So how do you get started with your content marketing program? The good news is it’s easier than you might think, and more cost effective. Here are a few ideas on how you can begin by working with a content provider:

High-quality infographics

Developed with a writer and a talented graphic designer, these newsy visualisations of trends and data are so useful. Include them in your own blog, offer them to prominent industry bloggers or publications, and you’re sure to get those sites publishing both your infographic and a link to your website, all of which will enhance your standing in Google’s eyes. Consider for example the Angry Birds infographic that we blogged about in September: well researched, compellingly designed and eye-opening, this graphic is classic “link bait”, attracting all kinds of writers and bloggers who want to republish it. The best ones take time and great research to produce, so do set aside budget if you plan to go down this route.

Ghost blogging service

Set up a weekly appointment to speak to your content writing agency on industry trends and ideas, upcoming events or the latest equipment and services from your vendors. Using your thoughts and insights, an experienced writer can easily create a short ghost blog post that conveys your ideas succinctly – and it’s very cost effective.

How-to videos

Have you seen ENNclick’s social media tips videos about HootSuite and LinkedIn, which we produced using Screenr? Be prepared: you’ll need a few “takes” before the words and actions flow easily, but how-to videos are so easy to do, and there’s nothing better if you want to help orient your customers. You can upload your how-to video to YouTube as well as other free video sharing websites, all of which improves your visibility for Google.

High-end animation

With high prices for short animation videos, you might wonder why anyone in their right mind would go down this route. But consider the viral potential, the YouTube visibility and the highly impactful brand message you can deliver with an animation that has a solid concept, great animation scriptwriting and brilliant artwork behind it. And don’t forget what you would pay to commission, write, illustrate, print and distribute a high-quality glossy brochure: the costs are roughly comparable.

Yes, there is a role for print: in fact ENNclick’s own most successful marketing initiative in 2011 was our hardcopy ENNclick brochure. But if you’re a start-up or if you’re trying to expand your business with a new range of services, would it be better for you to have an animation sitting online gathering Google’s attention, or a glossy brochure sitting on a desk, gathering dust?

What about grooming all of your content for search engine optimisation?

The most successful search agencies – such as Ring John, which recently delivered a brilliant SEO Boot Camp for the ENNclick team – are Google connoisseurs, and scrutinise and optimise every detail of your website and your other online activities, to improve your search engine rankings. But you also need to be sure that your content writing team has a clear appreciation of SEO: as a content provider, we at ENNclick make sure we know and absorb your target keywords and the audience you’re aiming at.

The content writing agency you choose should also excel at rewriting: Google hates to see any duplicated content, anywhere, and an experienced writer can turn your thoughts and ideas into various iterations for different outlets, from YouTube to your blog to LinkedIn. Some real writing skill is necessary for this, and for all website copy writing, which must strike a careful balance between readability and keyword density.

The content agency and the search engine optimisation agency are unlikely to be one and the same, but both provide a piece of the puzzle: a steady stream of high-quality content, and the in-depth Google skills to leverage that content as part of an overall SEO strategy.

One word of caution: when it comes to quality content, if you pay peanuts you will get monkeys. It has been recently demonstrated that Google has, and will continue to develop, new search techniques to spot poor quality content a mile off.

Now for something completely different

As you plan your marketing activities in 2012, will you do the same-old same-old? Even if creating a steady volume of quality content hasn’t been part of your strategy in the past, maybe 2012 is the time for something completely different.

Sheila
@sheilaenn

Content: still king after all these years, Part 2 is a post from: ENNclick - Expert copywriters in Dublin, Cork and Edinburgh.

For businesses everywhere, this means that content creation absolutely must become one of your 2012 New Year’s resolutions.

No matter how well you know your business, it’s often hard to get your head around this requirement to write content. Most of us hardly have time to take care of the customers and deadlines we already have, let alone set new deadlines for creating new material for the web. “And anyway,” the little voice in your head might be saying, “isn’t writing content supposed to be somebody else’s job?”

Content creation is everybody’s job!

