While your written content can be top-notch (and our professional content writing services can help), if your page isn’t visually catching, they may not engage your visitors as you’d like.

Here are four free tools you can use to create attention-grabbing pieces to bolster your content marketing campaigns:

GoogleFonts

How your words look impact how they feel. The spacing between each letter, the thickness of the lines and even how legible the actual words are all work to communicate a particular sentiment to your audience. Fonts give your content personality.

Free open-source font libraries such as GoogleFonts let you choose the right personality for your content, giving your words a virtual ‘face’ for your online readers.

Piktochart Infographics

Want to quickly convey complex concepts, boring statistics or detailed chronological information? Create an infographic.

Infographics may look complicated, but with a free online creator tool such as Piktochart, anyone with basic web savvy can craft their very own customized visual content marketing resources using one of the more than 400 free premade full-color templates.

[ctt template=”4″ link=”wC04Q” via=”yes” nofollow=”yes”]When it comes to making a first impression, appearances matter. Check out these four tools to create eye-catching content.[/ctt]

Biteable Explainer Videos

Explainer videos are big – everyone from Fortune 500 companies to sole-proprietor startups use the power of moving pictures to supplement their content marketing resources.

Thankfully, free online video creation tools such as Biteable, make it easy for anyone to get in on the video-creation craze.

With big-name clients like Yahoo!, Drupal and KPMG, Biteable lets anyone make a watermarked video for free (non-watermarked, HD versions cost around $100 each).

Related: Colors Are Crucial in Making Your Site Fresh and Vivid

Picasion GIF Maker

Get in on the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) craze by creating your very own animated GIF with one of the many free online tools. We like the easy-to-use Picasion service, which lets you quickly craft attention-grabbing animated avatars and images.

Want more insider tips on maximizing your content marketing resources? Explore our blog, where you’ll always find the latest in content marketing techniques and trends.

Save

The post 4 Free Visual Content Marketing Tools for Eye-Catching Content appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Effective content marketing is all about attracting new customers, and engaging with your exisiting audience- without pitching and selling.

Here’s steps you can take to increase the return on investment from your SEO content with your own content strategy:

1. Identify Your Target Market

The first step in any marketing campaign is identifying your audience – since content marketing is essentially an ongoing, subtle promotional technique, it’s important to target the right customers. Develop a persona of your ‘ideal’ audience member, and create your content with that person in mind.

2. Focus On Solutions

What value are you adding to your audience with your content? Online users are looking for solutions (sometimes for problems they don’t even know they have) – whether that be a cure from their mid-day boredom or advice on how to repair something, think about why your content is appealing to your readers.

3. Plan For The Long Run

Content marketing is more than a one-time email blast or a few blog posts – it’s a long-term strategy to promote your brand and engage your customers. Aim to make your content ‘evergreen’ and relevent to your audience both now and in the future.

4. Set A Schedule

Content marketing requires ongoing attention through interaction with social media feeds, response to current trends and seasonal promotions. Many content marketing newbies tend to front-load their websites and blogs with a ton of great content, only to loose interest a few months down the line – this leaves the audience with the impression that either the business has folded, or the owner just doesn’t care anymore.

Keep track of your SEO content distribution with a schedule – that way, you’ll keep your audience engaged with a steady stream of fresh, relevant SEO content that encourages repeat visits to your website, blog or social media feed.

5. Get Help From The Pros

Many content marketing hopefuls fall flat when it comes to actually developing their content – that’s where professional SEO content writers can help out.

The post 5 Essential Steps to Building an Effective Content Strategy appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Finding them can be tough, however. And once you find them, making sure you get the right message to them is even more difficult. But it’s a crucial step in growing your business. With the right target market strategies, discovering your target audience and crafting a message that resonates with them is considerably easier.

Whether you’re just getting started or looking for ways to fine-tune your approach, read on for some tried-and-true strategies for reaching the right people.

What Is a Target Market?

In the simplest terms, a target market is exactly what it sounds like: a specific segment of consumers a brand targets with its marketing efforts.

The complicated definition is that a target market is a subset of consumers a business identifies through a series of strategies and then focuses its messaging and marketing efforts on to attract. These strategies are meant to focus marketing efforts on the people most likely to engage and purchase the brand’s products and services.

Most people are familiar with the concept of demographics, which involves statistical data related to particular groups of the population. This data usually covers things like:

• Age
• Income level
• Ethnicity
• Gender

These demographics can play an important part in defining your target market. If you target people without the means to buy your products or services, for example, your efforts will be in vain. Likewise, if you’re focused on a wide audience that encompasses all genders when your company sells a gender-specific product, you’re wasting much of your marketing spend.

But demographics are only a small part of what defines your target market. And in some cases, they may not be relevant at all. For example, people of all genders and ethnicities need everyday household products like paper towels. Don’t pigeonhole your brand by targeting only one age group, income level, ethnicity or gender unless it’s truly relevant.

