Branding and Marketing : Top 3 Ways to Measure Content Marketing Success

Branding and Marketing : Top 3 Ways to Measure Content Marketing Success

Companies of all sizes have committed resources to content marketing, but not all of them understand how they should be measuring their efforts. Jesse Noyes, VP of Product Marketing, Content and Communications, at Kapost, says that there are three things content marketers should be measuring to ensure success and relevancy to their business.

Production

We all produce lots of content, but do you know what it really takes to get it done? Are you keeping track of how long it takes to produce each content piece, from a single blog post to a full campaign surrounding an ebook? If content is the thing that fuels your pipeline, then you need to measure that pipeline. You need to establish benchmarks around production and make sure your team is meeting deadlines. If every project becomes a slog and takes time away from other activities, that should weigh into the cost-benefit analysis of your content. Oh wait, that's what marketers call ROI.

Reach

This is the easiest part for many marketers because all the sharing tools give you these numbers. Yes, it may be all manual and siloed, but it is relatively easy to determine which social channels drive traffic to your content. This helps you understand where your prospects and customers are and which ones are helping to amplify your content across their networks. The engagement around your content is what you are looking for. These are retweets, shares, clicks, comments, hearts, stars or whatever other symbol your audience's favorite platform uses to indicate audience engagement. By understanding the reach of your content, you understand how to drive more people to the top of your funnel.

Conversion

Conversion is the most important metric to consider when measuring content success and most marketers do not go deep enough into this whole category. You can start by understanding how many people clicked on the offer and completed the form for a download, but you should not stop there. Do these leads become qualified, either by a marketing lead scoring model or by a salesperson? And the next step of the process is to understand how your content contributes to closed deals, cross sales and upsells. Finally, are you supporting customer retention efforts with your content and how does that convert? Every piece of content has multiple conversions along each stage of the buyer journey, or funnel, pick your marketing metaphor, and the more informed you are about this, the more relevant your content will be in the future.

Branding and Marketing : Marketing Personas: Beginners Guide

Marketing Personas: Beginners Guide

The basic marketing persona template

I love this description of a marketing persona from the team at Krux:

With personas, businesses can be more strategic in catering to each audience, internalize the customer that they are trying to attract, and relate to them as human beings.

So how many of these “human beings” do you need to create? It is recommended that you make three to five personas to represent your audience; this number is big enough to cover the majority of your customers yet small enough to still carry the value of specificity. Hubspot has tons of examples of companies who have created marketing personas, and there are templates galore for making personas of your own. 
Many of these templates include the same basic information. You want to know who the person is, what they value, and how best to speak to them. Here is a quick overview on what you should include in your marketing persona template:

Name of the persona
Job title

• Key information about their company (size, type, etc.)
• Details about their role

Demographics

• Age
• Gender
• Salary / household income
• Location: urban / suburban / rural
• Education
• Family

Goals and challenges

• Primary goal
• Secondary goal
• How you help achieve these goals
• Primary challenge
• Secondary challenge
• How you help solve these problems

Values / fears

• Primary values
• Common objections during sales process

Marketing message
Elevator pitch
Don’t worry if some of these aren’t quite clear yet; we’ll go over an example in just a second.

Additional persona information specific to your customers

Beyond the basics, you will find that your specific business might need specific information. Personas can vary from business to business and industry to industry. An Internet news company would require different customer information than a medical supply company, and a persona built for a buying funnel might look different than one built for a blog.
With that in mind, here are some miscellaneous bits of information that you might consider adding to your personas.

• Hobbies
• Real quotes from interviews with customers
• Computer literacy
• Where they get their news
• Blogs they read

How to create a marketing persona

So where do you get all the information you need to make a persona take shape? There are many sources of information on your audience, from the tiny details logged away in your site statistics to actual conversations with real-life customers. Cast a wide net when coming up with information related to your personas.
Here are three places to look:
Check your site analytics.
Inside your analytics, you can see where your visitors came from, what keywords they used to find you, and how long they spent once they arrived. This data is key for personas as it can reveal the desires that led your audience to your site as well as the tools they used to get there.
Involve your team in creating profiles. 
Get the team together—not just marketing, but customer service, growth, development, and more. Anyone with interactions with customers and customer data should be involved in sharing their perspective on what makes your customers tick.
Social media research
You can also do some research with social media. Use social media listening to find your potential customers asking questions or airing problems your product can solve on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, or even try Pinterest for retail-oriented insights.
Ask your audience questions.
Who knows your customers better than they know themselves? Surveys and interviews are often a critical component to building a useful marketing persona. In particular, interviews can reveal deep insight into your customers since you can really dig into their answers and follow up with the goals, values, and pain points that will resonate the most with them. For personas to become useful tools, it’s best if they’re based on interviews gathered from salespeople, customer service interactions, and the buyers (customers) themselves.

