Your website is the lifeblood of your business.

It’s how leads find you on search engines and how prospects learn about you to convert into customers.

Without great content and a people-first website, you can’t reasonably expect to do either.

So how do you know if you’re succeeding or not? And even if your website drives results, are you still leaving a lot on the table?

At Crowd Content, we hear anxieties like this all the time from business owners, content managers and website marketers.

“How can I improve my website content to finally get discovered on Google Search?”

So we decided to do something about it. Introducing SEO Clinics, brought to you by Crowd Content.

At an SEO Clinic, you’ll have the opportunity to receive live, real-time feedback about your website from content-marketing and SEO experts in an interactive, webinar-like environment—and it’s completely free of charge.

Not too shabby, eh? (Sorry, I’m Canadian. Also, sorry for saying “sorry.”)

So this begs the question: What now?

We’re stoked to announce our very first SEO Clinic with special guest Jeff Romero.

Jeff is the cofounder of the award-winning SEO & content agency Octiv Digital. He’s professionally audited and fixed websites for business of all sizes & types for over a decade, so he knows what it takes to optimize a website for Google Search to help you improve rankings, increase traffic and generate sales.

Okay. What Do I Do to Sign Up?

Submit your website here and sign up to join our live interactive webinar where Jeff will audit a select number of websites live, on the spot and in real-time.

Then join the SEO Clinic on Oct. 12th, 2 p.m. EDT / 11 a.m. PDT to see if your website is selected and learn helpful advice from watching live audits of other websites.

Who said good advice wasn’t free and readily available?

The post Supercharge Your Content: Introducing SEO Clinics appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

It’s that time of year again! (Actually, it’s happened multiple times this year now, but who’s counting?) An algorithm update from Google that impacts how webpages rank.

You’ll probably want to pay attention here because this update is a big one.

How you rank on Google Search directly influences how many people find your website and how many leads your business generates.

Google announced the Helpful Content update on Aug. 18, 2022, via a blog post by Danny Sullivan, a Public Liaison for Google Search.

The update began rolling out the following week. But the effects will be seen gradually as more data feeds the machine-learning algorithm over time (more on this below).

This is the first major Google update since the Broad Core update announced the previous May. Broad Core updates are major, reoccurring algorithm improvements by Google with wide, general scopes, so it’s hard to know or guess specific details.

But with the Aug. 2022 Helpful Content update, guess what? There are particular details about what it means and how to adjust for it to optimize your website’s performance.

Kind of….

So what is this all about? What’s changing with how Google evaluates websites from its Helpful Content update? How will it affect your website? And what are tips to improve your website after the Helpful Content update?

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered to help you know how to optimize content for SEO and provide great experiences for your audience so your business can get ahead!

What Is Google’s Helpful Content Update?

Are you ready for this? Google’s Helpful Content update is about…helpful content.

As Google themselves explained from the above-referenced announcement, their goal is “to tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people.”

In other words, trying to spray search engines with keyword-stuffed articles, instead of focusing on overall quality to actually answer users’ queries, isn’t wanted by Google.

So if you provide website content that’s helpful for search-engine users, then drink it down! If your content is written to game search-engine rankings, then send it back!

What’s the Backstory Behind Google’s Helpful Content Update?

Google’s motivation was to expand upon an early trial run from previous updates for product reviews. In 2021, their goal was to show more helpful reviews by customers of company products on SERPs (search-engine results pages), like what you would see in the below image from searching for gaming laptops, for example.

As Sullivan explained, the Helpful Content update expands on what Google’s learning from a previous update, to make product reviews more helpful, by applying this knowledge to content in general, including webpage content.

Google’s also implementing an additional iteration of the existing product reviews update at the same time as they roll out the Helpful Content update so the two can complement each other. In her initial analysis of Google’s Helpful Content update, SEO influencer Lily Ray breaks down the following example of how the Helpful Content update—as a complement to and extension of a reviews update—would reward well-written content.

Ray believes this article about tweezers secured the top organic spot on Google Search for its target keyterms after these updates because it sticks to best practices of E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trust), quality guidelines that suggest your content demonstrate topical expertise, come from an authoritative perspective and earn your audience’s trust.

Simply put, if you want your content to dominate search engines, care about your audience and put in the effort to write for people. Show that you’ve formed a researched opinion, illustrate that you can communicate your opinion and engage audiences with compelling writing.

What We Know About the Helpful Content Update So Far

Ok, let’s reel it in a bit!

We know the Google Helpful Content update extends beyond on-SERP reviews and even review articles to all types of content in general.

This means it can have a major impact on your website, affecting your lead-gen rates and website metrics.

But how? And what can you do about it?

Let’s start by figuring out how the Helpful Content update differs from other Google Search algorithm updates and what we know so far based on early effects & what Google is telling us.

How Does the Helpful Content Update Differ from Other Google Search Updates?

The Helpful Content Update is unique, there’s no way around it.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Most other unique updates are named things like Panda or Penguin—not really what you would call descriptive monikers.

Here, Google is clearly well-committed to pushing the message that this update is about something…something big. They’re on a mission to encourage content creators to make articles, blog posts and webpage copy as helpful and valuable to website visitors as possible.

In other words, it’s time to get on board and ditch the rushed, low-quality stuff you’ve been pumping out over the years.

But what specifically is unique this time around? Let’s compare this update to a broad core update.

As mentioned, the last time we had one of those was the Google Broad Core update of May 2022.

Again, a board core update refers to periodic updates Google Search makes to its algorithm that are expansive across the board, hitting at the “core” of main ranking factors the algorithm looks at, but not necessarily targeting any particular area in depth.

Because of this lack of deep specificity, Google doesn’t publicly release details about what has changed and what remains the same. And they always refer to the same set of high-level SEO guidelines as advice to website marketers about how to react.

Therefore, with core updates, it can be hard to diagnose how to improve details or what to fix. Effects can be scattered or inconsistent in a way that can balance out.

Take a look at this information below from Semrush about average ranking gains and losses by industry.

This graph shows that average gains and losses within almost all verticals balanced out following Google’s May 2022 Broad Core Update.

That means the effects were at least industry-agnostic, and the best practices moving forward involve the usual, like ensuring you’re following the best practices of E-A-T.

How are things different this time around with the Helpful Content update? Let’s take a look!

Early Effects of the Google Helpful Content Update

We’re not in Kansas anymore, that’s for sure.

The weeks following the launch of the Helpful Content update produced surprising and mixed early results. And the subsequent online commentary (i.e., “what’s really going on here?”) has sparked confusion, further distinguishing this update from the recent Broad Core update.

Many SEO analysts predicted that the Helpful Content update will be at least as impactful as Panda was—maybe even more so.

It felt like Armageddon was coming. But for now, things are still calm.

That doesn’t mean lots of websites are out of the woods yet though. Google is urging content creators to stay vigilant because this update is designed to self-adjust over time as it makes an ongoing impact.

We’ll deep dive into why and what that might look like further below in this post, but let’s start with the early data thus far.

Let’s look at the below data via Rank Ranger. It shows no statistically significant differences in average, across-the-board search-engine rankings between the weeks before and after the launch of the Helpful Content update.

And SEO company Sistrix observed no significant changes from the helpful Content update a week after the rollout, noting this was slightly unusual compared to broad core updates, where moderate changes are usually noticed within a few days.

So what’s the deal here? Is this all smoke and mirrors?

Not entirely. Sistrix did concede one example website that took a noticeable hit in rankings; the below image shows <foodandwine.com>’s visibility metrics nosedive.

And Ray highlighted websites with “‘meh’ content” in industries you might expect to see employ content mills, like health, dating, horoscopes, etc.

Most websites didn’t really see an impact, other than websites with unsurprisingly low-quality content.

Does this mean Armageddon was more like a Nah-mageddon?

Actually, maybe.

Google made a big deal about the Helpful Content update and were careful to position it more distinctly than a broad core update. It’s possible the Helpful Content update isn’t any more impactful than a pedestrian “spam update” and Google hyped it up as a public-relations stunt to encourage content marketers to take quality-control more seriously.

On the other hand, the Helpful Content update’s rollout will be gradual. In fact, it will be continuously gradual.

What does continuously gradual mean though? You might also ask, How will it impact my website?

Let’s unpack these questions by taking a look at what Google says—and at others’ interpretations of what Google’s saying….

What’s Google Saying About What the Helpful Content Update Means?

On the same day of the announcement, Google published guidelines for website-content creators to help them optimize their website for the Helpful Content update.

Their core recommendation is to focus on writing what’s known as “people-first content.” Write for the people who will read your content, not for search engines.

As Google says, write “content where visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience.”

They provide the following list of questions you should ask yourself before publishing any content on your website to ensure your content is the best that it can be for your readers:

1. Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
2. Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)?
3. Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
4. After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
5. Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?

Ultimately, Google’s goal is to reward webpage content that checks off the above criteria with better search rankings—and thus more website traffic!—while also explicitly saying content that doesn’t meet this criteria “won’t perform as well.”

How Google’s Helpful Content Update Impacts Search Rankings With Machine-Learning

How does this advice from Google translate to your day-to-day work? How can you apply these guidelines to improve your content for search engines?

SEO influencer Kevin Indig perfectly summarized a takeaway from each one of Google’s guidelines.

1. Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
   • Satisfy an existing demand and/or build an audience.
2. Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)?
   • Provide factually correct content.
3. Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
   • Focus on a core topic.
4. After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
   • Create original content.
5. Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?
   • Don’t force visitors to navigate back to the search-engine page to find their answer elsewhere.

What’s interesting is that Indig also highlighted a unique point from Google’s guidelines, that the Helpful Content update “introduces a new site-wide signal” to determine a sort of overall quality level.

In other words, even individual pieces of helpful content could underperform on search engines if your website has what Google describes as “relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall.”

What the heck does that mean? You publish a well-researched & well-written post that satisfies user expectations and it doesn’t rank as well as it could because your website already has lots of bad content already?

Well, kind of, yeah…. In fact, that’s actually Google’s intention.

A disportionately high amount of unhelpful content shows your website isn’t optimally focused on a core topic and on providing holistic solutions to visitors’ queries.

Google wants helpful content to be associated with websites that have strong reputations in their field—that helps send trust signals to users.

How does Google do this? As Ray clarifies in a LinkedIn post, this site-wide signal is a “classifier” applied to websites by the Helpful Content Update that uses machine-learning to gradually assess the quality level of a website’s content.

This is what we mean by continuously gradual. The classifier will perpetually learn more about your site over time to feed more & better data to Google algorithms.

This is the message Google is trying to impart. Ray’s LinkedIn post was in response to a Twitter discussion between Sullivan and SEO consultant Glenn Gabe over whether the Helpful Content update has actually been as big of a deal as it was made out to be.

Sullivan clarified that the site-wide signals from the Helpful Content update were what made it unique and that impacts from the update would be “noticeable” over time, referring to Google documentation about improving SEO as guidance for webmasters.

Clearly Google is taking a stand and instructing us that, even if the effects have been underwhelming thus far, the impacts of the Google Helpful Content update could never end.

So if your website has lots of low-quality, unhelpful content from over the years, even if you haven’t seen a major hit yet from Google’s Helpful Content update, you still might over time.

How to Improve Old Content After the Helpful Content Update

Okay, so what’s the solution here? You can’t only focus on providing quality content moving forward; also audit your existing content by the same standards you apply to new content.

In fact, this might be the biggest takeaway from the Helpful Content update.

Let’s look at some simple steps to get you started.

Steps to Improve Old Content on SEO After a Google Update

1. Develop quality criteria around E-A-T
2. Create a database and audit existing content
3. Identify content decay
4. Update or redirect existing content

1. Develop Quality Criteria Around E-A-T

We mentioned E-A-T earlier, but it’s a strong foundation for developing criteria for grading content quality.

Ensure your content reflects expertise, is written authoritatively and establishes trust. To do this, refer to an E-A-T SEO checklist to hit all the right notes, like double-checking your old content is comprehensive, backed by reputable authors and reviewed by industry experts.

For a detailed list of criteria you can steal, feel free to thank SEO consultant Aleyda Solis.

<https://twitter.com/aleyda/status/1560550093941456896>

2. Create a Database and Audit Existing Content

Now that you have set standards to audit your old content, it’s time to start, well, auditing your content.

Looking at E-A-T standards is a great way to make subjective or qualitative qualifications. But sometimes real, hard data makes things a lot easier.

See what’s underperforming in Google Search Console to start by narrowing things down.

The SEO influencer known as Niche Site Lady on Twitter outlined a great process for deciding which website content to cut or update by looking at traffic data and cross-referencing organic clicks with impressions.

3. Identify Content Decay

Your audit can’t only include underperforming content in your audit. There might be warning signs for content already bringing in traffic too.

First, what is content decay?

It’s the process of traffic-generating content beginning to lose its traffic. In other words, things are on the downhill.

Common culprits of content decay usually include increased competition from other websites. But think about it, if your content were strong enough in the first place and fully helpful for your users, then in theory the risk from competition is low.

Pull reports from Google Analytics to identify content decay. Don’t rush to delete articles with decreasing traffic—they’re still generating traffic, after all—but study what else ranks for the same search queries to see what you’re missing, and then update your content accordingly.

4. Update or Redirect Existing Content

The ultimate question remains: Should I update my content or redirect it?

It can be a fine line. Sometimes it comes down to a judgment call. If your content topic is important for your audience, then it’s likely worth an update. Otherwise a redirect might be in order. Sometimes known as 301 redirects, referring to the relevant HTML-response status code “301,” a redirect enables you to depublish content by instructing web browsers to automatically send users elsewhere on your website.

So for anything that doesn’t make the cut, either update the content if it’s worth salvaging or if you have to remove it, set up a 301 redirect to send its website traffic to a better version of the content you have on your site.

If there’s not a direct match, map the old content at least to something as best you can. Remember, your goal is always to resolve user queries and satisfy audience expectations.

Let’s look at an example! Say you’re an ecommerce website that sells waterproof shoes.

