Blog - Page 7 of 13 - Inbound Rocket

How To Hire A Professional Content Marketer For Your Business: Tips And Tools

As a small to medium-sized company, it’s typical to have an ‘all hands on board’ approach to operating. You are often made to wear multiple hats and do a variety of different jobs, which can not only be overwhelming but may also extend beyond the capabilities of your skillset. Because of this, outsourcing certain tasks can start to make a great deal of sense.

You will quickly find that content creation is a large portion of keeping your business updated and relevant online. Search engines and readers alike love to see fresh, new content, updated regularly. While you could spend all of your time dedicated to this task, delegating it to a professional leaves you free to focus on the rest of your business needs.

The person you choose to create and market the content for your business will essentially become the voice of your company and brand. It’s for this reason that this is such an important decision when it comes to finding and hiring that person. Here are some excellent tips for what to look for when hiring your content marketer, so you attract and find the best person for the job, who will put the best face on your company.

Posted in Content Marketing | 3 responses

The Headline Formula That Will Urge Your Readers To Click Every Time

Let us ask you a question, what made you click on this post’s headline — whether you saw it on Facebook, Twitter, Google, or in an email?

Maybe you clicked it because it promised to solve a problem for you — how to write better headlines?

Or maybe because it promised you could learn to start writing headlines the right away?

Just like when you want to write copy for an advertisement, when doing content marketing it is crucial, to begin with, a stunning, attention-grabbing headline.

According to David Ogilvy, also known as “The Father of Advertising”, author of Confessions of an Advertising Man:

“on average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. If you haven’t done some selling in your headline, you have wasted 80 percent of your client’s money.”

If you were not convinced yet, those should be some powerful words which should motivate you to start paying more attention to your headlines. Especially in today’s worlds where there is a rapidly shrinking attention span happening. Next, to that, there is advertisement everywhere and lots of content competing to get the attention of your target audience.

In other words, headlines are more important than ever!

In this blog post, we will talk you through an effective formula known as the Four U’s. The Four U’s is a strategy developed by Michael Masterson, and if you want to dig even deeper after reading this post, we suggest reading “The Copywriter’s Handbook” by Robert Bly – a must-read for copywriters, advertisers, and marketers.

Posted in Content Marketing | 8 responses

5 Ways to Convert More Customers with Context-Aware Emails

When was the last time you were excited to open up your email? If you’re a little bit like most people, you probably don’t look forward to opening your email inbox; it’s exploded with all the newsletters you at one point subscribed to, all the emails from the different social networks where you’re a part of, etc.

And let’s be honest with ourselves: most emails indeed are a bit annoying. According to research done by IDC in 2013 (full research available here), social media seems to evoke “excitement” as the prevailing sentiment.

Emails by XKCD

80% of the 18-44-year-olds check their smartphone straight after waking up, and that is not to check on email. The word that comes to mind when talking about email? Productivity. Emails are a chore.

Of course, using great subject lines, you might make people interested in opening up your emails, but the excitement mostly quickly gets away as soon as the email is opened.

Still, email marketing is still one of the most efficient ways of communicating with your customer, but email marketing campaigns have stayed mostly the same over the last couple of years. Many brands are simply not trying anything new.

In here, lies a significant opportunity for you and your brand.

What if you could make your emails more interesting? And what if, by making them more attractive, you could increase opens, click-throughs, and conversions?

In this article, we’re going to look into different tactics that can make that happen for you and your brand.

Posted in Email Marketing, Inspiration | 6 responses

Content Marketing KPI’s: How To Get Started

Everybody it seems is doing Content Marketing nowadays. Or at least thinking about doing Content Marketing. Whether it is through one of their social channels, or via their owned properties like their website. Content Marketing is 🔥

As a Content Marketer, though, it’s simply not enough to simply do research, write, publish, and then repeat the circle again. You must measure the impact that your Content Marketing is having on your business. This holds true when you’re just starting with your Content Marketing or just periodically. You need to ask yourself three important questions:

What is the desired or anticipated outcome?
What data can and will be collected?
What are the indicators of failure or success?

Posted in Content Marketing, Lead Conversion | one respons

SEO Strategies To Get Your Startup Off The Ground

Startups are very fragile. In fact, they are so fragile that the vast majority of them doesn’t make it past year 2 or 3. There are innumerable reasons as to why this happens and among those reasons is that they often simply do not find enough customers to become financially viable. And when a startup has difficulties doing this, the support of investors also tends to weaken.

In today’s world, startups are just as likely to find customers online as they are offline. In fact, for many of them, the customers will almost exclusively exist and do business online. Some of them will not even exist outside the web.

As a result, it becomes quite obvious that a startup needs to be as visible as possible online if it is to survive and as we all know it, no one (or at least almost no one) is visible online without a bit of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

In short, a startup simply has to do SEO if it is to survive.

Posted in Inspiration, Content Marketing | no responses

7 Industry Experts Share Their Best Kept Social Media Secrets

Every company is different; every social media network has its quirks.

If you’re a startup, it can be difficult to get started with your marketing efforts on social media. How did other companies deal with these struggles?

Are you looking to step up your social media marketing game?

Wondering what tools and tactics the pros are using?

We asked some top social media experts to share us their tools and tactics. The question we asked all of them was:

If you are starting out with your company, maybe you’re in the pre-launch phase or your just launched the first version of your product. How do you build your social media following when no-one ever heard about you yet?