It has to be everybody’s job to create content in your organisation. Look around and you’ll see great examples like Chuck’s blog, written by EMC’s Global Marketing CTO, where top management with specific subject matter expertise are speaking in real voices to new and potential customers.

The public wants to hear, from the horse’s mouth, what your company is planning, thinking, or worried about. Heavily groomed press releases or corporate statements aren’t enough. They want the real news, direct from your experts, and they want it frequently.

Yes, that means your public relations office must release its chokehold on marketing communications and empower everyone in the organisation to create content, whether it’s a one-sentence status update on LinkedIn or Twitter or a more thoughtful response on an industry blog.

This may feel like a shocking culture change, but it’s necessary in an age when your company is judged and made visible by the calibre and frequency of the content you produce. Your company can minimise the risk of content no-nos – for example an employee talking about something that’s commercially sensitive, or attacking a competitor too vociferously – by publishing a social media policy that employees need to read, and by quick reactive responses if issues arise.

The greater risk is not creating content at all: a large, established company with a big brand can easily be outpaced by a nimble new competitor with fewer resources but a bigger voice online.

(Want proof of that? Just look at how well-known some of the biggest tweeters have become, starting with few resources apart from their own initiative and ideas.)

No time to write content? Think again

This may have not occurred to you, but you don’t actually need to write the content yourself. A content marketing agency such as ENNclick can work with you to make your brand and website more visible to Google and other web search engines, by helping you create fresh, unique and, most important of all, interesting content.

In part two of this blog we’ll look at just how you go about this task, by exploiting resources you already have or can easily access, in order to create original and relevant content that will get you seen as part of your search engine optimisation strategy.

Sheila
@sheilaenn

Content: still king after all these years is a post from: ENNclick - Expert copywriters in Dublin, Cork and Edinburgh.

The answer is a resounding yes.

What are the real benefits of a company e-zine?

For a start, a regular email newsletter keeps you and your brand in customers’ minds. If your e-newsletter is full of useful and informative content your customers start to identify you as an expert in your industry, and look forward to your newsletter each month. With any luck, they start sharing your newsletter content with their network, in effect referring you to their contacts.

Developing content for a regular newsletter makes a company focus on its customers and what topics they are interested in. This has the knock-on effect of bringing the customer to the forefront of wider company decisions.

Most email newsletter delivery systems come with in-built analytics, an invaluable tool to help you get to know your customers. By analysing what content is most popular with readers, you can better shape future sales and marketing campaigns.

All of these benefits are based on having a successful newsletter that your customers are actually opening, reading and enjoying. That means you really need to think about the content.

What type of content?

Yes, your readers probably do want to know the latest news about your company. But your company e-newsletter is not a place to focus only on self-congratulatory news or blatant selling; the content needs to be informative, interesting and useful.

Case studies: We’ve blown the case studies trumpet before, but it’s worth reiterating how popular these real-life customer stories are. Don’t just stick with written case studies though, consider adding video case studies to your newsletter. At an informative webinar recently on the topic of email marketing content strategy, denise cox, email marketing expert at Newsweaver, told attendees that video content can get up to three times more clicks than written content.

How to/top tips: These helpful articles can really boost your credibility. Take time to identify challenges your customers may be facing and provide them with useful tips to deal with these issues, e.g. if new legislation has recently come in to play in your sector, give useful advice on compliance.

Get to know the team: Use your newsletter to humanise your company. A ‘meet the team’ type article or Q&A session with a different member of staff in each issue is a good way for customers to get to know the people behind the company.

Company/industry news: Do keep customers up to date with any relevant company news, product launches, new appointments, but in nice short articles. But when your customers think about you and your brand, you’d also like them to think “authoritative” and “expert”. So why not add in pertinent industry news, too? Your customers will know you’re keeping up with anything important going on in your sector.

What about those open rates?

With open rates low, you need to give your readers more than one opportunity to spot that you’ve just published something. Pressing the “send” button on your e-mail newsletter isn’t the only step you should take to tell your readers you’ve got a new issue out there. Everyone at your company should be using their individual social networks to publish snippets of content from the newsletter as status updates.