You have a blog post about why waterproof shoes are worth the cost.

Now your traffic decreases after the Helpful Content update. You conduct a content-quality audit and suspect this “costs” article isn’t helping. There are lots of better-written content pieces on the same topic from other websites performing better on Google Search.

Maybe this other content goes into more detail on secondary keyterms, showing expertise by discussing not just benefits, but also price-point differences, the reasons behind what drives prices, why your shoes are versatile even when there’s no rain, the concept of waterproofing as an investment, the effects of waterproof technology on shoe aesthetics & comfort and so on.

Your article? It’s a listicle of basic benefits of waterproof shoes, essentially a front to target the primary keyword “cost.” But the content isn’t otherwise diverse, so the listicle just ends up floundering. In other words, it’s not as helpful as it could be.

Option #1. The article is worth saving to compete for the primary term about costs, so you add more unique information about why customers should spend more for waterproof shoes.

Option #2. Since it already has some traction for keyterms about “benefits,” you redirect the traffic to another post you have specifically about that topic.

Which option should you go with? This is where SEO is half-art and half-science. Sometimes it’s a guess—but always a researched, educated guess.

In this hypothetical scenario, if the destination page (about “benefits”) already ranks well for its target keyterms and the existing page (about “costs”) has previous activity about “benefits” from either Google Search Console or rank-tracking tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, then go Option #2 and 301-redirect the “costs” article to the “benefits” one.

But if you do go with the latter and redirect the page and “costs” remains a high-value target keyword, you can still write net-new content for it!

Otherwise, just go with Option #1 and update the existing content in the “costs” article.

Takeaways for Moving Forward With the Google Helpful Content Update

At a high level, what should content marketers consider moving forward after the Helpful Content update?

Google certainly doesn’t make your job easier, but you need to stay on top of tips and best practices to ensure your website traffic grows and your company can scale.

With the site-wide classifier from this update, the message from Google is simple: lackluster content on your site will drive down rankings and traffic over time (even if the update’s impact has been meandering thus far).

Perhaps the biggest takeaway is to pay special attention to optimizing legacy content on your website on top of what you’re doing with new content. Investing in subject-matter expert services can help you improve new & old content alike to crush those E-A-T requirements so you can start futureproofing your website for better sales.

The post Google’s Helpful Content Update: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Or maybe you’ve hit a wall with your online ads. Or you’re pumping out content but it feels rudderless (“is anybody actually reading these?”).

You know you have to diversify your different marketing channels and dive more into inbound marketing, but where to start?

How can I leverage my content marketing to hit all the right notes and start turning my marketing operations into a lead-generating machine?

Let’s dive into inbound lead generation and the best ways to optimize content for inbound marketing so you can hit your metrics out of the park—without overburdening your sales team.

How Inbound Leads and Content Marketing Work Together

First, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about what we mean by inbound leads.

An inbound lead is any lead who finds your business via your marketing collateral and then they come to you. An outbound lead, by contrast, is someone whom you approached.

Inbound leads typically show an interest in your business and want to learn more about your products or services.

Whether they fill out a contact form on your website or sign up for a free trial, they are extremely valuable—because they form the base of your prospective customers.

Therefore, if you want to grow your sales, generating more inbound leads is essential. But how does content marketing fit in?

Simply put, people must find you in the first place to reach out. And then you need to motivate them to reach out once they do find you by piquing their interest.

To make your business discoverable and your selling propositions intriguing, you need content.

Potential inbound leads want information—information about how you can resolve their pain points or provide them with a benefit.

And information is what content provides. Content is info that people can find and consume. This is how you turn visitors into leads, leads into prospects and prospects into customers.

If you sell software to other companies, for example, you’ll see results by investing in B2B content creation that will enable you to promote your value propositions to leads.

Maybe you want an ebook to explain the nuances of productivity software to demonstrate your expertise in using tools for saving time.

Or a blog post that shows off benefits of your sales software to better manage pipelines when potential inbound leads search “how to better manage my pipeline.”

When you leverage content marketing, you set yourself up to transform your operations into a lead-generating machine.

What Is Inbound Lead Generation?

Inbound lead generation is the process of attracting prospects to a business and nurturing their interest. It’s how you turn a lead into a paying customer.

Although every company uses unique lead-generation strategies, the process usually follows the same basic steps:

1. Someone finds a business via its website, social media accounts or other marketing channels.
2. They take a desired action, such as clicking a link to download a free ebook.
3. The link leads to a landing page on the company’s website.
4. The visitor provides their contact information in exchange for the ebook or some type of offer to turn into a lead.

To ensure people find you and to nurture them down this path, optimizing your content so that it provides value for their needs is invaluable.

Optimizing Your Content for Inbound Lead Generation

What is content optimization? Optimizing content means to write, format and update content to make it both as accessible and as valuable to your target audience as possible.

There are lots of content-optimization tools to make your content as strong as it can be, but you should also deploy your content as part of a holistic website strategy for lead generation. 

Rather than sticking a few links on a page and calling it a day, you need to be strategic about your content-optimization efforts.

With content optimization, you have more opportunities to attract inbound leads. Let’s look at the different aspects of content to pay attention to for more inbound leads.

Website Forms

You can tweak website forms to generate more leads. For example, place forms “above the fold” so website visitors see them before they scroll down.

Remember that potential customers have screens of all sizes, from smartphones to large monitors, so not everyone can see the same amount of content before they scroll.

And pay attention to messaging for best results.

Research keywords for the content on pages where forms live to attract search engines and use language that captures the attention of your target audience, especially in calls-to-action.

And some visitors hesitate to turn over their names and email addresses. Make it easy for them to part with their information by adding a statement like “Unsubscribe at any time” at the bottom.

Finally, leave plenty of white space around each form. If a form is surrounded by text and graphics, it can be difficult for a visitor to focus on the content and the offer.

White space makes it much easier to understand the text and decide about taking the desired action.

You could also add a signup form as an overlay that appears when users first arrive at your site. Just make sure it has a simple, hard-to-resist call to action and a visible way to exit.

Wherever you use forms, make sure they’re easy to find again if someone who previously opted out changes their mind later.

A/B-Testing

A/B-testing is a type of performance testing that presents two versions of a page to different visitors so you can gather data to see what version works better.

And improving content is a great benefit of A/B-testing. This will allow you to leverage content to generate more inbound leads as you split-test which page elements are more effective.

Titles, images and page layouts are examples of variables you can test.

The key is to focus on one variable each time you conduct this type of test. Testing multiple variables makes it difficult to isolate what increased conversion rates.

Most testing softwares allows you to run small tests. For example, if Option A gets better results than Option B, iterate on A to create a new variation, Option C.

When you test Option C against Option A, you’ll probably only show it to a small percentage of your potential leads, so you won’t lose the progress you’ve made.

The goal is to create small incremental changes to boost performance over time.

Website Metrics

Pay attention to website metrics that show how visitors interact with your site to identify areas of opportunity with your content for improved lead generation.

Here are a few metrics to check:

• Bounce rate: If someone visits your website and leaves without looking at other pages, then they “bounced” away. Typically, people bounce when they look at the page and think it isn’t interesting or relevant. If you have a high bounce rate, tweak your content to make it more engaging and relevant to your target audience.
• Average time on page: The average time visitors spend on your website pages helps determine the type of content they find most valuable. It can also signal potential  inadequacies in your site structure or page-naming conventions—people who quickly move from page to page are likely searching your site for something specific.
• Traffic sources: To optimize your content for lead generation, it’s essential to understand where most of your traffic is coming from. Suppose you see hundreds of visitors coming to one of your pages from an educational resource. In that case, you can tweak your content to make it more educational or update it to answer questions that weren’t addressed on the referring page.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are standalone pages where people “land” when clicking on a link to your website.

For example, if you offer home-repair services in Florida, you might have landing pages known as location pages with content unique to home services in Florida cities.

You can optimize these landing pages for inbound lead generation with the following tips:

• Improve the headline on each page. Make it more exciting or relevant to your target audience.
• Edit landing pages to match the expectations of people looking for your products or services. Provide value by answering their queries, such as questions they would ask to solve their pain points. And where did they come from? Design landing-page content to tailor the stage of the buyer’s journey your website visitors are in.
• Make sure your form length is appropriate for the size of your landing page and strikes a balance between the amount of information you need to collect and your potential leads not feeling overwhelmed or demotivated to fill out too many fields.
• A/B-test to determine which version of each landing page is the most effective.
• Overcome objections immediately with your content.

Calls-to-Action

A call-to-action is a request for a visitor to take a desired action. “Click to subscribe” and “Sign up for updates” are generic example CTAs.

You can optimize your CTAs for lead generation in the following ways:

• Make the copy as straightforward as possible. Don’t make visitors wonder what you want them to do or what they’ll get if they do it. Spell out the offer and tell people precisely what action to take, whether it’s clicking, calling or downloading a free trial.
• Don’t rely too much on overly descriptive text. “Start Your Free Trial” can work sometimes but isn’t particularly compelling. “Get More Sales Today” speaks to a benefit if, for example, you sell sales-enablement software.
• Use design best practices to make it clear visitors are supposed to click the CTA. For example, you may want to have the text change color when the visitor hovers over it.
• Don’t let your CTA get lost in the background. Put some white space around it to draw the visitor’s eye and make it clear you want them to take action.

Generating Leads with Content Marketing

Quality content is a critical aspect of your marketing strategy. Content attracts people to your website and convinces them to become leads.

You can produce content in house with the proper resources or optimize efficiency & scalability by outsourcing content marketing.

But whatever path you choose, know that turning your operations into a lead-generating machine to attract more inbound leads to grow your revenue is impossible without content.

These are some of the most common ways to generate leads with content marketing.

Case Studies

If you’re trying to generate leads for a B2B business, publishing a case study is a great way to get more people to visit your website.

A case study typically describes a business problem and explains how one of your customers used your company’s products or services to solve the problem.

One of the main benefits of a case study is that it subtly suggests to the reader that your company has the expertise needed to meet their needs.

You can also include a strong CTA at the end of the case study to encourage readers to set up a discovery call or get in touch with your sales team.

Ebooks

Ebooks work well for both B2B and B2C businesses. If you work with B2B customers, they help the reader solve a problem or learn a new skill related to your service.

For example, an accounting firm would benefit from publishing an ebook on how manufacturing firms can reduce labor costs.

Or if you target consumers—perhaps you sell jewelry—you might want to publish a guide to caring for precious metals and gemstones.

Templates

Offering free templates can convince visitors to give you their contact information, making it easier to turn them into leads.

If you’re targeting designers, for instance, you may want to provide a basic infographic template or give visitors access to a set of color palettes that can help them with their design projects.

Free Courses

Free courses are ideal for sharing your expertise with other people and making them more confident in your ability to solve their pain points.

For example, if you sell math tutoring, you could offer a free course on using specific methods for math problems.

People who sign up for your course would then be exposed to your other offerings, such as tutoring for the math portion of the SAT or video courses on passing core math exams.

Surveys

If you sell to B2B customers, offering access to survey data is a great way to convince website visitors to give you their contact information, turning them into leads.

The Society for Human Resource Management and other industry organizations do this regularly, positioning themselves as a helpful resource for potential customers.

Checklists

Checklists are easy to create and many visitors find them valuable. This type of content benefits those who can provide step-by-step instructions for completing tasks.

For example, a professional organizer could offer a checklist to clean out a pantry or organize a bedroom closet.

Start Getting More Inbound Leads With Better Content Marketing

Successful inbound-lead generation starts with high-quality content. If you don’t have the time or expertise to create articles, landing pages, blog posts and more, Crowd Content can help.Expert, vetted writers from content creation services develop content uniquely for your audience so you never have to write again while your inbound-lead metrics blast through the roof!

The post How to Create an Inbound Lead-Gen Machine With Content Marketing appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Picture this. You’re writing a blog post, a social post or copy for a product page.

You want it to perform well to scale website traffic and revenue, but how do you know your copy will hit the mark? Will people care or will they indifferently move on?

You might think online attention spans are short and getting shorter, making it difficult to seize people’s attention with content copywriting.

Some studies say human attention spans have decreased by almost a third during the internet era, exacerbating the job of content marketers.

But it turns out that shorter attention spans is a myth. Attention spans are too task-dependent and too influenced by circumstantial expectations to be a reliable metric.

Why then do audiences pay so little attention to your content marketing? Copywriting for conversions is difficult, but not because of shorter attention spans. Successful conversion copywriting is challenging because of information overload and more competition.

If readers bounce from your content, you probably rambled, your brand messaging didn’t captivate or you committed a common copywriting mistake.

For content marketers who need to drive traffic, woo potential leads and boost conversions, the pressure is on! But stagnant copywriting will impede your content marketing goals.

Thankfully, with the right eye, you can spot the mistakes that turn content with potential into a waste of copywriting resources and the reader’s time.

We’ll outline the importance of copywriting for content marketing and six common copywriting mistakes to avoid so your content wows audiences and drives conversions through the roof!

The Importance of Copywriting for Content Marketing

There are few strategies as impactful on conversions, engagement and loyalty as content marketing. Content marketing builds trust by providing value without asking for compensation.

Great content creates memorable experiences for potential leads. If your articles or posts educate and enthrall leads, they’ll trust you and become more likely to convert into a customer.

Hence why strong copywriting is vital for content marketing. Words sway people, and all content requires copy. To scale content marketing, you need to become a content copywriter.

What Is a Content Copywriter?

A content copywriter applies copywriting best practices to content marketing to reinforce brand messaging and make audiences care about what they’re reading.

Let’s break this down! Content marketing is the strategy of creating and distributing content like articles and posts to attract and engage leads. Copywriting is the art of crafting written content to knock your audience’s socks off so they take action.

But don’t you want your content marketing to knock people’s socks off too?

People crave connection to what you’re saying. Does your content merely answer queries and promote your brand, or does it go further and move your audience?

You need to make your content “people-first content” with mistake-free copywriting. Tell stories that potential leads can relate to and use language that enraptures them.

