is easy. Producing good content is far more difficult.

While anyone can fill the pages of their website with words, it takes skill and time to produce quality content on a consistent level. Though it’s true that no-one knows your business quite as well as you do, it’s also worth noting that running that business is going to take up a significant amount of your time and energy. While you might be the ideal person to come with ideas of what you should be blogging about – you’re not necessarily the right person to write those blogs.

The Solution:

Call in the experts.

Producing amazing content week after week, month after month, quickly gets in the way of other important tasks that you need to focus on – like actually running a business. This is why if you want to create a really good long-term content strategy, you’re probably going to need to pay someone else to manage it for you. Whether that talent is outsourced or in-house is up to you, but one way or the other you’re going to have to accept that time and money is necessarily for producing quality content.

Challenge #2: Serious Competition

Compared to traditional options for marketing and even a number of other solutions for brand development that are available today, digital marketing strategies that involve content production are typically quite inexpensive. In other words, content marketing often offers an accessible and affordable advertising solution to businesses of various sizes – whether you’re a startup or an established enterprise.

Unfortunately, while the economic benefits, and the advantageous outcomes of content marketing apply to your needs, they also apply to your competitors’ needs too. In other words, you’re going to have to fight to come out on top of all the other people in your industry availing themselves of the same techniques when guiding customers to their products. If you’ve been asking “Why isn’t my content marketing strategy making money?” take a moment to ask whether you’re highlighting the right aspects of your business.

The Solution:

Highlight what makes you special.

Every market has an innumerable amount of competition filling it up to the seams. Most of the biggest players in any industry are only capable of surviving because they’re able to prove that they can bring something unique to the market. Simply put, the best way to survive today is to find your niche segment and focus on that. It’s not about showing how much variety you can deliver, or even offering the best deals – it’s about being able to suggest that you have a solution to an existing problem that is unlike anything your customer has seen before.

Challenge #3: So Much Data, So Little Time

You’re probably already aware of how much data consumers can leave behind within digital channels. Unfortunately, although that data can be essential for giving you an insight into what your target market wants, and needs, from you, it can also be difficult to get a handle on that information, and identify which parts are helpful, and which aren’t. Data collected in volume can reveal important details about the consumers that visit your website, but the crucial parts can quickly become lost if you don’t know how to properly analyze whatever you’ve gathered.

The Solution:

Increase the resources you have for data analysis.

It’s as simple as this, if you want to make the most of the data that you’re collecting, then you need to have the right tools and experts available to help you understand that information and put it to good use. There are a number of plugins and applications available today that you can utilize with a little time and research. However, just like it’s a good idea to have someone in your business that’s responsible for content production, it can also be beneficial to have a specific employee who’s responsible for analyzing and utilizing data. Delegation really does work.

Challenge #4: Unrealistic Expectations

I mentioned this concept in the intro, but it’s important enough that it really does deserve its own segment. If you’ve been asking “Why isn’t my content marketing strategy making money?” you might be suffering with too much impatience. Though content marketing is popular, and successful, there’s still a lot of misconceptions floating around about how it works, and what you should expect when you implement it into your marketing strategy.

It might not be what you want to hear, but the evidence suggests that content marketing is a long-term commitment, not a short-term fix. In fact, even with a skilled content team behind you, you might find that it takes several years for your content to have the impact you’re looking for. That’s not because this form of marketing isn’t effective – it’s because it’s designed to deliver success that is sustainable for the entire lifespan if your company. In other words, it’s not the thing that gives you your ten minutes of fame – it’s the thing that makes you into a household name for years to come.

The Solution

Be realistic, and understand what you’re getting into.

A lot of managers and executives are desperate for an immediate return on their marketing strategies. After all, traditional options for marketing like television ads, and billboards used to generate traffic to brick-and-mortar stores relatively quickly. However, we’re playing a different game today – the rules, and even the competitors have changed drastically.

Manage your expectations and set yourself up for realistic, achievable targets for engagement. This should help you to avoid some of the disappointment associated with aiming too high, too fast. It’s much better to establish manageable goals that you can achieve, than to dismiss your content marketing efforts as failures just because you can’t achieve targets that are far too ambitious.