For any company considering an e-newsletter, buy-in at all levels is essential. It needs to be a company project and not just a marketing project – this will determine the quality of the content, which is ultimately the key to the success of your newsletter.

Deirdre McArdle
@deirdreenn

e-Newsletters: Good for your business, good for your brand is a post from: ENNclick - Expert copywriters in Dublin, Cork and Edinburgh.

A new tool called LinkedIn Signal opens up the network to be a much more powerful networking, marketing and research tool. Here we demonstrate how you can use LinkedIn Signal to keyword search what anybody is saying on the service – even if they are not a first-degree connection to you.

LinkedIn Signal is continually indexing the status updates and LinkedIn group discussion comments made by all LinkedIn members. This collection of “public” activity is now yours to search.

This video, which is one in a series of social media tips we’re producing at ENNclick, also demonstrates how you can filter the results of your LinkedIn Signal search. You can refine the results by geography, company name, or even seniority, and you’re able to view the name and other basic information about the person making the status update or discussion comment.

LinkedIn Signal has the potential to be a powerful tool for your company – how will you use it?

Sheila
@sheilaenn

How to search what everyone’s saying on LinkedIn is a post from: ENNclick - Expert copywriters in Dublin, Cork and Edinburgh.

One of the key online marketing themes that emerged at the recent Dublin Web Summit was the growing need to create an emotional experience for the user. Simply getting attention for your brand is no longer enough. Promising a good deal for the consumer is only half the battle — bad news for discount deals sites. The future (and in some cases the present) success of online marketing and advertising centres around creating an emotional ‘moment’ for the user.

If that sounds like a tall order, that’s because it is. Emotional marketing itself is nothing new, but the challenge for brands and businesses today is how to make that connection in the online world, where consumers have shorter attention spans and cannot be forced to sit through ads with movie-production values, moving storylines or swelling music.

Brian Wong from Kiip (pronounced ‘keep’) – a San Francisco-based start-up that delivers rewards to mobile gamers – spoke passionately on this subject at the Dublin Web Summit, outlining ‘7 ways to go beyond online ads‘.

“Nobody wants to see a banner ad in a game,” he said. His company is taking an innovative approach to marketing – targeting mobile gamers with real-world rewards for in-game achievements.

Marketers need to move beyond traditional advertising methods into a more holistic realm of connecting with the target audience, he said. So, here are his suggested ways to give your online marketing some emotional impact:

1. Grab more than just attention

Achieving brand/product awareness is simply not enough any more. You must aim to create an emotional experience – a moment of happiness or joy – for the user. Aim to make the user smile. Wong cites Apple as an example of a company which is brilliant at creating what he calls “smile moments”.

2. Create serendipity

Aim to “surprise and delight” the user with a reward that is unexpected. Wong calls it the ‘upgrade model’ – an upgrade when you’re flying gives you a special fuzzy feeling because it doesn’t happen every time. But be careful – if the user comes to expect the reward, they won’t appreciate it as much and are less likely to tell other people about it.

3. Acknowledge and validate the user

People care about little moments of approval and validation. The response is emotional, not logical. “Why should we care if someone retweets us?” asks Wong. “We shouldn’t care, but we do.” As an example, Wong says Kiip had great success when it linked up the game Mega Jump with the Guinness Book of Records; whoever achieved the highest score would get their name entered as a world record holder – the ultimate validation.

4. Offer an emotional return on investment (ROI)

This could take the form of fantastic customer service or a personalised service. Wong says that, for now, sharing photographs of people is the best way to share emotions and to give an emotional ROI for the user.

5. Offer gifts and rewards

Offer gifts and rewards to users. And – similar to 2 (above) – if you really want to inspire emotion, deliver a reward for no particular reason: a ‘just because’ gift is always better than a gift on an occasion. Wong calls it a “serendipitous reward”. He cites the example of MailChimp, who sometimes randomly send out a T-shirt to a new subscriber.