A content copywriter leverages brand messaging, emotional language and product copy in their content marketing to improve traffic and conversions. It’s that simple.

If longform content doesn’t command attention the same way a billboard advertisement does, the strength of the writing otherwise and the research you put into the content won’t matter.

Therefore, you can’t afford to overlook common copywriting mistakes in content marketing! Let’s review six copywriting mistakes to avoid to benefit your bottom line.

6 Common Content Copywriting Mistakes to Avoid

As a content marketer—or, more precisely, a content copywriter!—you want to make your content copywriting shine!

Here are common copywriting mistakes to avoid:

1. Messaging that doesn’t move your audience.
2. Using the passive voice.
3. Non-conversational writing that’s all about “me.”
4. Too much fluff.
5. Bad or no formatting.
6. A failure to test your content.

1. Messaging That Doesn’t Move Your Audience

The biggest mistake brands make in content marketing is not employing clear messaging as part of a story to establish connections with people.

Storytelling is an important aspect for both B2C content marketing and B2B content creation; no matter your audience, all potential customers are people first who just want to feel connected.

Check out the below blog-post intro from the B2B-software company Gong.

Even though they sell complex technology to business professionals, they set up a narrative (with a pop-culture reference no less!) to hook their readers.

This tactic exemplifies what makes a great copywriter: great communication skills with people.

But to connect with your target audience—to influence and entice them towards your products or services—you need to understand them.

In short, your content should demonstrate that you’ve identified the following about your target audience:

• Emotional pushes (i.e., what causes them problems)
• Emotional pulls (i.e., what attracts them to a solution)
• Present habits (i.e., what they are currently doing or not doing)
• Solution anxieties (i.e., what might worry them if they break their habits)

Let’s go through an example.

Take a web-design agency that caters to local-service businesses, like landscaping companies.

• Push: They work hard so they don’t have time to market their business more.
• Pull: They want more leads to increase revenue.
• Habit: They’re floundering with an outdated website.
• Anxiety: They know how their website works and besides, what if their investment goes down the drain?

Here’s a potential intro for an article on “marketing tips for a landscaping website”:

So you want to dominate the neighborhood and become the top landscaper in town?

But you work so much running your business, you worry your website isn’t pulling its weight to make this a reality and you don’t have the capacity to do anything about it. Your website has gotten you this far, but now you’ve hit a cap so it’s time to take things to the next level.

To grow your landscaping business, your website needs to work as hard as you do to become a lead-generating machine. Let’s look at some surefire tips to make this a reality!

By framing the website as working hard like them, you appeal to their entrepreneurial pride (hard work) that explains the push (not enough time), while implying the consequences of keeping their habit (they’re floundering if their current website isn’t working as hard as it could).

Plus, a “hard-working website” both alludes to the pull (if it works hard, it will generate more leads like a “machine” so they can “dominate” and “grow”) and alleviates anxiety (if it works hard, you won’t have to update it as much and it will pay for itself).

You now have a story, leading the reader on a journey where they identify as the audience with messaging that intersects their desires & pain points and your products or services.

Content copywriting with strong messaging is key to content marketing success.

2. Using the Passive Voice

Good copywriting energizes, engages and stirs people into action. It should be direct and to the point. Most importantly, good copy is crystal clear and never confuses readers.

The quickest way to undermine good copywriting is to write in the passive voice.

In the passive voice, the verb acts on the subject. It makes a phrase sound more odd and disconnected than necessary and it stutters your copy.

Take this sentence, for example: Our product is loved by our customers because of its simplicity.

The active voice flips things around so the subject performs the verb’s action. It’s more lively, energetic and clear, and it turns a passive sentence from clunky to spunky.

Like this: Our customers love our product for its simplicity.

A fast way to identify the passive voice is to look for to be and its variants (am, are, been, being, is, was and were). These verbs lack confidence and detract from more engaging verbs.

Remember in the introduction the sentence, “Why then do readers pay so little attention to your content marketing?”

In the first draft of this post, that sentence read, “So why then do audiences seem to spend so little attention to your content marketing?”

“Seem to…” devalues the stronger verb “spend” (later replaced by “pay”) and makes you sound hesitant. It also inflates your word count!

Fixing the passive voice quickly improves content marketing.

3. Non-Conversational Writing That’s All About “Me”

Brands take varying approaches with the tone and voice of their content, ranging from a knowledgeable voice and an even tone to a more casual vibe.

But all good content copywriting has one thing in common: it’s conversational.

To nurture lifelong customers and make them raving fans of your business, your copy should have the same cadence that a message from a friend would.

Read your content out loud to test for conversationalism. If it flows more like a friendly conversation and less like reading a microwave’s instruction manual, you’re on the right track.

But be wary of advice like “write like you talk,” which itself is a common copywriting mistake.

Why? Because people talk based on unedited thoughts from their head. Copywriting expert Erica Schneider says to think of conversational writing as “relaxed writing.”

A relaxed tone comes naturally when you stop talking at your readers and start conversing with them.

Want an example? Check out this above-the-fold messaging from an agency’s website:

“We are” this. “An expert team” of that. “Get to know us”!? Yuck.

The “Me, Me, Me” tactic is a great example of a copywriting mistake because it underscores the value of focusing on what you can do for leads.

Conversational content copywriting is all about the “you”; making it about “me” is lazy and ineffective.

For instance, here copywriting expert Grace Baldwin hits the nail on the head about the importance of writing to customers about them instead of at them about you.

Trying to sell leads on your greatness will get you nowhere. (Unless of course, you’re selling the world’s best cup of coffee!)

4. Too Much Fluff

Ever read a paragraph and thought, “Well that was a lot of words”? I’ll bet dollars to donuts you didn’t even remember what the paragraph was about.

Crafting conversational copy that connects with your readers is foundational to good writing. And nothing stops the flow of a conversation quicker than fluff in writing.

All too often, writers hope to dazzle readers by filling their prose with industry jargon and complex language, only to alienate their audience with fluff. 

Wait, let me try that again.

Filling your prose with industry jargon and complex language to dazzle readers will alienate them instead.

That’s better. Let’s move on….

If you find your writing is stuffed with superfluous words that belabor the point or ones that don’t make sense, you’re likely covering for your own lack of clarity.

Simply slow down and make sure you understand what you’re talking about. This usually happens in the editing process.

What are some tips to avoid this common copywriting mistake of fluffy writing?

• Watch out for extra verbs.
• Avoid explanations that are implied.
• Eliminate filler terms.

Let’s look at some concrete examples of each.

Watch Out for Extra Verbs

You must make a connection with your readers to increase conversion rates.

Are you trying to write about consumer debt for a fintech company but don’t know where to start?

Many business owners aren’t aware of new LinkedIn features or how to best use them, leaving them struggling to expand their reach to new customers by not exploring their options.

“Must.” “Trying.” “Leaving.” “Expand.” What’s going on here?

Some ideas are complicated, we get it. But you can boil all sentences down to three elements: Subject > Verb > Object. There’s no need for more than one verb per clause if you can help it.

Adding extra verbs to a sentence is an example of a common copywriting mistake because it lacks confidence, increases word counts and indicates you probably need an editor. Here are ways to fix these problems:

Connect with your readers to increase conversion rates.

Are you writing about consumer debt for a fintech company but don’t know where to start?

Many business owners aren’t aware of new LinkedIn features or how to best use them. Instead, they struggle to reach new customers by not exploring their options.

Avoid Implied Explanations

Delineation is extremely valuable when referencing industry buzzwords, but rarely welcome in all other circumstances.

If you’re padding your points with additional context that tells the reader something already obvious or that they already know, your content copywriting will tire them out.

This seems simple, but writers overlook this copywriting mistake frequently, because it even creeps into microcopy on a sentence-by-sentence basis when writing first drafts.

Consider the following example:

Can you imagine a competitor not in your space? What does that even mean?

Eliminate Filler Terms

What are filler terms?

Filler terms are words or turns-of-phrase in sentences when trying to get thoughts on paper but which don’t add any value to readers.

They bloat your writing, hurt your content marketing goals and make your readers more likely to bounce from your articles or blog posts.

Remember the sentence a couple subsections ago, “All too often, writers hope to dazzle…”?

Yeah, “All too often” was lazy filler. That’s why I cut it and rearranged the syntax to later lead with “Filling your prose….” Much better, no?

Some examples of filler words include adverbs, “in order to” and “the fact of the matter.” Instead, leverage action verbs, mitigate adjectives and avoid clichés.

Are there exceptions to these rules? Absolutely!

It all comes down to context. For instance, I used the word “absolutely” even though adverbs are usually a red flag, but not to qualify an adjective or verb. And even then, strategically placed adverbs to modify other words can sometimes be effective if they grab attention.

Use your discretion and always put yourself in the reader’s shoes.

5. Bad or No Formatting

Potential customers want copy that engages, entertains and informs. They don’t want to slog through monotonously formatted paragraphs that hurt their eyes.

Format content to reflect the nature of the medium. Did you know that the average person spends 37 seconds reading a blog post? That’s insanely disheartening for content marketers! Don’t chase readers away with walls of text.

Here’s how to make content scannable, easy to digest and pleasant to read:

• Break up topics with headings and subheadings;
• Include interesting points and facts as bullet points; and
• Embed relevant images or video content to visually compel readers (and as a bonus, multimedia content adds authority to your article, showing you’ve done research to back up your points). 

And don’t forget to format paragraphs themselves. The flow of your writing is just as important to the visual and hierarchical structure.

Rhythm, syntax, vocabulary and more all comprise flow that helps define copy-formatting. Lacking diversity of these elements is a major copywriting mistake to avoid.

6. A Failure to Test Your Content

No matter how well you write, there’s still a subjective element to great copy.

You simply can’t know if a piece of content works until you put it out there. To succeed, you need great content copywriters with strong intuitions about what works and what doesn’t.

That and testing your content.

Creativity is an inherent part of copywriting, but there’s no reason to leave your marketing results to chance.

A/b-testing, readability testing and even studying analytics are all crucial to optimizing content copywriting and to mitigate mistakes.

Want to test two different headlines, introduction sections, taglines or more against each other? Check out a free tool like Google Optimize!

Want to double-check the grammar, flow, readability and more of your content copywriting? Try Grammarly (freemium) or Hemingway Editor (free)!

Want to cross-reference your content with traffic or conversions to see what content types work well and which pieces are most profitable to optimize? Google Analytics!

Leaving content stagnant, not analyzing it and not testing it are the low-hanging fruits of common copywriting mistakes. Pick those fruits and your content marketing will thank you!

How to Avoid Common Copywriting Mistakes to Blow Past Content Quotas

Writing, in general, is deceptively simple. Anyone can form words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs and so on. But crafting words that connect, engage and sell is another matter.

Remember, people don’t pay less attention to business content than they used to. Instead, it’s tougher to compete but also never more important.

Content marketing is vital to improving your marketing metrics, spreading your brand and delivering more qualified leads. But you can’t succeed without great copywriting that’s on-message, well-tested and written confidently, conversationally, jargon-free, succinctly and more.

That’s what content copywriting is all about!

But even when you know the rules of good copywriting, scaling your output and committing additional time you don’t have are new challenges altogether.

High-quality freelance copywriter services deliver on all these notes, without any of the mistakes that can hold your content down.

Supercharge your content with managed services and now your content strategy might be the envy of other marketers!

The post 6 Common Copywriting Mistakes That Hurt Content Marketing appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

It’s a challenge all email marketers face. How can I get people to care? What email newsletter tips can I use to excite my customers?

Email marketing is competitive. Simply sharing your latest blog post or promoting a sales campaign won’t inherently help you stand out.

The truth is, emails inundate us more than ever. Advancements in instant-messaging technology, social platforms and push notifications only make the problem worse.

From the most-recent data, the ROI of email marketing has decreased in recent years, landing at 36:1 ($36 in revenue for every $1 of costs) from 42:1 in the previous year.

That’s still an impressive ROI—showing how dominant email is as a marketing channel that drives sales.

So what gives? Why is it more difficult to create a successful email newsletter? Well, customers have higher expectations coupled with limited attention spans because of bloated inboxes.

Yet email remains one of the best mediums for how to grow your business using content marketing.

To get it to work, you have to construct a strong narrative in your email newsletters, messaging that compels readers and a user experience that optimizes for conversions & more sales.

It’s not easy, but you can improve results by making a few tweaks to your newsletter strategy.

In this guide, you’ll discover the key benefits of email marketing and learn five email newsletter tips to make your own campaigns more successful.

What Are the Benefits of Email Newsletter Marketing?

It’s easy to guess the typically cited benefits of email. You can reach your audience directly, email is cost-efficient & increases sales, email newsletters drive engagement, etc.

But email marketing with newsletters is special because it’s particular for one specific segment of your audience: existing customers.

Research shows that email marketing works best when focused on “post-purchase” opportunities. In other words, steer efforts towards upsell revenue, not net-new revenue.

Makes sense. Other types of marketing emails like transactional emails used in sales sequences target leads and potential new customers.

But existing customers are more likely to subscribe to your newsletter. That’s because, according to the above study, they want “to learn about the products they purchase.”

Simply put, once they become new customers or are at least near the bottom of the sales funnel, a newsletter offers them the chance to feel nurtured by you as a customer.

So what are some of the unique email newsletter benefits you can leverage from these insights?

Unique Benefits of an Email Newsletter for Existing Customers

When optimizing your newsletters, ensure you’re providing value for actual subscribers.

Email newsletters shouldn’t assume recipients are still just learning about your brand, so aim for these unique benefits from newsletters to extract as much return as possible.

• You can collect feedback from customers. Email newsletters are perfect for asking about satisfaction levels, sentiments and ideas.
• Educate customers. Subscribers want to learn about your services, understand how they can get the most out of them and stay abreast of new features or updates.
• Increase upsell revenue. Email newsletters promoting product suggestions or discounts & deals almost always yield great profits.
• Drive loyalty via reputation marketing. Telling stories and connecting with customers emotionally means they’ll more likely refer you and become a fan of your business..