So, demographics are the starting point. Now we need to understand our customer on an even deeper level. That’s where customer personas come in.

What Is a Customer Persona?

A customer persona is a fictional representation of real customers. While an individual persona is a work of fiction, it’s created based on data and a close study of actual buyers.

In short, a customer persona is an amalgamation of your “typical” customers.

In addition to specific demographic info, a customer persona usually includes:

• A name, age and location
• Marital and parental status
• Personal characteristics
• Job title and career aspirations
• Hobbies and interests
• Needs, desires, goals and aspirations
• Buying and spending habits
• Behaviors, habits and pain points associated with your products and services

This is generally considered the minimum amount of information. Many brands go into much greater detail defining their customer personas.

Some brands develop one or two personas; others create several to help define their target market. While demographics are statistics of wider groups of consumers, personas are much more specific. Your target market falls within demographic markets and represents the wider characteristics of your personas.

Why Having a Target Market Is Important

Advertisements that reach the general public may not offer as many leads or sales as those tailored to a target market. Identifying a target market lets marketers concentrate on those most likely to buy the product.

While it may be time-consuming to set up, defining a target market allows you to direct your marketing efforts in the most cost-effective manner possible. Start by making clear what your product or service is and who it’s meant for.

It’s absolutely critical to understand how customer requirements differ — that’s why it’s one of the first things every small business should do in the early stages.

Once you’ve found a target market, you can create messaging tailored to it. The goal is to entice the right individuals to engage with your brand. Requirements across demographics and markets are very distinct, so you need messaging aimed at the people most likely to want your product or service.

Reaching the Right Audience

Consider the target audience after you’ve chosen a target market. Many times, the consumer of your product is not identical to the end user. Make sure your message is modified for the person doing the buying.

For example, if you make products for residents of an assisted living facility, you’ll probably want to target the purchasing managers who work at these facilities, not the residents themselves.

Identifying Underserved or Emerging Markets

Instead of attempting to appeal to every potential customer, focusing a marketing campaign on a smaller and perhaps unaddressed portion of the overall market may allow you to establish a distinct niche for your product. A small firm may have a better grasp on a certain customer group than its larger rivals.

Once you’ve defined your target market, media purchases become a lot simpler. Using a target market strategy will save you money while also providing a greater return on investment, and media buys will be more efficient. And the number of people who are unlikely to buy your product is greatly reduced, too.

And now for the fun part: the strategies used for finding your target market.

Developing Your Target Market Strategies

At this point, finding your target market might seem fairly complicated. But with the right strategies, you can start narrowing down the people in your market and get the most bang for your marketing buck.

Before diving into strategy, ask yourself these questions to set the stage for what’s to come:

1. Who are the people in your target market?

Start by looking at the people who identify with your brand. Your existing customers are great examples and definitely qualify as your audience. If they bought from you once, they’re likely to do so again.

2. What are their biggest pain points, problems, needs and desires?

You need to understand what your target market deals with and what they want to accomplish. Consider their pain points with products or services offered by your competitors. Think about what they want and what they’re trying to accomplish. Most importantly, ask yourself how your brand’s offerings solve these problems better than the competition.

3. Where do these people get their information from?

You also need to understand what drives your audience’s decisions — in other words, where they get their information from. Do they follow social media, or do they search the web and respond to authoritative blogs? This tells you the channels you’ll need to target and also demonstrate the kind of language and tone that resonate with them.

4. What benefits do your products and services offer?

Lastly, you need to clearly understand the benefits you provide your target market — what your target market finds value in. Benefits are almost entirely subjective, so you need to get inside the heads of your audience and understand how your product helps them.

Now let’s discover and define your target market.

Target Market Research

While learning about a large group of individuals may appear intimidating, there are plenty of free or low-cost methods for smaller businesses and brands.

Ask Your Existing Customers

Customer surveys provide you with broad information about people who enjoy your product, such as initial demographic data, other products they use or media they consume. Try sending out a quick survey to your email list and offer a small discount in return. (You may end up gathering valuable data and making a sale at the same time!) Keep surveys general, but include space for respondents to share more details if they wish. At the end, include a section where customers can opt in to a second, in-depth interview.

One-on-one interviews offer richer data on individual consumers’ experiences that will help you understand why your consumers connect with your business.

Set a specific aim for your interview, just like you did with your consumer survey.

Open-ended questions are preferable to closed-ended ones. They simply provide better answers. For example, a question like “Tell me how you like to use our product” will get more information from a client than “Do you think our product is useful?”

Consider your audience’s perspective. A consumer may express dissatisfaction with your product — and that’s fine. In fact, these comments will help you determine how to make your product better.