Step-by-step guide to filling out a marketing persona template

Now that you know where you’re headed with a marketing persona, the next step is to actually build out the profile. Here’s how we might fill out the template above at Buffer to help find and connect with our core customers.



Let’s take a look at each field and talk about how we filled it out.
Give the persona a name.
The name can be whatever you choose. Make it a real name so the persona feels like a real person.

A persona should have enough psychological detail to allow you to conveniently step over to the persona’s view and see your products and services from her perspective. A persona can function almost like another person in the room when making a decision—It is “Sally.” She looks at what you’re doing from her particular and very specific vantage point, and points out flaws and benefits for her.

Identify the persona’s job, role, and company.
Your greatest resource for coming up with jobs for your personas is likely to be customer surveys. When you are building the surveys, you can include a field for job title, company size, and type of business. For instance, a recent survey of Buffer users showed that a large percentage are small-business owners—founders, owner/operators, or one-man teams. These can all fit nicely into a single persona.
Discover demographic information.
For demographic information, you can glean some insight from Google Analytics, plus your best educated guesses and survey info. Drilling down into the Google Analytics stats can show you where your visitors live as well as age, gender, affinity, and technology. Navigate to the Audience section of your Google Analytics to see all this and more:

Here is a sample of what you might see from Google Analytics for the interests of your site’s visitors. (If you cannot see certain demographic information, you may need to enable the feature or contact your Analytics administrator.)

For the elements you cannot find in your analytics, you can supplement with survey results. Many tools like Survey Monkey offer suggestions for how to word certain demographic questions to ensure you get the most accurate responses and avoid any confusion.

By this point, you may be wondering, “Is all this information really essential?” It might seem like fluff, but details like this do serve an important purpose. This is how James Heaton, writing for Tronvig Group, puts it:

These details have two functions:
First, they help force the creators to get into character. Specificity is a good way to push the process deep enough to facilitate genuine understanding of the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of your customers. We are not all naturally good at this, and it’s important for a persona’s effectiveness.
Second, it can help you find previously undetected tactical opportunities for your product, service, or institution. These can make what you do more useful and relevant in your customer’s lives. Where does your product or service constructively intersect with what Sally does or what Sally cares about? Once uncovered, these are very valuable insights.

Expressed visually, diving deep into personas can be the catalyst that turns a crude sketch into a true portrait.

Goals and challenges, values and fears
Actual customer interviews will be helpful in determining the objectives here. During your interviews, ask questions similar to the following—a great list from Marketing Interactions—to get a good feeling for your customers’ goals and challenges.

• What’s important to them and what’s driving the change?
• What’s impeding or speeding their need to change?
• How do they go about change?
• What do they need to know to embrace change?
• Who do they turn to for advice or information?
• What’s the value they visualize once they make a decision?
• Who do they have to sell change to in order to get it?
• What could cause the need for this change to lose priority?

While coming up with these goals and challenges, you can also identify the ways in which you can help customers meet these goals and overcome the challenges.
Your intuition here will be helpful. Try to put yourself in the shoes of your customer and approach the solution with empathy. Consider what common objections arise for them during the sales process. What might keep this customer from closing the deal? Then brainstorm ways you can help.
Marketing message and elevator pitch
This part is all up to you! Put your knowledge and information to use and determine the best ways to meet the needs of each type of customer. At this step, “message” refers to how you might describe your product for this particular type of person.  Are you a complete social media service? An enterprise customer management tool? Then your elevator pitch can go into detail and set a consistent message on how to sell to this customer.

Examples of marketing personas

As mentioned above, marketing personas will vary from company to company, and each place will be unique. There will, of course, be similar themes that run throughout all personas. It’s when you get into detail that you start to see where the differences crop up. There are lots of neat examples online where companies have shared one of their own marketing personas. Here are a few shared by Hubspot and Buyer Persona.

Takeaways

 Marketing personas will help you identify with your audience and better solve their problems. And when you solve their problems, everyone wins. 

Be sure to include the whole team in coming up with these personas as everyone brings a different perspective and different information to the table. Then once you have your personas in place, act on them by using specific messaging with your content and by empathizing with customers as they go through your funnels.

The results will be a better experience for the customer and a more engaged user for your business.