What Makes a Successful Email Newsletter?

Now that you know what benefits to aim towards from your email newsletter, how can you realize them?

Remember, we mentioned above that simply sending out information about your company or promotional campaigns isn’t sufficient.

Email ROI has slightly decreased because not enough marketers have upped their content game.

Compel readers with the “hook, line and sinker” approach to marketing. Grab their attention, deliver on the promise with memorable associations and then inspire engagement.

For example, say you’re sharing news about a product update.

I don’t know about you, but I see emails like this in my inbox every day, glossing over most of them if I open them at all since they look like the engineers who coded the updates wrote them.

But if I see an email about a product update from a brand I love because they have a reputation for sharing news in an interesting way? Now I’m intrigued.

Is there a relatable pain point addressed? Is there messaging that makes me feel like the email is for me? Is there a solution to the problem connected to benefits that I can understand?

Creating a successful email newsletter requires great content, good timing and other content marketing know-how.

Let’s review actionable email marketing newsletter tips to help you get there so you can increase conversion rates, improve revenue and grow your brand.

Email Marketing Newsletter Tips

1. Write a Compelling Headline as Your Subject
2. Make the Content Relevant to Your Audience
3. Write Amazing Copy That Converts
4. Map the Message to the Buyer-Journey Stage
5. A/B-Test All the Things!

1. Write a Compelling Headline as Your Subject

One of the easiest ways to improve your emails is to write great headlines in the subject field.

Make each headline should short, interesting and relevant to your audience; otherwise, recipients won’t open the message and read your content.

Shorter headlines of five to seven words often perform well, but it’s important to test variations with your audience to find what works for them.

Avoid words that are likely to trigger an email provider’s spam filter or turn off customers in general.

For example, “buy,” “order,” “clearance,” “cash,” “cheap,” “money” and “price” aren’t very intriguing.

To generate interest in your email newsletters, try the following:

• Use the subject line to make an announcement.
• Ask a question in the subject line and provide the answer in the body of the email.
• Offer a valuable tip in the subject line.
• Use imperatives to direct the reader. This works best if you want people to download something or sign up for an event.

2. Make Content Relevant to Your Audience

Are you an email marketer who wants your newsletter to make you the hero at your company? Write content that’s actually relevant to your audience and speaks to them specifically.

This means you need to research your target audience thoroughly, understand their pain points.

First, segment by audience information. Email marketers who craft unique messaging for different segments report an average increase in revenue of 760%!

Examples of email segmentation include:

• Geographic (where people live);
• Psychographic (lifestyle characteristics);
• Behavioral (how your audience found you, how they engage with your product, etc.); and
• Demographic (age, gender, etc.).

When you segment subscribers, you can tailor email newsletters to your audience, making them more likely to convert.

3. Write Amazing Copy That Converts

But I’m an email marketer for a chain of hardware stores who needs to push plumbing supplies this week! How am I supposed to make that sexy?

Here’s why you shouldn’t let doubt sink your newsletter down the drain….

There’s no followup to the above sentence. But I did write a compelling line referencing industry-related humor, didn’t I?

Want to know how to seize people’s attention? Humor and puns are a great tactic for subject lines. But there are many others.

Callback time! Remember when I introduced the previous subsection with a question asking you if you want to be the hero at your company?

Yes, that was a copywriting technique to appeal to your personal desires. And it works wonders. 

,It’s also important to write like you’re talking to a friend. Conversational writing connects with audiences and persuades them towards taking action.

Just be sure to not literally write like you speak!

Next, don’t obscure your message with jargon.

Whether you sell a $10 item aimed or one worth $5,000, communicating value propositions clearly and with action words is one of the most impactful email copywriting tips to follow.

Lastly, demonstrate to your target audience that you actually know them. People like to feel identified. Let’s look at an example.

This email from a newsletter caters to its audience, service providers, by acknowledging to them that they’re experts. Service providers definitely love to hear that; it makes them feel respected.

But the best part of this copywriting trick? Explicitly saying who your audience is (“as a business owner…”).

When you see your name, title, identity marker, etc., you subconsciously pay attention. It’s that simple.

4. Map the Message to the Buyer’s Journey Stage

What is the buyer’s journey? It’s the path a customer follows to purchase from your company.

When you set up a sales funnel, the buyer’s journey is how that funnel looks from the customer’s perspective.

You should have content for every stage to reflect the buyer’s needs and push them forward in their journey.

For instance, a lead or new customer at the top of the funnel—the start of their journey—has pain points but is still discovering your brand; pushy calls-to-action aren’t ideal for them.

Conversely, you should craft more sales-oriented messaging for those at the bottom of the funnel. They’re ready to buy—or ready to buy even more!.

5. A/B-Test All the Things!

A/B-testing is a way to compare two pieces of copy and determine which one performs better.

You can test an alternate subject line or different body copy for valuable future insights to help you improve open rates, click-through rates or conversion rates.

In fact, you don’t have to restrict yourself to copy! There are lots of examples of A/B-testing for emails, like calls-to-action, images or even testimonials.

The key to A/B-testing effectively is to change just one variable each time you run a test.

If you want to test headlines, for example, the headline is the only thing you should change. The content, images and formatting would all stay the same. This ensures statistical significance.

Once you decide to conduct an A/B-test, determine how you’ll measure performance. You may want to see which headline leads to the highest open rate or which CTA gives you the best click-through rate.

Most email-service providers offer built-in A/B-testing functionality, but here’s a list of different A/B-testing tools for email to consider.

Master Your Email Newsletter With Amazing Content

Turning your email marketing newsletter into a conversion-generating machine relies on great content, strong messaging and a hyper-focused awareness of your target audience.

Email newsletters remain a tried-and-true way of engaging with existing customers to build your brand, drive sales and inspire loyalty if you follow these tested email marketing newsletter tips.

Consistently producing great email content doesn’t happen overnight. Connect with customers, save time and optimize resources by exploring an email writing service that suits your needs.

When you outsource email content to professional writers, you can focus on what you do best while your newsletter runs like clockwork.

It looks like any reports of email’s death have been greatly exaggerated indeed!

The post 5 Tips for Writing an Email Marketing Newsletter appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

When Amanda Natividad, VP of Marketing at SparkToro, published content on LinkedIn and compared the data to Twitter, the results were a lot of “fun.”

Surely us fellow content marketers can have fun too!

What kind of fun did Natividad experience? Well, their LinkedIn publication earned over 913,000 impressions and almost 13,000 engagements in just five days.

That beat Twitter by almost 1,136% and 381%, respectively!

What happened? Is there a discrepancy between follower counts? Well, yes, but not in the obvious direction: over 94,000 on Twitter and less than 9,000 on Linkedin.

Natividad’s observation reinforces what a lot of content marketers have seen: LinkedIn is one of the most-trusted social media platforms for businesses.

With this foundation of trust, LinkedIn’s organic reach is more wide-ranging than other platforms—there’s a big demand for content that users don’t value on Facebook, Twitter, et al.

And articles on LinkedIn are unique as they allow you to write content similar to blog posts to help your business build its brand and establish expertise.

Yet many business owners aren’t aware of the article-publishing features on LinkedIn or how to best use them. Instead, they struggle to reach new customers and grow their audience.

But why should you write articles on LinkedIn? And how can you write a good LinkedIn article?

We’ll cover how to write an article on a LinkedIn page, the benefits of publishing on LinkedIn and tips for writing a good LinkedIn article so your content gets the attention it deserves!

Writing Articles on LinkedIn: An Overview

Before you learn how to write a good LinkedIn article, it’s important to understand the difference between an article and a post (also called a status or update).

LinkedIn posts are short messages that appear directly on LinkedIn feeds.

Articles are longer-form content shared as posts, where the post itself serves as a caption, but the article is available on its own page via LinkedIn’s publishing platform, LinkedIn Pulse.

Which Is Better: LinkedIn Articles or Posts?

Are LinkedIn articles better than posts? It’s a trick question because LinkedIn posts are completely different from LinkedIn articles.

First, the character counts for LinkedIn posts vs. articles differ. LinkedIn caps posts at 1,300 characters—or around 200–300 words on average if you include spaces (LinkedIn does). 

In contrast, articles get a max 125,000 characters. That’s more than 17,000 words on average.

We’re definitely not suggesting you use all that space for every article. Most people on LinkedIn don’t have time to binge-read novellas.

But you can definitely convey more—and more complex—information in an article on LinkedIn than you can in a post.

So LinkedIn articles are great in helping you demonstrate expertise and promote brand awareness.

When to Use LinkedIn Posts

• Publish regular content to LinkedIn to increase awareness
• Share links to your own posts or information you find interesting or want to comment on
• Introduce a new staffer, business partnership or product
• Share business news or accomplishments
• Ask for client or consumer feedback
• Highlight your company’s philanthropy or other efforts related to mission or corporate social responsibility

When to Publish LinkedIn Articles

• Share expertise with other LinkedIn members via longer content
• Drive awareness of your brand, services or products by creating content other people are likely to share
• Educate your audience, such as with how-to articles
• Create content likely to drive conversions to demonstrate your expertise or help people better understand the purpose & benefits of your products

What Are the Benefits of Publishing an Article on LinkedIn

Are LinkedIn articles a valuable use of time?

Yes.

LinkedIn articles complement blog posts because they offer another medium to revamp and repurpose your longform content.

You can also use LinkedIn articles as previews of what’s on your website.

Plus, with LinkedIn, you’ll get a great organic reach that isn’t guaranteed on your website.

What about the inherent effort?

It does take more time to write an in-depth article than to publish a short post. Is it really worth the extra effort? Absolutely. Here’s why:

• LinkedIn displays content to users interested in the topics you write about. If readers already perceive your content as relevant to their needs, they’ll more likely read the full article, comment on it and share it with others.
• Many users view LinkedIn articles as thought-leadership content. Publishing LinkedIn articles gives you instant credibility, trust and brand awareness.

LinkedIn articles provide more linking opportunities than LinkedIn posts do. Article links can drive traffic to your website and help you generate high-quality leads to achieve your B2B content marketing goals.

Do LinkedIn Articles Matter?

Articles provide a unique opportunity to establish expertise in your field and cement yourself or your company as a thought leader.

But whether you’re writing an article or a post on LinkedIn, they both appear on people’s feeds for followers—and their followers—to view and engage with the same way.

Articles show up as any other link with the link’s featured image above its Open Graph protocol (e.g., title, description), with the option to add organic text as a caption.

Posts display as organic text, with the option to add an accompanying image.

So LinkedIn articles matter a lot not just because they’re on an additional & reputable platform to complement your blog but also because publishing in general on LinkedIn is beneficial.

What then makes LinkedIn so unique as a publishing platform?

3 Benefits of Publishing an Article on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is one of the fastest-growing social platforms, recently seeing a 30% year-over-year increase in user sessions and a 60% increase in content creation over the same period.

These expanding metrics demonstrate the amazing opportunities available to brand managers and content marketers to scale their reach and attract more leads.

Let’s look at three specific benefits of publishing articles on LinkedIn validated by content-marketing consultant Dickie Bush:

1. Insane reach
2. Low competition
3. Genuinely thoughtful community

1. Insane Reach

There exists no shortage of observational evidence that LinkedIn’s algorithms are very liberal in how they distribute content on the platform.

User feeds are less siloed than on other social platforms. Only a few likes or comments can snowball impressions of and engagement with LinkedIn articles very quickly.

And with consistent increases in user-volume and -session metrics on LinkedIn, that means more eyeballs on LinkedIn articles and more leads.

2. Low Competition

Even though, as hinted above, the higher growth rate of LinkedIn content creation is closing the gap with the volume of user sessions, there remains a huge demand for content.

In other words, there’s still no equilibrium in the supply:demand ratio of the amount of content available on LinkedIn to the amount of content that its users demand.

This mismatch is one reason why LinkedIn’s algorithms are so lax with circulating content.

At least until this gap narrows further, businesses can easily distribute LinkedIn articles without much competition—even if your competitors literally publish LinkedIn articles too!

3. Genuinely Thoughtful Community

LinkedIn might have its fair share of opportunists and people who overestimate the extent to which their ideas qualify as insightful thought leadership.

But there’s no denying that all active users are genuine business professionals there to legitimately network, study new ideas and master industry best practices.

Coupled with its ever-growing user base, LinkedIn is a prime platform to help your articles succeed!

Bonus Tips for Writing Articles on LinkedIn to Make Them Matter

One of the easiest ways to get more readers is to make your LinkedIn profile or company page public and your activity as shareable as possible.

To do this, open “Settings & Privacy” > “Visibility” to optimize visibility settings for your profile, network and activity.

You can also share other people’s articles on LinkedIn and add relevant commentary & hashtags to help more people find them.

The Share button is at the bottom of each article on your feed. Simply click on it and choose to “Repost” or “Share with your thoughts.”

Amplifying other content and engaging with others in general shows LinkedIn you’re active yourself, improving the reach from either your personal profile or your LinkedIn company page.

LinkedIn also enables sharing articles to Facebook and Twitter. Diversifying your reach across platforms grows your brand, showcases your expertise and attracts more leads

Ask others in your company and your network to share your articles from their own profiles too!

Lastly, if you’re thinking about outsourcing content marketing activities, you can scale the production of LinkedIn articles to post more frequently and help with discoverability even further.

Steps to Publishing an Article on LinkedIn

1. Sign in to LinkedIn on desktop.
2. Click “Write article” near the top of the homepage. If you run a company page, you can publish a LinkedIn article under the page or under your personal profile.
3. Add a headline.
4. Place your cursor in the “Write here” field to start writing your article. Use bold text, bulleted lists and other formatting elements to break up large text chunks and make it easier for readers to scan your article for key points.
5. When you finish writing, proofread carefully. Then hit “Publish” and follow the on-screen instructions.

How to Write an Article on a LinkedIn Company Page: A Step-by-Step Guide

Step 1: Write an Attention-Getting Headline

The headline must be relevant to readers and let them know what to expect from your article.