Then, end with a tried-and-true journalistic technique: Ask something like, “Would you want to add anything else I haven’t inquired about during this interview?”

Take a Look at Your Existing Customer Data

Practices you already have in place and tools you already use are veritable treasure troves of customer data. Analyzing this data can inform you of your target market’s biggest pain points and most burning questions. With 40% of brands expanding their data-driven marketing budgets, if you aren’t using it, you’re handing your future customers to your competitors on a silver platter.

Some excellent starting points for customer data include:

• A customer relationship management platform
• Order history
• Customer reviews on other platforms
• Information from a mailing list

Even simple invoices give you clues as to how your market interacts with your brand. Thoroughly review them to discover the target markets lurking within and what they want.

Leverage the Platforms You Already Use

Another great way to unearth valuable target market data is by looking at the information in existing tools. If you’re a business owner, there’s a good chance you have some tools in place to track your progress and performance.

For example, if you use Google Analytics (and you definitely should) to track your website’s traffic, you can easily segment that data by things like location, behaviour and interests. This information can help you understand your visitors in terms of location, gender, age and even hobbies and interests. Depending on the amount of traffic you receive, you may see a lot of people in one specific group who frequent your site. This is an excellent starting point for defining a target market.

Most social networks also collect demographic information about your fans. These social media demographics include audience ages, genders and locations. You can use this information to help refine your target market or even find new markets to explore.

If you run ads on social media, you can link your customer information to the social network’s database. Using algorithms, the social network can construct a “lookalike” audience similar to your current customer base. You might learn that people who buy your products have a shared affinity or trait you never expected.

In addition to the data that’s available on social networks, don’t forget to actually listen to what your fans are saying.

The practice of monitoring for keyword mentions on social media or the internet is known as social listening. These keywords are often related to your business or sector, particularly your brand name. You can use specialized social media management tools to do this or simply search for the terms on each network.

Pay close attention to certain keywords, such as:

• Your brand’s name
• The names of your competitors
• Mentions of original product names or services you offer
• Any mentions of your industry or niche

Look for key themes and pain spots that your audience members discuss as you monitor what they say about these issues. Are there any new demands in your field that your potential consumers are calling for? What do they admire or criticize?

Pay Close Attention to Your Existing Content

Dig into your blog’s analytics to discover which themes and methods work best with your target audience. While page views and bounce rates are useful, content analytics provide even more valuable information.

Take note of:

• The click-through rate across all your content
• The average time readers spend on each blog post
• The number of individuals who click on a call to action versus the number of people who view the page

You can use whichever analytical technology you like, or undertake a complete content audit, to evaluate the metrics in this report.

Your brand is only one source of information for your target audience. What other businesses and publications do they rely on? What subjects interest and educate them? Look at trending content in your industry or material shared on social media to discover what else your audience reads.

Review Your Data and Refine Your Approach

Lastly, once you’ve discovered and defined your target market, it’s important to continue doing so. Customers’ needs and desires evolve; demographics shift and grow. If you don’t take these changes into consideration, you’ll find yourself targeting a market that no longer exists.

And that might be worse than targeting everyone.

So keep looking at your data sources, refining your personas as necessary and integrating that new information into your marketing and content strategies. This ensures you’ll stay current with a rapidly evolving consumer base. Even better, you’re more likely to uncover new patterns and discover new markets.

How a Freelance Writer Can Help Reach Your Target Market

Now that you’ve defined your target audience, you need to create content that resonates with the people you want to engage with.

This is where a freelance writer can help.

Freelance writers have the skills and knowledge to develop content that speaks to your target audience, whether it’s blog posts, white papers, e-books or website copy. They know how to research your industry and find the most relevant information to share with your consumers. Even for brands that have in-house writing teams, a freelance writer can discover potential blind spots.

The best writers have the writing chops to turn that data into content that’s both informative and engaging.

When you work with a freelance writer, be sure to give them as much information about your target audience as possible. The more they know, the easier it is for them to develop material that speaks to those individuals. Plus, they can help you track the progress of your content and ensure it continues to resonate with your target market.

A freelance writer can be a valuable asset as you work to reach your target audience. With their help, you can create content that’s designed to engage and convert the people you most want to do business with and who are most likely to engage with your brand.

Speak to Your Target Market With Crowd Content

It’s much easier to hit marketing targets when you have a specific group of people in mind. But creating the right content that resonates with your target market is equally important. Freelance writers can help by providing valuable insights into who your customers are and what they want. With Crowd Content, you gain access to thousands of talented freelance writers who can help you create content that drives sales.

So what are you waiting for? Sign up and get started today.

The post Must-Know Strategies To Find and Engage Your Target Market appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

When it comes to website content, fresh is best. Scraped or auto-generated content is just a big ole' waste of time, money and resources.