6. Humanise the process

Try to make your brand appear human. Advertisers have long practised this, choosing appealing, attractive people to represent their brands. What you’re really trying to achieve is love – if the audience loves your brand, they will give it a chance, they will attribute good qualities to it, and overlook indiscretions.

7. Inception

As in the movie ‘Inception’. Try to infiltrate people’s brains with an understanding of your company’s passion – why it does what it does. Your story will hopefully inspire others to share your message.

Wong’s parting message to the Dublin Web Summit audience was a dramatic “Feel or die”. So, are you ready to get emotional with your marketing?

Sylvia Leatham
@SylviaLeatham

Putting emotion into online marketing is a post from: ENNclick - Expert copywriters in Dublin, Cork and Edinburgh.

The two-day tech conference, already the hottest event in the Irish web calendar, got an extra buzz when rock daddy Bono turned up – adding a slice of cool to the super-serving of nerdrepreneurs™.

Admittedly, the diminutive one didn’t attend the daytime DWS conference, but was spotted hob-nobbing with the cream of the international web world at a private evening event (F.ounders) that runs alongside the summit. Still, Bono’s attendance will have done nothing to hurt the reputation of event organiser Paddy Cosgrave for attracting star names to the week’s proceedings.

Ironically, the daytime talks by the biggest names in the tech world turned out to be the least interesting aspect of the two-day DWS event. Couch-bound Q&As and dry presentations from top brass at Twitter, Amazon, Google and Facebook yielded little to pique the interest.

The real meat, however, was served up by start-up entrepreneurs and those who study them for a living (investors, journalists). Representatives from the likes of Techcrunch, Mashable, AOL and the New York Times really captured the vibe of the event with innovative ideas and fresh thinking about the web.

In fact, the event could have easily been renamed the Dublin Startup Summit. A special ‘Startup Zone’ featured around 40 Irish-based early-stage companies, most of them export-focused clients of Enterprise Ireland. The main stage was dedicated to presentations for startups on the first day, and the winner of the ESB Electric Ireland ‘Spark of Genius’ startup competition was announced on the second day (Redeemandget).

A good line-up for the Online Marketing stage made the conference a fertile ground where start-ups and marketers could collide. Indeed, walking around the Startup Zone and listening to the Spark of Genius pitches (done Dragons’ Den style, with only 5 minutes each), it became clear that many of the tech entrepreneurs could use a little help with their messaging. Many of the pitches suffered from the classic pitfall of describing the technology first, rather than presenting the solution to a customer problem.

Over the two days, several predictions were made about the future of the web: among the key marketing trends that emerged were community management, content curation and creating an emotional experience for the customer.

Look out for more blogs on these topics in coming days.

@SylviaLeatham

Start (me) up: Dublin Web Summit rocks the Irish tech scene is a post from: ENNclick - Expert copywriters in Dublin, Cork and Edinburgh.

The noise level on Twitter poses difficulties, especially for marketing professionals who are keen to make more effective use of this social media tool. But there are ways you can fight back, through smart use of Twitter search tools.

The clever people at @channelship demonstrated a great Twitter tool a few months ago, and it’s been so helpful to me I have to show you how I’ve been using it to find and reach out to the right people. In the video below I will demonstrate how you can use HootSuite, the social media management platform, to create a saved geographic search based on keywords that are pertinent to you.

Let’s assume you’re a food brand running a competition on your Facebook page; it can be helpful to pop over to Twitter to do a targeted search for people who would be attracted to your campaign. I’ll show you how to create a saved search for the term “craving chocolate” (a surprising amount of tweets are about people’s stomachs), which could allow a chocolate brand running a campaign to do a targeted outreach.

You can use the same tool to build a list of people you would like to follow in any industry, no matter whether you’re a software developer or a shipbuilder. (The example in the video also shows how to limit the search to a certain geographic area, if it’s important to you that people you’re listening to are in your country, region or town.) But however you decide to interact with the people you find, the first step is finding them. Click below to view:

Sheila
@sheilaenn

Twitter search tools that beat the noisy chatter blues is a post from: ENNclick - Expert copywriters in Dublin, Cork and Edinburgh.