Think about what your audience wants to read. Do they need tips on completing a task? Information on a new development in your field?

If you have specific readers in mind, such as executives in the technology industry, tailor your headline accordingly.

For example, say you sell a calendar app and are targeting executives in the tech industry.

Perhaps consider a benefit-driven headline (“Scale Your Productivity 3x With a New Kind of Calendar App”) since tech execs can be drawn in by messaging about growth opportunities.

Listicles and how-to articles do well on LinkedIn, so you may start with “7 Ways to Save Money on Tech Outsourcing” or “How to Increase Your Employee Retention Rate in 3 Easy Steps.”

If you promise something in the headline, follow through on that promise in the article. You don’t want to mislead readers.

Step 2: Create an Interesting Introduction

A good intro draws the reader in so they give your article a closer look.

Depending on the article’s purpose, you may want to open with a question, make a controversial statement or tell a compelling story.

Don’t start an article about credit cards with “We all know paying off debt is hard.”

Instead, unravel Sarah’s journey: “Once 28-year-old journalist Sarah decided to control her debt, she didn’t guess it would lead her on a path towards a global ambassadorship in fintech.”

Step 3: Use Short Paragraphs

Huge blocks of text turn off most readers. They also aren’t scannable and don’t work well for mobile users. 

Try to limit most paragraphs to a few short sentences.

The first sentence, also known as the topic sentence, summarizes the main idea of the paragraph. Additional sentences support your main point.

Some paragraphs may just be one sentence. Writing for the internet means your prose shouldn’t exceed a high-school reading level, especially since LinkedIn articles are for top-of-funnel leads.

When you’re ready to share a new idea, move on to the next paragraph.

Step 4: Organize Your Thoughts

Don’t underestimate the importance of outlining so you can fully internalize the delineation of your argument.

It’s vital to use storytelling for articles because stories motivate more engagement from readers, leading to more conversions.

In many cases, writing with a classic “hamburger menu” style of thesis > supporting points > conclusion is a good way to make your point, or rely on rising action > conflict > falling action.

Use these storytelling techniques in blog posts when:

• You’re giving step-by-step instructions to help readers accomplish a task.
• Your article topic relates to historical events, such as the rise of industrial activity or development of new technology.
• You want readers to visualize something in a certain order.

If all else fails, organize your thoughts by importance. This is helpful to rank items or persuade readers to adopt your viewpoint.

If you’re writing a list of the five best software packages for accounting firms, for example, it makes sense to rank them in order of importance because people will want to see the top five.

Step 5: Focus on Formatting

Good writing is only one aspect of creating an appealing article. Also consider how formatting affects the reader’s experience. 

Break content up with elements to help readers scan for information. Bulleted or numbered lists, data, images or subheadings make content more digestible and highlight key takeaways.

Give your article plenty of white space, the open space between design elements. White space focuses the reader’s attention and improves comprehension.

There’s less to immediately look at with white space, so people really engage with the content because it’s not intimidating.

Breaking up content and writing short paragraphs is the easiest way to add white space when writing a LinkedIn article for your company page.

Step 6: Cut the Fluff

Make your article exactly as long as it needs to be to get your point across. If you can explain a topic in 900 words, don’t add an extra hundred just to make the article longer.

LinkedIn content caters to executives, business owners and other professionals. They’re busy people with a limited amount of time.

As you proofread, cut out anything inessential to helping them understand what you’re saying.

Also remain vigilant in editing against the passive voice, repetition and run-on sentences, which all detract from succinct writing.

Step 7: Provide Expert Insight

The best way to build credibility and position yourself as an expert is to offer a completely new perspective, show you know your craft and cultivate your reputation.

If your article rehashes what’s out there, it won’t add much to the professional body of knowledge in your industry.

Can’t think of anything to write about? Here are some ideas to get the creative juices flowing:

• Explain how you solved a big problem in your business
• Discuss unusual solutions to common industry challenges
• Highlight how you helped a customer grow their company
• Write a rebuttal to a popular article by an industry colleague
• Read industry publications to find out what people are interested in learning about

Professional content writers can also help you curate topics for your LinkedIn content calendar. For instance, what categories and keyword-research can we take from your blog?

Once you learn how to write unique articles, you’ll distinguish yourself from other professionals in your industry.

Step 8: Speak Directly to Your Audience

Just because you’re writing for a professional audience doesn’t mean you need to be overly formal.

Use second-person pronouns to make it clear that you’re addressing the reader. “If you’ve been struggling…” and “Here are three things you can do…” are examples of this approach.

A second-person point of view makes it easier to connect with the reader and reassure them of your expertise.

Most importantly, leverage brand messaging. If you implement language that speaks to your audience’s anxieties, aspirations, challenges or fears—you’ll never be unpopular on LinkedIn.

Getting Help With LinkedIn Article Writing

Do you see how fun it is now to write LinkedIn articles?

LinkedIn articles empower your company to spread your message, assert your expertise in your field and attract new leads to increase revenue.

With an insane reach, negligible competition and a genuine readership, LinkedIn articles are a no-brainer authority statement for your business.

But if you don’t have a lot of time or still aren’t sure how best to write an article for your company on LinkedIn, then a professional article writing service helps.

Outsourcing article writing means you can establish your company as thought leaders, scale up production and more effectively draw attention to your brand.

(You know, so you don’t have to write every day, which maybe isn’t that fun!)

The post How to Write an Article on a LinkedIn Company Page appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Google implemented a “broad core update” to its search-engine algorithm on May 25, 2022, as announced by Danny Sullivan, a Public Liaison for Google Search.

Its full effects take a couple weeks to manifest because Google rolls out major updates gradually.

This is Google’s first broad core update in over six months since November, 2021.

An algorithm update is a big deal. It means Google is refining how its search engine interprets webpages, which impacts your company’s rankings, traffic and, subsequently, revenue.

It is hard to assess, let alone prepare for, a broad core update. Google doesn’t specify what the update is nor how it will affect your website metrics because broad core updates have wide scopes.

So what’s the deal? How will this Google algorithm update modify your website’s performance? How will website content play a role? And, ultimately, what does this mean for your business?

We’ll go over everything you need to know about Google’s May 2022 core update!

What Is a Broad Core Update?

Broad core updates represent an overall tweaking of the algorithm instead of a targeted effort.

Think of it in terms of car maintenance. An engine tuneup maintains overall performance but isn’t a particular fix meant to identify a specific problem.

Google’s broad core updates impact search-engine ranking factors across the board without addressing any one component in detail. That’s why Google calls them “broad.”

Past updates like Panda and Penguin were targeted, specifically looking at the quality of backlinks and content.

Other updates are more specific still. For example, Google Search adjusted how product reviews and spam impact relevant rankings in December & November, respectively, of 2021. 

But broad core updates? They change how the algorithm values a webpage in a more wide-ranging way. Who knows what could happen!

So then how in the heck are you supposed to respond to broad core updates?

You just need to ensure you’re nailing all the essential best practices. Know how to optimize content for SEO, provide great user experiences, have fast page speeds and build healthy backlinks!

What Happened in Previous Broad Core Updates?

We mentioned the most recent broad core update before this one was in November, 2021. But the June/July 2021 update is what actually takes the cake for the most website impact.

That’s because the update was so large, Google split its deployment into two, launching the first half of it in June and then finishing up in July. This was largely unprecedented.

Data analysts observed a lot of volatility for website performances across many industries as Google Search rolled out the June/July 2021 broad core update.

One analyst described it as “one of the largest core updates we’ve seen from Google yet.”

Will this May 2022 update have the same punch? How will it impact your company’s website? Importantly, how will it affect your business and what do you have to do? Let’s try to find out!

What Is Unique About This New Broad Core-Algorithm Update?

In a way, nothing. Or, at least nothing that the public can confirm.

Again, when it comes to broad core updates, Google never provides any specific details. All we know is these updates have the potential to significantly disrupt rankings on Google Search.

The SEO community had (correctly) speculated about an impending core update about a week before it happened, causing many to guess that data changes during that time were casualties.

But according to Search Engine Land, John Mueller, a Webmaster-Trends Analyst at Google, said that, “when we announce core updates, we start the rollout at that point, not beforehand.”

And broad core updates tend to be rolled out over time. So any noticeable differences in website traffic from late May into mid-June we can safely assume were influenced by this new update.

Takeaways From Google’s May 2022 Core Update

Let’s start by researching some of the data related to this broad core-algorithm update and what we can glean for brands and content marketers.

1. What Google Did Advise With the Update Announcement

As is typical, Google doesn’t provide any specific feedback, preemptive or otherwise, about how content marketers and website managers can prepare for or adjust to a broad core update.

In fact, Google tried to impart on many, “don’t try to fix the wrong things,” shortly before acknowledging that, for some, “there might not be anything to fix at all.”

But surely there must be some way to narrow down a particular takeaway and receive actionable advice from Google?!

Well, actually, kind of, yes.

Whenever Google announces a broad core update, as general advice, they always point to documentation for search-ranking best practices unchanged since 2019.

Here, Google explains that content marketers and SEO specialists can best spend their energy after a broad core update by “focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can.”

This means providing:

• Original information, reporting, research or analysis;
• A substantial, complete or comprehensive description of the topic; and
• Insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious.

As a rule of thumb, if your site’s rankings increased, your content probably already exhibits these practices. Conversely, if your rankings dropped, you likely need to up your content game.

2. Focus on E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trust)

No, not food!

E-A-T is the acronym that Google uses to describe best practices for optimizing content to rank well on their search engine.

It stands for Expertise, Authority, Trust. Simply put, does your content a) demonstrate expertise in your field, b) come from a position of authority and c) compel readers to find you trustworthy?

Your goal as a website marketer responsible for online leads and digital sales should be to answer “yes” to all these questions. 

There is no concrete ranking factor in Google’s algorithm that represents E-A-T directly, but Google confirmed in 2019 that multiple ranking factors do encompass the principles of E-A-T.

And Google explicitly encourages focusing on E-A-T in their documentation mentioned above about core-algorithm updates.

We can therefore safely assume a connection between ranking drops from the May 2022 broad core update and content that underwhelms at exhibiting E-A-T.

In fact, content marketer Will James claimed that some victims of the core update lost ground on search engines because of their lack of E-A-T.

Because the update hurt rankings for generalist websites more than for specialist websites with a narrower scope of topics, James induced generalist websites were diluting their expertise. 

So, how can you guard against future performance setbacks of your website and optimize for E-A-T?

Follow a Google E-A-T checklist and ensure content is comprehensive; authoritative by focusing on a niche; written by reputable authors; and commentated on by experts where needed.

3. Volatility in Website Rankings Is Common After Broad Core Updates

If your website rankings bounced all over the place after the May 2022 Google broad core update, we can assure you that you are not alone.

It’s not uncommon after a broad core update for websites to see volatile rankings because Google rolls out their algorithm updates gradually.

It’s why these updates always take a couple of weeks to settle and why we saw volatility for multiple days following both the June/July 2021 update & the November 2021 update.

But so far, the May 2022 update had a briefer but more intense volatile period that has leveled out.

This is significant despite the leveling-out because the results could foretell potential long-term impacts yet to happen.

So what do we know?

From the two Semrush graphs below, all industries (except real estate) had slightly smaller ranges of rank volatility than from before—but also higher (or at least even) peak volatilities.

This consistency makes it difficult to pinpoint specific impacts by industry.

Couple the consistency with the intensity itself of the volatility and it’s more likely a stronger sign than of anything else that Google is both improving & expediting their rollouts of these updates.

For instance, take a look below at contrasting examples from industry pros about the same industry: healthcare.

Different results, but same vertical.

Could we attribute the lost rankings to a skew against non-English sites, as the commentary suggests is plausible? It’s possible, but then again, that factor isn’t consistent across industries.

What this all means is that the best practices moving forward are agnostic towards industry.

All industries need content and Google applies the same principles of content to all industries.

Implementations, messaging, use cases, etc., may differ—but the underlying principles to gauge value are the same.

Take a look at this last data set below:

Most industries (except some like Arts & Entertainment and Books & Literature) more or less saw high-level parity between average gains and average losses in search-engine rankings.

So what?

Well, this analysis reinforces the idea that valuable content with quality checks—including E-A-T but also branding guidelines to compel your audience—is both relevant and universal.

4. Which Search-Engine Features Had Definite Impacts?

Snippets! You love ’em? Well do we have great news for you!

That’s right, the May 2022 Google broad core update has definitively impacted multiple snippet types for SERPs, like FAQ snippets and featured snippets.

What has this looked like? And what will this impact mean for your company’s SEO?

The Impact on FAQ Snippets

Let’s start with FAQ snippets. Yes, those pesky little buggers that provide short, direct answers to variations of users’ queries underneath webpage listings on SERPs.

A fascinating result of the broad core update reported on by Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable is that FAQ snippets on SERPs have increased from 22% to 27% of queries.

That means FAQs are showing up on Google Search almost 23% more often than before. That’s huge!

Granted, the source data, from Rank Ranger, groups FAQ snippets and how-to snippets together.

But the conclusions have been validated externally, including by SEO expert and Search Engine Land columnist Glenn Gabe.

Gabe analyzed multiple case studies to observe that “Google [is] showing more search results with FAQ rich results.”

How is this significant?

Well, on one hand, FAQ results ostensibly enable Google to siphon clicks from your website (it’s another clickable element on the SERP for users to find an answer to their query, isn’t it?).

But they also empower your webpages to attract more clicks by adding credibility and expertise to your SERP listings themselves.

Plus, qualifying for FAQ appearances helps improve your main search rankings as a whole, since strong content for FAQ snippets could be what lifts your content to the top!

Make sure you mark up FAQ content with relevant structured data on your website.

And improve your content with information suitable for questions related to target keyterms. Do keyword research or even something as simple as analyzing “People Also Ask” questions.

The Impact on Featured Snippets

As for featured snippets? Recall the observation in the above-referenced tweet by SEO professional Lily Ray that there have been “massive fluctuations with featured snippets.”