Says who? Matt Cutts, the leader of Google's own Webspam team, that's who.

In one of his recent YouTube Q & A sessions, Cutts answers the question of whether or not it's useful to re-post content (including press releases, blog posts and articles) from other sites.

The short answer? No.

Google has made their mission clear from the get-go – they're dedicated to "providing the best user experience possible", and to that end, the search engine giant is constantly 'tweaking' their algorithms.

According to Cutts, "Google focuses on high quality content" by focusing on 3 main factors:

• "Discretion"
• "Curation"
• "Content"

Cutts explains that marketers, website owners and businesses who want to make the most of their SEO content marketing strategies should look at:

• Why would users want to return to my website?
• What value am I providing visitors with each piece of content on my website?

He uses the NY Times as a cystal-clear example of a website that, in Google's eyes, does everything right when it comes to content creation, discretion and curation.

What's So Wrong With Duplicate SEO Content?

According to Cutts, "It's probably not worth just having automatically generated stuff that could be duplicate content".

That's right. Sourcing and posting auto-generated RRS feeds, passed-around press releases and scraped content is at best, a waste of time, money and resources.

And if you really go all-out with recycled content, you run the risk of being reported directly to Google by virtually anyone who's online.

It's time to stop scraping for content and start creating your own, high-quality SEO content – or hire the pros to do it for you!

After all, while Cutts doesn't claim that Google has any plans to penalize sites with non-malicious duplicate content, he's perfectly clear when he states ""Why not just concentrate on the good stuff"? Indeed.

The post Duplicate vs. Fresh SEO Content – Advice From Google’s Webspam Team Leader appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Despite what you might think, you don’t sell products.

That’s right, you don’t – your unique product descriptions sell (or don’t sell) your products.

Chances are good that no matter what you’re trying to sell, somewhere on the Internet, there’s a competitor who has the exact same products that you do. Maybe the other guys have lower prices, cheaper shipping or a better return policy.

To keep pace with the competition, you need powerful, sales-focused product descriptions – strategic sets of carefully-crafted words that convert casual shoppers into paying customers. Here’s where you need to start:

1. Know Your Target Audience

Focusing your sales and marketing efforts requires knowledge – you need to know who your customers are, what’s important to them, what makes them tick. Mark Macdonald of Shopify.com states that “the best product descriptions address your ideal buyer directly and personally”.

Invest some up-front time on developing a buyer persona – a profile of your ideal (imaginary) customer. Write content that speaks to that person; use a tone and style that resonates with your buyers to distinguish your company from the competition.

2. Discuss The Features & Benefits

Customers want products that make “life easier, richer or more pleasurable”, says Henneke Duistermaat of Kissmetrics. When describing the features of your product (such as the color, size, compatibility) remember to let your readers know why these features are important – what’s in it for your buyer?

3. Don’t Be Boring

Internet users expect to be entertained, even while they’re shopping. When crafting your unique product descriptions, engage your readers using humor, empathy and nostalgia. Whatever you do, don’t be tempted to use predicable phrases and recycled content – that’s just plain boring.

Not much of a copywriter? No worries – you can always outsource your content creation to a professional writer. Just remember, when it comes to unique product descriptions, don’t just tell -sell!

The post 3 Essential Tips on Creating Product Descriptions That Turn Browsers Into Buyers appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Top search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! all reward high-quality content with higher SERP rankings, and more importantly, your readers demand valuable, engaging content.

Jeff Bullas states that content publishers have four “media category choices for creating engaging content”; text (copy), images, audio and video. Here’s how you can write search engine optimized content that captivates your audience:

Research Your Keywords

To create captivating SEO content, you need to know what your audience is searching for. Keyword research tools like Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner provide invaluable information about your target market.

According to Moz.com, “Ranking for the “right” keywords can make or break your website”.

Write Simple, Solution-Focused Content

Today’s web users rarely read – they ‘skim’, looking for valuable, engaging content that delivers quick, practical solutions. This is where many ‘traditional’ writers fall down; while a 3000-word essay might have earned top marks in a high school English class, that same lengthy, narrative style falls flat on the web.

Need help? Outsource your writing to a credible SEO content writing service.

Be Empathetic

Jerod Morris of Copyblogger explains how empathy is an important component of every successful content marketing campaign, even one that’s focused on SEO.

Start The Conversation

Truly engaging SEO content isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it product, it’s a powerful conversation-starter. Once you’ve published your SEO blog post, article or web page, be prepared to promote your content through social media channels, backlinks and real-time social engagement.

Your audience wants to feel connected with you and your brand – simply publishing great content is only half of the equation.

Writing truly engaging SEO content is a combination of science and emotions; you need to captivate your audience with empathy, solve real-world problems and target the keywords that they are searching for right now.

The post How to Write Engaging SEO Content appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.