How did you build engagement with your new followers and how did you attract them in the first place? What networks did you use?

Can you describe your ultimate growth technique for building and launching your company on social media and how can people implement that for their companies?

In this article, we’re going to look at their answers, and you’ll discover seven ways you can start and stay ahead of your competitors on the social media curve. This is who they are, from William Harris (Elumynt) to Sujan Patel (Web Profits) and all the brilliant minds in between.

Posted in Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Inspiration | 6 responses

Subject Line Strategies Guaranteed to Increase Your Open Rates

Everybody knows the importance of email marketing. More than 34% of the people worldwide use email. But if you look at your inbox, how many unread emails do you’ve got? 400? 900? Or maybe, if you’re like us and are subscribed to countless different mailing list, 6.702 emails? And that is only in our inbox (not counting every email that is automatically sorted out using rules in our Gmail).

Everyone gets tonnes of emails every day, and a lot of them are never opened. The chances of your email being ignored are pretty high. No matter what you might think, people do judge emails by their subject lines.

[clicktotweet]Your email needs to be opened before you can make a sale from your email list.[/clicktotweet]

According to research done by Convince and Convert, 33% of email recipients decide if they are going to open your email or not based on only the subject line and 69% of email recipients also report email as spam based solely on the subject line.

Knowing this you might start to rethink your subject lines. After all, you do want your email to get open-end, read, and clicked right? Knowing that it all start with the subject line, let’s dive into some tips actionable tips you can start implementing straight away.

Posted in Email Marketing, Content Marketing | 4 responses

Branding Essentials: Finding Your Brand’s Voice

If there was no logo or no company name next to your posts on social media or your blog items. Do you sound different, unique—like yourself? Or do you sound like everyone else… including your competitors?

Would someone who is viewing your content on different channels know it all came from the same brand? Could your potential target audience identify the content as coming from your brand?

In a previous post, we already talked about How to Create an Authentic Brand Story and 5 Easy Steps For Building A Great Visual Brand as part of the process of building your brand. And just as you took the time to think off, create and test your brand story and the visuals elements that make for your brand, if you don’t pay attention, you can end up with a scattered and non-consistent tone of voice in the content you produce across your entire marketing ecosystem. A non-consistent tone of voice that doesn’t provide a consistent picture of your brand.

This inconsistent brand experience becomes even harder to keep under control when your organisation grows. You start hiring freelancers, or more people to help produce content, and how do you keep it consistent when you’re not the only one anymore who creates your company’s content?

You may ask yourself, why a brand voice matters. Isn’t it enough to make your brand sound more human? The tone of voice of your brand, though, isn’t about sounding more human. It’s about being consistent with the voice you’re creating. Being recognisable for the people reading your content, ranging from social media posts to newsletters, to “What’s New” messages in the app store.

Making sure that even if you forgot to include your logo or name in one of your writings, people would still know it is about you.

Just like creating your Brand Story and your brand visual template, you need to create a Brand Voice Template to have something to fall back to. Here at Inbound Rocket we got you covered though and outlined a seven-step guide to establish, create, and maintain your brand’s tone of voice to drive consistency in your content marketing efforts.

Posted in Minimum Viable Brand | one respons

Content Creation: How to Steal Your Way to Successful Content

Today, we will explore one of the seven deadly sins of marketing – stealing content. But, wait… isn’t that a black hat tactic? Why are we discussing theft in a place like this? Well, it is time for a revelation. In truth, there is one way to steal content in a purely white hat fashion: steal it from yourself.

All of us have published interesting infographics, blog posts, videos, and emails that stand out from the rest and receive significant engagement (we secretly wish all of our content could bless us this way). If only we could reuse the content that shines a little brighter, without negatively affecting SEO… Well, we can, and here is how.

Why Wouldn’t We Want to Reuse Content?

Before we begin “repurposing” our online content, we need to understand what can go wrong. Duplicate content can have a detrimental effect on SEO. Even if we copy content from ourselves, this can appear deceptive in the eyes of search engines. Though it won’t get our content banned, having duplicate or very similar information at more than one URL will force Google to choose only one page to index. If the search engine happens to pick an externally-hosted piece, our websites can lose page rank. Losing our page rank position is what we want to avoid at all costs.

Posted in Content Marketing, Inspiration | 3 responses

6 Content Creation Tips For More Relevant Visitors

After learning “How to Build a Successful Content Marketing Strategy” and “8 Content Marketing Mistakes That Are Costing You Leads”, you’re already having a running start with your content marketing plan. And of course, you’ve got to because online ads are working less and less.

You’ve begun to see that by using good content you can start working on your company’s branding and brand awareness.

Even better, after working hard for some time, you manage to become an online authority and get that sought-after expert status 😉

By using content marketing, people will start to see you as the expert in your domain. With you being perceived as the expert, your content will get more backlinks, shares, likes, retweets, etc. which in the end will result in more visitors to your website.

Visitors will start to notice you; they think you know what you’re talking about, that you’re always informed about the latest trends AND that you’re ready to share all these tips for free with them. All in all, this is resulting in you leaving a fantastic first impression.

The end goal for you? Trying to convert these visitors into a customer of course!

Consistent usage of relevant, engaging content will attract more visitors, and more (relevant) visitors will, in the end, turn into more profit for your business. In this article, we will dive into six tips for content creation. Six tips to keep that content machine running.

Posted in Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing | no responses

Why Wouldn’t We Want to Reuse Content?

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