Well, Gabe echoed those observations, noting a distinct “surge or drop in featured snippets” from the May 2022 broad core update.

That means all those information pieces at the top of SERPs above the traditional listings, including highlighted paragraphs, bullets, lists, tables or videos, have seen big gains or losses.

And that’s a big deal for a lot of businesses because featured snippets deliver relatively high proportions of organic traffic.

As Gabe elaborates, sites not “seen as high quality/relevant anymore can lose featured snippets when negatively impacted by a broad core update.”

So what should you do? Check your featured snippets; you can easily track them if you’re not already with tools like Ahrefs, Semrush or Google Search Console.

If you find you’ve lost any, you’ll know where and how to improve your content quality as a result of the May 2022 broad core update.

5. The Big Kahunas: What Won the May 2022 Update

Drumroll please! *Drumroll sounds* And the big winners of the May 2022 Google broad core-algorithm update are…videos, content specialization and search-intent matching!

Okay, that’s maybe not the sexiest sentence to read out loud, so let’s parse these out.

These analyses came from Malte Landwehr, Head of SEO at idealo, the largest ecommerce publishing platform in Germany, from cross-referencing data from Semrush and SISTRIX.

With this data, we see some fairly consistent and convincing conclusions about SEO after the broad core update in three areas that could inspire amazing content ideas for your business.

The Rise of Video (Again)!

We know, we know. Digital marketers have been hailing the “rise of video” for several years now.

In fact, we have to go that far back to get to when I first heard a now-former boss of mine proclaim to the audience at an industry seminar that “videos are the future—and they’re here!”

Just look at this sample SERP in the below image. Not a lot of diversity in the metatitles for these webpages that are themselves spread out over a few years, is there?

Of course, it all seems a bit silly.

Even that now-former boss of mine was mildly embarrassed by one of my then-colleagues who made an astute reflection in response. (Don’t worry—no one got fired!)

That reflection? Video isn’t always ideal because it’s often easier to quickly scan well-organized text, such as a blog post, for specific answers to a particular query.

But the medium wouldn’t hold back! TikTok has exploded the popularity of shorts, YouTube videos are well-structured with labeled sections and video-embedding is as effective as ever.

Landweher discovered that video websites improved their online visibility by a whopping 25% after the broad core update.

The takeaway? If you’re not already complementing your written content with videos, there is a huge missed opportunity for scaling your website traffic, lead volumes and your revenue.

Nobody Likes a Know-it-All! Show Why You’re the Best in What You Know

Remember the above comment about how the broad core update hurt generalist websites more than specialist websites with a narrower scope of topics?

This observation corresponds with Landweher’s take that websites like news publishers, “known for trying to rank for everything—lost on average 4% of their Google rankings.”

So what is the take here? You try to rank for lots of things and you’ll end up ranking for nothing. Know your niche and demonstrate your expertise there. Your organic metrics will reward you.

Content Is King? More Like Context Is King!

Back in the day, it was easy to pump out semi-relevant content about any given topic and win high search-engine rankings by covering these topics with broad details.

Encyclopedia- and database-style websites (think Wikipedia copycats, online dictionaries, song-lyric & stock-photo websites and the like), were masters at this.

As Landweher describes it, such sites “contain pages for virtually any topic that seems relevant based on term frequency-inverse document frequency[to retrieve content info from an index].”

What does this mean and why is it a problem?

Term frequency-inverse document frequency looks at the relationship between keyword volume and the degree to which keywords are spread out when search engines retrieve data

These websites were leveraging this method to rank for queries despite not going in depth to match more specific intentions behind the queries.

The free ride is over, as evidenced by the below data.

Landweher notes these sites “rarely match the [user’s] search intent.”

This means that generic content about a particular topic could rank well even if it didn’t specifically address a search query, but the May 2022 update is reigning this in.

So focusing on contextual relevance in your content, deemphasizing exact keyword-matching (especially keyword-stuffing!) and providing real value for a search query is key to success.

It’s actually simple. Ask yourself honestly: does your webpage’s content provide helpful value relevant to the page’s scope and reflective of typical queries that would lead visitors there?

If so, you’ve created what’s known as “search-intent matching,” where your content closely matches the intention of the search-engine user based on their query.

Time to watch your website’s organic traffic skyrocket!

Bottom Line? Quality Content Is the Name of the Game

If there’s one thing Google’s May 2022 broad core update is teaching us, it’s that the time to raise your quality standards for website content was…yesterday!

It’s no secret that Google’s own guidelines recommend following E-A-T best practices as evidenced by the results of this update rollout.

From intense ranking volatility and impacted snippets to more attention on videos, content specialization and search-intent mapping, publishing great content is a must for online visibility.

Investing in SEO content services can empower you to leverage subject-matter expertise and efficiently publish high-quality content on your website to start boosting your traffic.

And with time, you can say goodbye to broad-core anxiety for good!

The post Google’s May 2022 Core Update: What You Need to Know appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Building a brand to attract leads online requires content—and then more content.

Search engines want fresh, relevant, high-quality content to serve users. Consumers want up-to-date content that speaks to their needs and answers their queries.

But executing a content strategy on your own can quickly drain resources because of the high quality standards it takes for content to stand out.

Ever feel like you never have time to write the kind of content that dominates Google and generates more leads? Yeah, we know the feeling….

For instance, research about content production shows it takes an average of over four hours to complete a blog post—a 67% increase from previous years.

With in-house production, you might be able to better control processes if you can stomach higher costs. Is it worth it? Should you outsource content writing or use in-house writers?

In this post, you’ll learn everything about outsourcing content writing vs. using in-house writers and how content outsourcing enables you to optimize efficiency & quality.

Balance Outsourced Content Creation and In-House Writing

Using in-house writers creates limitations you don’t face when working with outsourced content writing services.

With in-house talent, you’re limited to the skills, knowledge and time of each person. When you outsource, you can draw on diverse resources to expand the type and scale of your content.

However, every content creation project has its own requirements and goals.

There are places for both in-house and outsourced content teams. For example, companies in regulated industries may want in-house writers trained to write within compliance requirements.

Even in these cases, though, you can often pair outsourcing with in-house resources to scale up.

Outsourcing Content Writing: What You Need to Know

When you work with the right partner, outsourcing content writing helps you boost your bottom line, increase how often you publish and provide higher-quality content.

What Is Content Outsourcing?

Content outsourcing occurs when you have anyone outside your organization write or otherwise create content for you. This can include:

• Having someone come up with ideas and create outlines and plans for content
• Having people write and/or edit content for you
• Having designers create infographics or other visuals

Why Should You Outsource Content Creation?

A main reason companies outsource content creation is to save money.

Outsourcing involves paying freelancers or content services only when you need content. You’re not having to pay an all-the-time salary (plus benefits) for an in-house writer.

Consider this breakdown to help you understand how much you can save:

• If an in-house writer creates 1,000 words a day, that’s 5,000 words a week.
• Working a total of 48 weeks a year (to account for vacations, holidays and sick time), the in-house writer creates 240,000 words in a year.
• The average salary of a skilled U.S.-based content writer, including benefits and bonuses, is around $64,000 according to Glassdoor.
• With an in-house content writer, you’re paying around 26 cents per word for the content you publish.

For the same $64,000 per year, you could get more than 460,000 words of content—almost double what you’d get with an in-house writer—when you outsource content writing.

Benefits of Content Outsourcing

The benefits of outsourcing content writing go beyond the basic bottom line, though.

What are the reasons to reach outside of your organization for content writing resources?

1. Cost Efficiency
2. Scale Up Quickly
3. Increase Content Diversity
4. Support Better Quality
5. Connect With Industry Specialists

Cost Efficiency

As we already touched on, improving cost efficiency is probably the biggest benefit you get when you outsource your content creation.

In-house writers would need to speed through and really scale their output to match the cost-per-article, lest they have other content-management responsibilities.

Even then, you want your content managers to, well, manage content strategy. Generally, the more you outsource content production, the more money you save in your marketing budget.

Scale Up Quickly

When you’re outsourcing, you’re not limited to a single writer or even a few. The right content writing service opens the door to dozens or even hundreds of qualified freelancers.

You can quickly scale up content efforts without putting your business through a major recruiting push and onboarding dozens of in-house writers you may not even need all the time.

That lets companies of any size compete with larger competitors online.

Increase Content Diversity

To create quality content for SEO (the kind most likely to rank well in search results), your content needs to be useful and engaging.

That means your content is interesting and helpful to your audience.

Yet it’s easy for a single writer or small writing teams to get stuck on the same topics, rehashing them repeatedly without providing something new and interesting for the reader.

When you outsource, you increase your writing team’s diversity and their overall point of view.

That can lead to more interesting posts that people will engage with, so your content is more likely to drive leads and conversions.

Support Better Quality

Outsourcing content to freelance writers is sometimes associated with a reputation of lower quality. This can be true when trying to find freelancers on your own without a system in place.

The right outsource content writing services can offer processes for editing and quality control to ensure topic expertise, internal linking strategies and your brand voice shine through.

For optimal quality with content outsourcing, consider engaging with managed services that provide pre-vetted writers and logistics to communicate & apply your writing guidelines. 

Connect with Industry Specialists

An in-house writing team may know your brand, but their expertise is limited.

Outsourcing lets you bring subject-matter experts on board who can write or review content for accuracy and authority, ensuring your pages meet Google EAT guidelines.

Does Outsourcing Content Hurt Your SEO?

Many businesses wonder if outsourced content would hurt their search rankings and thus their ability to attract more organic leads online.

Well, outsourcing content doesn’t hurt your SEO. Google is on record saying there is no SEO penalty for having different writers as long as the quality is good.

In fact, working with external teams that know how to optimize content for SEO often improves your search-engine optimization efforts.

Freelance writers with experience in creating content tend to keep up with keyword best practices and understand how to write for a variety of audiences.

You can leverage those skills to help your pages land higher on search-engine results pages (SERPs) and generate more leads.

Using In-House Content Writers: What You Need to Know

In-house content writers also offer some benefits, such as a greater level of control over the content creation process.

Businesses keeping an eye on regulatory concerns or specific branding needs may turn to in-house talent as a first option.

But you can easily avoid quality issues and ensure branding & compliance with the right content outsourcing processes and partners.

What Is In-House Content Creation?

In-house content creation occurs when you use resources on your payroll to write or otherwise create content.

You can use people you hired for this specific purpose or people who do other jobs but may be able to write content too.

Why Do Businesses Choose In-House Content Creation?

Control is typically the main reason companies opt for in-house content writers. They can train writers to create content within specific brand guidelines, voice and compliance parameters.

The idea is that in-house content will be more publish-ready than outsourced content.

It’s true that you do have a bit more control with in-house writers. But you don’t have to sacrifice scale or savings to get the quality you want.

In many cases, the right process is a hybrid approach that leverages an in-house content manager to help maintain brand voice and freelancers to scale up to meet competitive needs.

How to Outsource Content Writing

You have two overall options when outsourcing content: working with individual freelancers or working with content writing outsource companies.

When working directly with individual freelancers, you first have to recruit them. That can involve placing ads for content writers, reviewing applications & samples and onboarding writers.

It’s a lot of work that can create delays in scaling content. Even after finding freelancers, you’re on the hook for all the communication, management and quality assurance.

Working with a content writing outsource company, you can access hundreds of qualified writers immediately to scale up quickly without the need to go through recruiting processes.

You can opt for self-serve marketplaces to work directly with pre-vetted freelancers at multiple quality levels or choose managed services to benefit from a dedicated content manager.

Whether you’re looking for bloggers, copywriters or subject-matter experts, Crowd Content has the freelance writers for hire you need to scale up, save money and improve your SEO.

The post Outsource Content Writing vs. In-House Writers: Complete Guide appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. Your company’s lead volume is stagnant but your sales reps are capped. What do you mean simply call more leads? Are you hiring another SDR?

Alas, a tale as old as time.

This is where marketing comes in. If you run mark-ops or are a content marketer tasked with feeding leads to sales, how’s it going?

Is inbound lead generation working for you or are you experiencing lots of sleepless nights?

If you want to expand your efforts or just focus on a core strategy without scatterbrain, you need to know inbound marketing, what are inbound marketing channels and how to leverage them.

So what is inbound marketing, how does it differ from outbound marketing and how can you refine tactics to make inbound marketing channels generate leads so you can hit your goals?

Outbound marketing reaches out to new leads by coming to them, whether it be through traditional advertising, outreach at tradeshows or even telemarketing.

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, attracts customers who’ve already started the buyer’s journey (even if they don’t know it yet) by drawing them in to you.

By creating different kinds of content with solutions potential leads are already looking for, you can attract and empower more people to give you more revenue.

Why is this important? Simply put, inbound marketing creates a dialogue with prospective leads. Providing valuable info via inbound marketing channels enables leads to find and evaluate you.

But how exactly does inbound marketing work? And how can you harness this powerful marketing strategy yourself?

We’ll dive into the benefits of inbound marketing, the returns you can expect and investigate the various channels of inbound marketing to take advantage of.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

At its most basic definition, inbound marketing is a strategy to help prospective customers or clients find your business.

Inbound marketing meets customers where they are and guides them towards your products or services, attracting and engaging buyers before they’re even considering making a purchase.

Customers generally start their journey by researching a query online to learn more about their given interest.

For instance, they may be researching new meal recipes, gardening tips or software solutions for their jobs but not necessarily shopping yet.

If you sell a product that aligns with their interest—say, gardening accessories or a productivity software—you can guide them towards your solution.

That’s where inbound marketing, SEO content come in. By providing meaningful and informative content to customers, you can build trust and educate leads.

With an inbound marketing strategy, you’re building visibility and rapport, bringing customers to you rather than seeking them out and selling to them directly, which is outbound marketing.

Through inbound marketing channels, including organic traffic, social media and events, businesses can create brand awareness and generate leads.

Therefore inbound marketing can be a great complement to outbound marketing to increase your revenue. So how exactly are inbound and outbound marketing channels different?