Remember, your business isn’t a one-trick pony – it’s your livelihood – something that you want to grow and thrive for years to come. Success like that takes time.

Want to know more about creating a sustainable strategy for digital success? Get in touch at: Rebekah@CarterContent.com or fill in my contact form.

The post Why Isn’t My Content Marketing Strategy Making Money? Overcoming Online Marketing Challenges appeared first on Carter Content.

So what should you be thinking about when it comes to deciding on that magic number?

The Average Word Count of Top-Ranked Searches…

Is 2416 words. The reason for this is that the longer your articles are, the more likely they are to be well-researched and backed by a lot of useful data that’s capable of backing up your claims. Often, the longest articles are the ones that bloggers and journalists link back to on a regular basis, delivering yet more traffic to the given landing page. Rather than a quick summary of an issue that provides a singular statistic, a long article generally takes the time to explain an issue and flesh out the ideas that it talks about.

The more words in your article, the more likely you are to answer the questions that your customers are asking before they have to go searching somewhere else. However, it’s still worth remembering that the word count isn’t so much the deciding factor in quality content – rather, it’s what’s actually being said. If you can answer the same questions just as efficiently in 500 words as you can in 2000, then you should go for it!

Long Copy Outperforms Short Copy…

By 40.54%. Marketing experiments conducted a study that found long copy was capable of outperforming short copy in a series of three tests. In the first test, long copy reigned over short copy with 40.54% conversions. In the second test, long copy converted 50% of customers while short copy struggled, and in the third, both converted equally.

In other words, don’t be afraid of making your readers scroll from time to time – you’re not going to lose your audience just because you’re putting too many words on the screen. As long as the content that you provide is helpful and valuable, your return on investment will reflect your hard work.

Google Defines Thin Content at Around…

200 words. The Panda update from Google punishes websites for a number of reasons, and thin content is one of them. If the average length of an article on your website is 200 words or lower, most search engines will be extra critical of the content, and blogs of 300 words are also relatively likely to put you at risk of the “thin content” threat.

Of course, we’re talking about your online presence here – not your latest literature essay. Bloggers that simply write to meet a word count aren’t going to give you the quality or impact that you want to have. Remember that there is a difference between thin content and short content. While thin content is low in quality, refreshed from use on other websites, and brimming with annoying key words, short content is valuable, concise and ready to offer something to readers (though potentially not search engines).

So how Do you Deal with Word Count?

Although the above statistics are worth keeping in mind when you’re developing a starting point for writing articles, remember that they’re just a ball-park. You shouldn’t really be asking your writers and bloggers to keep an eye on their word count while they’re writing. Instead, you need them to focus on delivering high-quality content that’s ideal for share ability. If conveying your message takes three thousand words – so be it, but if you can say everything you need to in less than 500 – that’s great too.

The post Great Content – It isn’t All about Word count appeared first on Carter Content.

If you really want to make sure that you’re getting attention with your content marketing strategy, then your content can’t simply be adequate – it has to be extraordinary.

So, how do you deliver remarkable content?

Have the Right Voice

Your content needs to answer the question that pervades through the minds of every customer out there: “What’s in it for me?”

Chances are, regardless of how bespoke your product, service, or idea may be, your audience will have other options to choose from, so you need to deliver an experience that speaks directly to them. Start off by defining who your audience actually is, and categorize your readers into different personas.

The personas that you find should be able to guide you towards creating a content strategy that speaks specifically to your target market. In simple terms, if the content that you create is specifically answering or responding to the needs and interests of your target consumer, then it’s going to be far more powerful than any generic blog written for an undefined, broader audience.

At the beginning, this might mean that you have to cut down the amount of content you create on a weekly basis and focus on quality instead. You don’t necessarily need to set arbitrary metrics for the amount of words you churn out with each blog post. Start by developing the story, and the appropriate length will make itself known.

Content is An Experience

One of the main reasons why a content marketing strategy is so essential today, is that nearly every company’s product or service is easy to duplicate or re-create in some form or another. Simply marketing your product by telling everyone how great it is, isn’t enough to rake in the big conversions.