Groupings of like-minded people tend to gravitate towards each other in the real world – hence political parties, hobby groups and sports clubs. But that’s also reflected in the digital arena, with each of us allying to various factions where we feel there’s common ground or interest.

Yet, obvious as this may seem, many of us in business neglect the opportunities this presents to tell our circles, already interested in what you have to say, about your latest blog post or article. That’s perhaps understandable given that each of us is faced with a barrage of online tools when it comes to how we promote material via the web.

EMAIL MARKETING

It used to be that we could rely on permission-based email marketing. This is, after all, a fairly powerful channel. A person has given you their email and permission to communicate information to them.

Yet the emergence of tools like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn now presents any business with an array of alternate ways to take that emailed message and reach out to new audiences. Imagine you run a business communicating once a quarter with an email newsletter containing relevant content that you know will interest the target audience. The challenge is not simply delivering the message but then ensuring that it is opened and actually read.

Business-to-consumer email open rates aren’t great at the best of times, which means that for all the effort expended in creating your compelling content, perhaps as few as one in five of those receiving an email communication will ever get around to seeing the content contained inside.

PERMISSION-BASED SOCIAL MARKETING

That’s perhaps no great surprise given that each of us faces an often overwhelming amount of inbox material vying for attention. But this is where social marketing can play a powerful part – circumventing the inbox logjam and reaching out to circles of contacts who, much as with permission email marketing, have already given some form of consent to a communications relationship with either you as an individual or your company’s Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn identity.

And just as with email marketing, control is in the hands of the recipient. If you start spewing irrelevant messages about new blog posts on your business website, it won’t take long for those who aren’t interested to cease following you.

TOP TIPS FOR SOCIAL MARKETING OF CONTENT

1. Be relevant – if people are following you on Twitter under a business identity make sure the messages you put out are relevant to the business. No one cares what you had for breakfast!

2. Be interesting – social media or any other media, if the content you are promoting is poorly written, even if relevant to the followers you’re targetting, it won’t get read. Quality prose still counts, whatever medium it’s in.

3. Be found – make sure to use hashtags in your updates to add context and help others to find your post e.g. if you write about telecoms of cloud computing make sure it can be easily found by anyone following #telecoms or #cloudcomputing.

4. Do not spam – repeating the same tweet is going to annoy people pretty quickly. You get one opportunity, so use it wisely.

5. Recognise those who retweet to their own followers – it’s small beer, but it’s just plain good manners to thank anyone who subsequently shares your original posting with their own circle of followers. They are, after all, freely promoting your content/blog/update to contacts you may not have.

6. Be responsive – if someone takes the trouble to comment on your tweet, whether on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or even the comments section of the page where your content lives, respond! This is social, so engage. It might be someone who does business with you in the future.

7. Be consistent - don’t post nothing for weeks or months and then rush a bunch of messages out in a matter of days. Don’t hesitate to comment about other relevant content on the web to your followers. It doesn’t have to be all about you/your business.

8. Listen – if you have people following your business take the time to monitor what they’re talking about. It will help you keep it relevant when creating new content.

The bottom line is that social tools like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn now present a great opportunity for companies attempting to reach out to existing and potentially new customers. Certainly, it’s a means of bypassing the logjam in so many people’s inboxes. But that doesn’t mean it’s a universal panacea. It’s simply another part of an ever-growing set of tools that can help you to reach out to potentially interested audiences. Use it wisely and reap the rewards.

Ralph
@ralphenn

Using Social marketing to promote your content is a post from: ENNclick - Expert copywriters in Dublin, Cork and Edinburgh.

Twitter is all about empowering people or organisations to communicate — be it one to one, one to many or a general free-for-all. Admittedly it’s in fairly brief and staccato form, but on the plus side, this does mean that we have to be succinct and to the point.