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing

While outbound marketing also creates leads and builds revenue, it aligns with more conventional marketing practices like ads, bulk-email marketing or even cold-calling.

The goal for both inbound and outbound marketing is to convert leads, but the approach between the two differs.

Outbound marketing almost acts as an interruption by proactively presenting products or services to people, regardless of whether they’re likely to make a purchase or not.

Inbound marketing instead aims to attract customers with tailored and valuable content.

Inbound lead generation answers questions or provides solutions to problems potential customers want to solve, while outbound marketing pushes out messages to create interest.

In simplest terms, outbound marketing brings your business to customers while inbound marketing brings customers to your business.

While outbound marketing still has its place in a marketing strategy, inbound marketing benefits compared to outbound marketing include cost-efficiency and the opportunity to nurture leads.

Let’s review the benefits of inbound marketing so you know when and how to leverage it to grow your customer base.

What Are the Benefits of Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a long-term strategy. Instead of going right for a sale, it’s designed to attract a lead’s attention, pique their interest and nurture them on their journey to a conversion.

While the benefits are subtle in the short term, a good inbound marketing strategy creates more brand awareness, increased revenue, reduced expenses and better customer engagement.

3 Inbound Marketing Benefits

1. More Brand Awareness
2. Higher Quality Leads and Increased Engagement
3. Efficient Marketing Budget

1. More Brand Awareness

Most consumers start their buyer’s journey by researching online.

With an effective SEO strategy and content that satisfies the queries of prospective customers, you can rank near the top of a search engine for instance and answer their question.

Or you attract their attention by educating them on something they didn’t know that would benefit them or solve a pain point.

This is an example of how inbound marketing generates online sales leads. When customers start their journey, your brand can show up and answer their questions first.

2. Higher Quality Leads and Increased Engagement

Customers expect tailored and individualized experiences. But only 60% of customers think companies provide good marketing personalization.

Inbound marketing can help connect to more potential customers in a personalized way.

When you understand where customers are in their journey and strategize your inbound marketing to their needs, leads are more likely to engage with your brand in meaningful ways.

Writing content with emotional messaging to exhibit empathy with your audience’s pain points is an example of how to grow your business using content marketing.

It connects with your audience on that personal level and translates to better inbound lead generation and higher customer conversion rates.

3. Efficient Marketing Budget

Since inbound marketing focuses on bringing qualified leads to your business, it’s less costly than outbound marketing.

With an effective inbound marketing effort, you can use a relatively small marketing team to make the most of your budget.

By pushing great content through various channels, the results of your efforts will compound rather than diminish over time.

With SEO practices and engaging content, your content will continue to grow and generate more leads, which means more revenue to feed back into your business and marketing budget.

How to Create an Inbound Marketing Strategy

Creating an inbound marketing strategy takes more than throwing money into various channels.

Pro marketing teams consider what channels they should prioritize and how to best facilitate lead generation according to their business needs.

Here are six tactics to create an inbound marketing strategy:

1. Define Buyer Personas
2. Identify Marketing Triggers
3. Determine Keywords and SEO Strategy
4. Establish Marketing Goals
5. Outline Content Strategy and Structure
6. Analyze, Revisit and Optimize Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

1. Define Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your brand’s ideal customers. A single brand might have numerous buyer personas, each with different interests, priorities and goals.

Some elements to include in a buyer persona to ensure your inbound marketing strategy is effective include interests, challenges, goals and frustrations.

Importantly—and this is key for your marketing collateral to hit the mark—map your solution’s benefits to your personas’ anxieties and pain points to attract more leads.

Understanding and defining your brand’s buyer personas helps you better understand whom you’re marketing to. The better you understand your buyer personas, the better equipped you are to create content that resonates with customers.

2. Identify Marketing Triggers

Events, circumstances or pain points that cause customers to search for information about your product or industry are known formally as marketing triggers.

An example would be an anxiety we referred to above when talking about defining buyer personas.

For instance, maybe you sell marketing software to business owners who’re anxious about their busy calendars. That’s a classic trigger for the selling point of “saving time.”

Trigger-based marketing also meets customers at their point in the buyer’s journey, responding to certain actions with specific solutions rather than broad and arbitrary advertising.

Other triggers could include website or email activity, letting you know if your lead is still learning about your solution or is further along, looking at product features.

3. Determine Keywords and SEO Strategy

Once you understand your buyer personas and what causes potential customers to engage with your content, you’ll need to know how you’ll get that content in front of them.

Keyword research is an integral part of an inbound marketing strategy because it enables you to identify the questions and pain points your target audience has when researching online.

Leverage this information to optimize your SEO strategy and design your content calendars to make your content discoverable so more leads can find you.

A good example of improving your inbound marketing with SEO is to investigate common topics your audience researches from keyword research and to create topic clusters.

By focusing on and linking between a few core, common topics, you demonstrate authority and expertise to people and search engines alike on info your target audience will find valuable.

4. Establish Marketing Goals

Set inbound marketing goals by identifying what you want to accomplish by a certain time. Consider traffic metrics, conversion rates and lead sources to start planning marketing goals.

Once you know what to focus on, you can scale up from there. For example, maybe it’s better to start driving brand awareness and improving SEO before tackling goals about customer loyalty.

But whether you’re creating short-term or building towards more long-term inbound marketing goals, you’ll need strong content. 

5. Outline Content Strategy and Structure

Impactful content in various formats enables you to accomplish your marketing goals because content is how leads find you and it’s what they engage with when you’re nurturing them.

So content marketing goals are a necessary subset of inbound marketing goals, but how do you create great content goals for inbound marketing?

Basic keyword research will help you design content topics that align with your audience’s interests to grab their attention and provide value.

You also need to understand your audience’s pain points, emotional triggers, needs and wants to compel them, nurture them properly and generate inbound conversions.

If you’re a B2B content marketer, for instance, a great tip for creating B2B content marketing goals is to map your content to the buyer’s journey.

That means optimizing different types of content for each of the stages your leads are in and distributing that content accordingly.

Inbound marketing leads typically fall into three stages:

• Awareness. Leads look for general information about a topic and you’ll want them to discover your brand with content that they find valuable
• Evaluation. Leads discover more about your brand & services and gradually engage with more content about benefits or features so you can move them closer to a sale.
• Buying. Leads more strongly consider what your company can offer and interact with bottom-of-funnel content specifically about your product, services or buying process.

By creating content that responds to the separate lead stages, you can meet customers where they’re at in the buying journey and better personalize each experience.

ROI of Inbound Marketing

When designing a strategy to kickstart your inbound lead generation, you also need to focus on achieving and measuring a return-on-investment (ROI).

Not every inbound marketing channel is conducive to precise measurements and specific quantifiable metrics.

But creating a baseline, even if it’s based on estimates, is a great start to help with forecasting and finetuning your strategy decisions.

How Cost-Effective is Inbound Marketing?

Compared to outbound marketing, inbound marketing is cost-effective: small businesses see an average cost-per-lead savings of 64% and medium-sized companies enjoy a 68% reduction.

That’s partly because you’re not exhausting extra expenditure to deliver your message to potential customers, using content to instead let them find and evaluate you.

Therefore, it’s worth it to build an infrastructure to measure your inbound marketing ROI.

When you can bring tangible profitability estimates to your decision-makers that demonstrate this cost-effectiveness, you can access more resources you need to hit your goals.

What Is the ROI of Inbound Marketing?

It’ll take time to see how your content connects customers to your brand and generates leads.

Search engines gradually crawl and index content, rewarding high rankings to content that’s regularly optimized to  answer users’ questions.

Keep in mind that content can have a lasting impact. Performance often compounds over time as you build an authoritative domain through more strong content properly interlinked.

The bottom line for inbound marketing ROI comes down to how much you’re spending to convert leads into sales.

For example, say you spend $3,000 on content that results in six sales at $3,500 each. That’s $21,000 in revenue at an average cost of $500 per sale.

But this breakdown is often too simplistic. The formula is looking at total investments; content is one piece of a puzzle that leads to a sale.

So how do you build a system to take a properly holistic view at measuring inbound marketing ROI?

How to Measure Inbound Marketing ROI

Instead, build a system on an attribution model that weighs channels and content collateral by various touchpoints.

Strong inbound marketing measurement maps content to revenue-related conversion events.

For example, an analytics tool can connect a touchpoint on a blog post or an email campaign to an event like a demo signup, a trial request, a newsletter subscription and more.

Manual solutions could involve UTM parameters for inbound marketing ROI on conversion links and then tying the data in a spreadsheet to revenue metrics from a sales software.

With a comprehensive approach, you can cross-reference revenue with other metrics like social media engagement or email signups to get a full picture of your inbound marketing strategy.

So how does this all add up to generating more inbound marketing leads? We know what goes into a successful strategy and measuring ROI, but what are the channels of inbound marketing?

We’re going to shift into looking at the most common inbound marketing channels and how to use them so you can level up your content game and scale lead generation for your business.

What Are Inbound Marketing Channels?

An inbound marketing channel is a scoped set of resources and tools to deliver content from a company to your audience. In other words, how content goes from production to consumption.

Inbound marketing channels comprise the various ways businesses connect with their audience via content, from discoverability online to nurturing leads through emails or social media.

Knowing which inbound marketing channels to focus on and how to leverage them helps leverage ways to generate online sales leads with inbound marketing, so let’s dive in!

7 Important Inbound Marketing Channels

1. Organic Traffic
2. Social Media
3. Paid Advertising
4. Events
5. Podcasts
6. Referral Marketing
7. Website Resources

1. Organic Traffic

Organic inbound marketing is the most common and generally the most important channel available. It refers to website traffic of users who find you “organically” via a search engine.

Your company’s website is the main hub connecting your services to customers. Blog posts and services pages can generate organic traffic with the right content marketing and SEO strategy.

When potential leads look for info, your brand can educate them about the topic to build trust or provide value by highlighting benefits related to their query.

This is what makes your website discoverable on search engines to generate organic traffic and more prospective customers to your website.

Tailor your website’s content to your buyer personas and study the keywords and phrases that can guide people to your website.

Generate content for all stages of the funnel too. For example, top-of-funnel pages specifically target leads in the awareness stage by discussing content similar to your business categories.

If you sell workout equipment online, for instance, building content topics around workout routines and bodybuilding advice is a great way to target top-of-funnel leads.

It’s also important to know how to optimize content for SEO. Common tactics include keyword research, focusing on quality and ensuring you demonstrate expertise, authority and trust (E-A-T).

If you don’t pay attention to keywords and an SEO strategy, it might not matter how much high-quality content you produce.

If content doesn’t match users’ search intentions, search engines won’t rank your content and your website might not get the traffic it deserves.

2. Social Media

Why is social media an important part of inbound marketing?

Social media is a fast-growing channel for inbound marketing, and for good reason. A unique benefit to social media for inbound marketing is the ability to foster relationships with customers.

Social media content establishes a meaningful relationship between customers and businesses and facilitates two-way conversations.

With platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more, you can engage directly with customers, gaining insights into what they need from products and services.

What are ways to use social media as an inbound marketing channel?

Provide valuable threads on LinkedIn and Twitter to show your expertise or create a Facebook community for customers to demonstrate your commitment to customer experience.

There are also ways for how social media helps SEO.

For example, you can gain backlinks through viral posts when you amplify your content to people who can share your links on their websites.

Search algorithms will view such shares as a sign of credibility, enhancing your search rankings. Your social profile pages themselves can also rank for relevant keywords.

3. Paid Advertising

Advertising is often considered an outbound tactic, but it can be useful for inbound marketing strategies too.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on platforms like Google Ads allows you to target specific buyer personas by criteria like demographics, location and previous touchpoints on your website.

You can further customize your targeting by controlling when and where your content or ads appear.

This level of personalization enables you to hone in on potential leads already looking for info that you can provide. And ads are a proven tool to nurture inbound leads already in your funnel.

It’s also easy to attribute PPC inbound marketing to conversion events and revenue metrics. These analytics are handy for measuring and optimizing the success of your content strategy.

Although PPC can be costly, you only pay for each click you get.

Costs also differ per platform. LinkedIn tends to have higher click costs than Facebook or Google, but the lead quality tends to be stronger too since it targets business professionals.

And if you’re a local business that provides a home service, you can qualify for Google Local Services Ads.

One reason why this type of advertising is great for small business owners is that Local Services Ads charge per lead instead of per click, so you only pay for qualified leads, no junk. 

4. Events

Events are another example of a marketing channel that appear outbound, but they overlap with inbound techniques to a large degree.

Popup events associated with experiential marketing closely resemble outbound marketing, but participating in conferences and sponsoring events is all about attracting leads to your brand.

Why is event marketing an integral channel for inbound marketing? Because event marketing involves multiple touchpoints to educate and nurture leads like other inbound channels.

Setting up a booth at an event to entice passersby with a solution to their problem isn’t much different from blogging about that solution to entice search-engine users with the same problem.

And when booth attendees sign up for a demo or request more info, this should place them in a sequence with collateral like emails and ads, with unique landing pages about the event.

Once you get more digital assets involved, like QR codes, you can also initiate attribution tracking to measure event ROI too!

The key is how you are leveraging events to enable potential leads to find you and intrigue them with your hook. From there, educate them with materials also used for other inbound channels.

5. Podcasts

Podcasts are increasingly prevalent among even small- and medium-sized businesses as an inbound marketing channel.

Podcast inbound marketing is effective because it helps you cement your brand by giving your company an opportunity to develop and show off your personality.

Another positive for podcasts is that podcast listeners actively engage with brands. Podcasts compel people to listen attentively, so they’ll likely become a fan of your brand personality.

Also, podcasts are an additional avenue for you to establish your expertise.

For example, if you’re an SEO agency that sells digital marketing services, starting a podcast to share SEO tips would build trust with prospective customers, showing them you know your stuff.

And podcasts are hugely popular with consumers.

The most recent year-over-year data shows the percentage of adults who regularly listen to podcasts jumped from 37% to 41%.