Instead, your marketing itself must deliver value. Your customers today aren’t loyal to your product per se, but rather the experience that you create around it. Develop an experience that makes your customer want to interact and engage with you, and success will follow.

Inspire Excitement in Your Buyers

Experience-focused and highly engaging content isn’t just a great way of drawing in an audience – it can also help to ensure that your readers stay eager for more. Aim to create an emotional connection and voice that is true to your brand. Heartfelt or hilarious content – even outrage at a particular change in the industry – anything that makes you more human helps to connect you with your audience.

Strong content needs to weave along the entire journey of your buyer, consistently building anticipation for the next step. In order to deliver content that attracts and retains the customers of today, most brands will need to re-evaluate and examine how they approach content creation.

For help making an impact with your content, and finding your voice, contact me via email or get in touch through my handy contact form.

The post How To Make the Most of Your Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on Carter Content.

In the internet-driven, satisfaction-obsessed era of today, marketing departments are moving further away from traditional marketing techniques, and seeking out a more effective strategy of reaching out to their chosen markets. If business was fashion, then content marketing would definitely be the new black, but what’s more important is the fact that it appears to be a method that’s here to stay.

Why? Let’s investigate shall we?

Pay-per-click and Traditional Advertising

There are a number of traditional marketing techniques that most of your content writers today muddled through while they were in college. These marketing techniques come in four simple categories: telemarketing, direct mail, broadcast and print.

1. Telemarketing is the much-hated process of calling up customers while they’re sitting around enjoying their favorite shows, in an attempt that your massive intrusion will somehow make them want to buy something.
2. Broadcasting refers to television commercials and radio commercials. I know a few people who love watching commercials in their free time, but for the vast majority of us, commercials are just an annoying way to prevent us from watching/hearing the thing we’re most interested in.
3. Direct mail is the printed advertisement that generally comes through your letter box in the form of leaflets, flyers, booklets and other media.
4. Print advertisements are those that you see strewn throughout your reading material – such as brochures, magazines, and ads in the newspaper. In other words, those pages that you skip past as quickly as possible.

As the internet has emerged as a more popular, and often essential part of our daily lives, new methods of advertising have emerged as marketers found ways to target their online audience. The PPC or pay per click model was created to offer businesses a way to snag their audience during relevant searches. However, though PPC does work for some people, it’s not the most effective form of advertising out there.

Discovering the Next Piece of the Marketing Puzzle

Today, advertising has become a common and reoccurring challenge for companies as consumers find new and improved ways to take over control of the research and buying process. As customers, we typically place more trust in articles and customer reviews that have been written by third parties. For example, think about how you made your last major purchase – did you rely on how awesome the television advert you saw made it out to be – or did you check out online reviews and comparisons?

The traditional methods of advertising are still relevant today, but it’s important to recognize that a new method of marketing has arisen over the recent years – content marketing. You don’t have to say goodbye to traditional marketing completely in order to embrace content marketing, but you should consider it if you want to get the most out of your brand’s reach.

The Goals of Content Marketing

Content marketing is about delivering value to your consumers in the form of entertaining, informative, and engaging text, images, or video. Content marketing gives your audience something that they actually want to read or see, by creating interesting pieces in the form of articles, blogs, infographics, and videos. Frequently, this type of advertising intertwines perfectly with social media as companies can use social platforms to advertise and distribute their new content. The more content that you produce, the more brand awareness you can obtain.

The main aim is this: potential customers come to learn something by reading an article or blog post. If they’re interested in what they find, they research the company further, visit the website, and buy the products being sold.

Content Marketing and Traditional Marketing

The image below, taken from attach media, shows some of the major disadvantages that traditional publicity suffers from:

Through the same image, we can see that content marketing is a more effective, and often cheaper strategy that allows companies to create brand loyalty and attract new clients.

It’s evident that 2015 will mark a considerable shift into the world of content marketing, and traditional channels of advertising are already being overshadowed. If you want to get the most out of your brand, then you need to be prepared to make the right investment. To learn more about online marketing, establishing your online presence and creating unique content, subscribe to my blog. To speak to a content writer about starting your very own effective marketing strategy, contact me via my content form, or email for a quote.

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