So it’s perhaps only right that the first place that news of Twitter’s move to the emerald isle should appear was in an Industrial Development Authority tweet as @IDAIRELAND announced: “Ireland is trending. Twitter to establish international office in Dublin.”

Now you could argue, and some already have have, that the reason we’re getting the No.2 social media player (with estimates of 125m users) setting up in Ireland is motivated by low corporation tax (which surely is part of it) but it’s also because Ireland is a well-established centre for other dotcom players. Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and many others already have a significant presence and use Ireland in many cases as a jumping-off point for taking on European markets.

For Twitter it’s likely that this is all about establishing a foothold in Europe in order to develop a viable commercial model which makes a return for investors. Twitter needs to grab a piece of the revenue pie commensurate with its influence. But where Google already has a solid revenue stream by placing relevant ads (AdWords) against searched content and Facebook has some amazingly detailed demographics on its users (Facebook Ads), Twitter is yet to make the big jump to a social media platform with an equally solid revenue model, currently relying on a product it calls promoted tweets.

That’s not to suggest that Twitter won’t strike a successful revenue model, but it’s pretty clear that the window of opportunity might be closing… fast. Now that Google has taken Google+ public, its own new attempt at getting onto the social media bandwagon, the space left for Twitter to take a cut of the available action is most likely set to shrink.

So you could argue that Twitter had little option but to grow its business into Europe and do it damn fast. It may not be about first mover advantage, but there’s little doubt that this particular bird needs to tweet less, get up early and catch more worms!

Meantime, as we recently highlighted, one area in which Twitter truly excels is in providing a powerful yet simple platform for businesses to communicate with customers. It’s been used successfully by big name brands in the FMCG, fashion and tech sectors and, if you’re not using it in your business yet, why not?

Ralph
@ralphenn

Twitter sets up nest in Ireland is a post from: ENNclick - Expert copywriters in Dublin, Cork and Edinburgh.

A simple message from a dedicated Twitter account controlled by staff at the pool would have meant that any followers were saved the time and expense of a wasted journey so early in the morning.

Here are the typical objections a company may have to getting started with this channel. If your company isn’t already using this channel, some of these may sound familiar:

“Our customers don’t use Twitter”

Is that so? Have you asked them? What method, if any, do you currently use to communicate with your customers? Put up a sign in reception, mention it when you’re on the phone to them, drop them an e-mail — use whatever methods you already have to see if they’d be open to this new channel.

“We don’t have a social media policy”

Draft one. It will take you 15 minutes. Keep it simple. The policy should be founded on common sense, trust of your own staff, and personal accountability on behalf of your users.

“We can’t be on Twitter all hours of the day checking it for messages”

Twitter will send you an e-mail if somebody mentions you on Twitter or sends you a private direct message. You do use e-mail, don’t you? Twitter works alongside it beautifully. Sending a message to followers of your Twitter ID takes just a minute to send.

“I think our marketing people already use Twitter”

That might be true. But the core value of Twitter, especially if you are a business-to-consumer organisation, is customer service, not horn-tooting. Your marketing department can have its Twitter account and you can have yours.

If you could make your customers happy, help them avoid inconvenience, solve their problem (especially if it’s a problem to do with your product or service), wouldn’t you do it? And wouldn’t your boss love to hear about it? Many companies approach Twitter as a marketing channel to communicate their press release or media coverage. If you’re one of those companies, look yourself in the mirror. Shouldn’t you also be using this channel to listen and help your customers?

Here’s an example of the online fashion retailer ASOS using Twitter to talk to its customers in real time.

“I am not sure how to get started”

ENNclick helps companies do social media. But you don’t really need our help to do the very basics — register your Twitter identity and ask your customers if they are interested in this channel. If you need training, a branded graphic for your Twitter page, or more insight into Twitter best practice, contact me. But there’s much you can do on your own. Why not get started today?

Q. What’s the best customer service you’ve ever received via Twitter? How did that make you feel about that company?

Sheila
@sheilaenn

Why aren’t you using Twitter for customer service? is a post from: ENNclick - Expert copywriters in Dublin, Cork and Edinburgh.