If that increase looks unimpressive, consider it was at 32% the previous year and is expected to hit 47% within the next year. That’s a consistent annual growth rate of over 10%.

But starting a podcast can be intimidating and time-consuming for first-timers. Plus, with more podcasts constantly popping up, it can be difficult to stand out in a saturated market.

Make sure to research podcasting tips for beginners so you feel comfortable getting started.

For instance, find the right equipment and figure out how to plan the scope of your podcast episodes.

Returning to the SEO-agency example, the SEO-podcast space is a competitive market. Maybe you mostly cater to local businesses, so you can establish a niche around tips for “local SEO.”

6. Referral Marketing

Referral marketing can produce a high volume of quality leads for lower costs than other inbound marketing channels.

That’s because you’re leveraging the reputation of other brands potential customers already know and trust.

By tapping into businesses and social circles around you, you can broaden your reach, get leads recommended from partner companies and find influential people to vouch for you.

Broadly speaking, this is what referral marketing is: it encapsulates anything that involves other people or companies bringing prospective customers to you.

Examples include customer referrals, influencer marketing with social media heavyweights or partnership marketing with companies that aren’t competitors but target the same audience.

One of the easiest ways to begin a referral program is to harness your existing customer base.

Provide your existing customers with a unique coupon code to share with a friend. They’ll likely spread the word if there’s a benefit for them, like a discount for each new referral.

The beauty here is that you only need to pay out rewards once the new customer actually makes a purchase, so you’ll still see revenue growth that’s profitable.

Influencer marketing uses endorsements and mentions from social media users with large followings, otherwise known as influencers.

With established trust from their followers, influencers can generate traffic to your business by recommending your products and services to their followers.

While influencer marketing is a lucrative inbound marketing channel, managing the shifting trends and demographics can be challenging.

Different demographics have their own aesthetic preferences, meaning you might not reach your ideal buyer persona if you don’t partner with the right influencer.

It doesn’t need to be as complex as paying a celebrity a lot of money to publish an ingenuine tweet about your product.

Find people your target audience respect, perhaps experts in their field, and engage them in a dialogue to see how you could help each other out.

If you sell products online, for instance, a great way to work with influencers is with ecommerce influencer marketing.

Find influencers who are right for your brand. If you sell makeup online, why not partner with popular YouTubers who give makeup tutorials?

When you partner with another business to refer customers between each other, that’s called partnership marketing.

For example, Apple and Mastercard came together to integrate Mastercard into Apple Pay when it was first introduced.

This made the Apple Pay app viable but also boosted Mastercard’s image as a forward-thinking leader in the payments space.

You don’t even need to create an integrated product line with another company.

If you sell accounting software, you can simply build an interdependent referral program with another company that targets accountants with a different type of software.

If you choose to partner with another company, make sure you’ll be reaching new customers and the relationship is truly a win-win.

7. Website Resources

In addition to blog posts and social media content, for instance, it’s important to create other pieces of inbound marketing content to nurture leads at all stages of the funnel.

For instance, once leads find you, they’ll want to learn more about your specific product category. This is known as middle-of-funnel marketing.

Content optimized for the top of the funnel answers users’ queries about their pain points and needs before they even know about what your product is or does.

But then after they find your brand, they’ll then want to learn more about how a solution like yours works.

As we mentioned previously, blog posts can represent “top of the funnel” marketing, drawing users to your site from search engines.

Informational resources like podcasts and webinars target customers in the evaluation stage—the middle of the sales funnel.

Ebooks and white papers provide in-depth educational content beyond that of the average blog post. You should reserve these resources for your most sophisticated content.

They take more time and funds to produce, but they’re necessary to win sales when you have a more complex buying cycle.

And for leads who already know what they’re looking for at a high level, these resources can be perfect as an initial touchpoint.

Since potential customers often find them more valuable than top-of-funnel content, they’ll more likely give their contact information so you can follow up with—and close them—later on.

Harness Inbound Marketing Channels for More Leads

Inbound marketing is an impactful tool that strategically connects businesses and customers.

By using channels like blogs, social media and referral marketing, you can target customers at their individual stages in the buyer’s journey.

This results in improved brand awareness and preference, ultimately leading to greater lead generation and conversion rates over time.

To create an effective inbound marketing strategy, you’ll need more than a few blog posts. At the heart of every inbound marketing strategy is quality content.

With content writing services, you can cost-effectively generate the content needed to leverage inbound marketing at scale and attract more leads to your brand to grow your business.

The post 7 Inbound Marketing Channels to Generate More Leads appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Developing B2B content marketing goals is critical to attract new customers and grow your revenue.

But strategizing a content plan can seem daunting for a B2B content marketer. Content yields high returns, but without a roadmap, your efforts will be for naught.

Say your boss wants to scale your company’s content and see more results. But your blog does nothing, nobody downloads your ebooks and your conversion rates are underwhelming.

So how can you achieve results for your B2B brand? You can’t exactly assume that doing much of the same will improve the situation.

You need to set content marketing objectives with direction and purpose.

This is why it’s important to define content marketing goals. You connect content marketing to company growth goals to build revenue.

B2B content marketing goals clarify business goals focused on lead generation to help you produce that extra revenue and hit targets.

And content marketing is a perfect fit! Content marketing delivers 3x more leads than outbound sales and B2B companies increase lead volume by 67% when they blog regularly.

When you define content marketing goals, you generate brand awareness, improve SEO, educate leads, foster customer retention and drive revenue.

This guide outlines B2B content marketing goals, explains what makes great content and lists example goals to help you win at content.

Now you can create a content marketing plan that actually works, so let’s dive in!

Developing a Strategy for Your Content Marketing Goals

What makes great content marketing strategy goals? A strong content marketing strategy relies upon quality content designed with purpose.

Defining content goals for quality and relevance is the best way to align content marketing with company revenue goals.

But let’s be honest. It’s almost impossible to determine revenue produced by content marketing with precision.

Bottom-of-funnel content about buyer concerns or product fit might work for last-touch attribution.

Though most content delivers organic traffic and introduces your brand to potential leads. At this stage, people are still learning.

Your content needs to educate and nurture. Along with a strong brand story and a great user experience, your content functions as part of a holistic whole to move leads down the funnel.

An optimal B2B content strategy thus emphasizes quality and relevance.

About 47% of potential B2B buyers engage with 3–5 pieces of your content before purchasing—and a sizable chunk with more than five!.

Focusing on quality, value-driven content makes your content discoverable and engaging for leads. This is how to align content goals with revenue goals (and make your bosses happy!).

So, how to define, produce and leverage high-quality content?

What Makes Great B2B Content?

Great B2B content provides relevant value to your audience, answers questions, and forms part of a strategy that scales your business.

There are four steps for how to grow your business using content marketing and make B2B content work for you:

1. Planning content. The days of designing blog posts one at a time based on generic keywords are gone. Cluster content around relevant topics for your audience to signal your expertise in certain fields.
2. Developing content. Set brand standards to ensure content is well-researched, succinct yet still comprehensive, simple to digest and connects with your target audience. Play around with different formats to see what moves the needle.
3. Distributing and amplifying content. Never “set it and forget it” after publishing. B2B content is only great with an audience, and a relevant one too. Create a marketing flywheel for content around a distribution and amplification plan.
4. Restrategize content. Customer expectations will develop over time and your competitors will adapt. Don’t be afraid to regularly revisit content clusters, guidelines and influencers to keep things fresh.

With a holistic strategy in place, you can then hone in on crafting content quality itself during the production stage.

How to Create Quality B2B Content

The goals of content marketing rely on relevant blog posts and touchpoints for leads to find you, gain interest and become customers.

Focus on Storytelling

Just because you sell to businesses doesn’t mean your content should be boring and esoteric.

Guide readers through a journey connected to the heart of your company; narratives humanize brands and are key for conversions.

Develop Smart Buyer Personas

Create content that speaks to your buyer personas. A buyer persona is a fictional character who represents part of your audience.

But avoid defining personas around generic characteristics. A common trap is that buyer personas are often based on stereotypes, thus deflating their value.

Instead, focus on needs, not useless demographic information. Two people with similar backgrounds, equal amounts of wealth and of the same age could differ a lot.

For example, Kazoo designs content around buyer types and needs. They focus on categories like challenges, industries and solutions.

Format Content Like a Pro

Giant walls of text put off most readers.

Before you publish a piece of B2B content, make sure it’s easy to read. Bolded headings, bulleted lists and other formatting elements make it easy to digest content.

For example, concentrate on brevity. Short headers generate 36% more organic traffic than longer ones.

Map the Buyer’s Journey

The buyer’s journey is the path a potential customer follows when evaluating your products or services.

If you publish content only relevant to leads in one stage of the journey, you can’t connect with them as their intents change at different stages.

Map out the journey stages to different pieces of content, inclusive of destination pages with targeted conversion points.

Goals of Content Marketing

We’ve overviewed the importance of devising a content strategy aligned with revenue goals that focuses on quality and relevance to target leads based on their needs.

Part of this process involves understanding the steps needed to develop great content that actually works and what goes into creating & leveraging quality content.

Content marketing goals guide these principles that enable you to succeed and provide a roadmap towards that success.

If this seems overwhelming, start with the end in mind. Once you know where you’re going, you can determine the best way to get there.

Let’s take a look at content marketing goals to consider—and why.

5 Example B2B Content Marketing Goals

1. Drive Brand Awareness
2. Improve SEO
3. Educate Prospective Buyers
4. Impact Revenue Metrics
5. Foster Customer Loyalty & Revenue Retention

1. Drive Brand Awareness

Before your content can help qualify leads or convert qualified leads into customers, it has to generate leads.

Content is especially valuable in driving brand awareness. Since increasing brand awareness is the top priority of half of all B2B marketers, it should be a go-to content marketing goal.

Design top-of-funnel content that speaks to buyers’ aspirations and pain points. This will make you discoverable as they look for ideas before they even know what solutions they need.

Gong executes a great example of this content marketing goal.

They created the content category “Revenue Intelligence” for information about improving company revenue and to establish themselves as experts in their field.

And as an added bonus, they doubled-down on this brand-awareness campaign by highlighting the category in their metadata!

2. Improve SEO

One of the most vital content marketing goals is to improve SEO and deliver more organic traffic to your website.

This goal should drive your content marketing because of how effectively content contributes to SEO.

Engage in best practices for article writing SEO by targeting keywords and search queries your audience might find interesting with researched and well-written posts.

And go after interactive elements on SERPs (search-engine results pages) to augment this approach.

For example, HubSpot are masters at capturing featured snippets with their content marketing.

They execute a structured system within their content to answer queries their target audience would search on Google.

HubSpot leverages typical questions their potential customers might ask for more organic traffic.

Then they implement SEO tactics, such as in the below HTML, to signal to search engines that this type of content is worthy for exposure. Genius!

3. Educate Prospective Buyers

Leveraging content to educate people about the possibilities of how they can improve at their jobs and hit their metrics is one of the most impactful content marketing goals to strive for.

When possible buyers have pain points, they’ll seek out information to fix their problems.

By educating them on solutions, you’ll build trust and cement your expertise to encourage them to buy.

Let’s say you struggle to optimize your productivity because of an insufficient tech stack. None of your tools integrate with each other and it eats up hours each week.

Enter Zapier. They produce B2B content about “productivity tips” complemented on their blog with a dedicated CTA for a newsletter signup.

Makes sense. Increased productivity for B2B buyers is at the heart of their messaging since it’s a core benefit of their offerings.

In the above example, they don’t merely point out the integration they offer with Google Calendar; they lead with the educational message about how to better manage your day.

This content reinforces their reputation as leaders in the productivity space as they educate potential buyers about solutions they didn’t even know existed.

4. Impact Revenue Metrics

Earlier we mentioned how it’s almost impossible to attribute revenue to your content marketing. This is especially true with top-of-funnel content like blog posts.

But it’s simpler with middle- or bottom-funnel marketing content for specific, short-tail queries that address immediate pains.

Besides, the overarching purpose of B2B content marketing goals is to align with wider revenue goals. Well-executed content serves this purpose.

If you’re doing well and ready to start scaling, hone in on content that leads to shorter turnaround times for converting leads to paying customers.

Again, Zapier provides an exemplary case study here.

Their “insane SEO strategy” involves content pieces spread out across many webpages and elements targeting prospective leads looking for specific solutions.

Think about it. You’re a prospective lead who encounters a gap in one of your daily workflows. Your stack is insufficient and your tech team feels capped—they can’t help you.

So you search for potential ways to solve the problem yourself. You need to send emails as Slack messages.

Behold Zapier, with three webpages, one about Gmail, one about Slack and one about the solution.

It’s dedicated content designed to spur direct revenue—and it works!

5. Foster Customer Loyalty and Revenue Retention

Nurturing customer loyalty for better retention rates is an underrated goal of content marketing.

How can you achieve this goal?

Create content marketing campaigns around information that helps both new and existing customers.

When you provide curated and expert content for your base, they’ll value your services more and stick around.

One B2B organization that does well at this goal with their content marketing is the accounting company Bench.

They produce content every tax season on a dedicated website hub about advice and resources for filing business tax returns.

They reinforce their expertise and reward clients with content full of tangible benefits. This tactic also provides upsell opportunities and delights website visitors with great content.

This is a winning formula for B2B content marketing. It inspires loyalty and spurs business growth!

Get Amazing Content to Hit Your B2B Content Goals

Setting B2B content marketing goals provides a roadmap to develop and put your content strategy in place.

When you know what to achieve with content goals, you’ll attract & educate leads, create brand awareness, drive organic traffic and increase retention rates.

But none of this matters without quality and relevance for your target audience. To achieve results, you need quality content you can produce at scale.

Crowd Content’s content writing services save you time and deliver expertly written B2B content so you never have to write again.

No matter what stage of the buyer journey you’re targeting, you can tackle your B2B content marketing goals with confidence.

The post How to Create B2B Content Marketing Goals With 5 Examples appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.