What experience do you have with marketing personas? Are there elements of your persona template that have been particularly helpful? I’d love to hear what’s worked for you in the past or what you’re excited to try for your next persona experiment.

The SiriusDecisions Product Marketing and Management (PMM) Model

The SiriusDecisions Product Marketing and Management (PMM) Model

Branding and Marketing: Essential B-to-B Marketing Acronyms

Essential B-to-B Marketing Acronyms

Marketing Automation and SEO

Marketing Automation and SEO: Subdomains vs. Subdirectories

In recent months I’ve noticed a lack of content dedicated to marketing automation platforms and SEO. Most platforms, like Infusionsoft and HubSpot, have great content on general SEO best practices but there seems to be a gap in content that explains how to best use a marketing platform to support a site’s broader SEO efforts.



Specifically, there remains a lingering question on how to best use best subdomains and subdirectories in order to benefit your site’s overall SEO efforts.
In this post, I’m going to offer some insight into how to best use marketing automation platforms for SEO and how to avoid some of the most common pitfalls. But first, let’s take a step back and remember why marketing automation platforms came into existence and put their value into the right context.

The Real Benefits of a Marketing Automation Platform

Marketing automation platforms combine many of the features of singular marketing tools in one package, take these examples to name just a few:

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• Unbounce (landing page creation, A/B testing)
• Moz (keyword tracking, SEO on-page optimization checks)
• MailChimp (email marketing)
• WordPress (CMS)
• Hootsuite (social media management)
• Google Analytics (content performance)
• Google AdWords (PPC performance)

Whew! That’s a lot of different tools running at the same time, all trying to solve the same objective: drive traffic, deliver great content, generate leads, and turn those leads into customers.
Prior to the explosion of marketing automation platforms, we marketers were stuck managing campaigns across multiple tools that often didn’t speak to each other and had varying degrees of automation. Much of our time was spent on implementation instead of actually measuring results.

The goal of marketing automation tools is to drive traffic, deliver great content, generate leads, and turn those leads into customers.

Plus, analyzing the results of our campaigns – the most important part of marketing – was a nightmare. Remember trying to aggregate data from these tools into standard reports? A place where we could draw visitor and lead insights? Yeah, me neither. Features like lead intelligence and dynamic smart forms just weren’t possible for the average marketing team.
Marketing automation platforms are extremely beneficial. They allow you to combine multiple marketing tools into one home, set up complex automated processes, and seamlessly gather anything from basic analytics to comprehensive visitor and lead intelligence. That’s a huge win for digital marketers and absolutely worth the investment for most businesses.

So What’s the Catch? It’s All About the Landing Pages

The details are critical when using a marketing automation platform and we find we get the most questions on how to use landing pages correctly with these types of platforms. Most users aren’t sure if they should set up a subdomain to house all of their newly created gated content or use a subdirectory on their website.


(Source: Formstack)
To understand which is right for you and your site, it’s important to know how marketing landing pages should be used.

SEO Best Practice: How to Use Marketing Landing Pages

Marketing landing pages should be created on a subdomain and used for individual marketing offers used for lead generation capture and testing — that’s it. Here’s why it’s best practice to create marketing landing pages on subdomains versus a main top level domain

1. Marketers don’t have multiple versions of the same offer in a site’s subfolders (avoid duplicate content)
2. Subdomains can be masked with custom URLs not part of a main site structure (info.yourwebsite.com or demo.yourwebsite.com)
3. Subdomains are treated as separated sites so the content produced is only narrowly attributed to the corresponding top-level domain. This creates a “playground” for marketers to test offers.
4. Efforts made to optimize a top-level domain do not significantly impact subdomain authority and vice-versa.

Marketing landing pages live on a subdomain for a distinct purpose that benefit both the marketers and your SEO team by creating a test friendly environment to create lead generation offers. Marketers should not use a subdomain to replace any content that lives in a top-level domain.

Marketing landing pages should be created on a subdomain and used for individual marketing offers used for lead generation capture and testing — that’s it.

Here’s what happened to Timo Reitnauer when he started using a subdomain to house his company’s content. Big drop, right? Recent reports show his content still hasn’t quite recovered 6 months after moving it back to their top level domain.



Landing pages created through marketing automation platforms should not be the home of the SEO-rich content you create. Instead, they are the right place for you to promote that content for lead generation.

SEO Best Practice: Where Your Authoritative Content Should Live

Here’s where it gets a bit confusing. Most marketing automation platforms give you the ability to “optimize” your marketing landing pages for search engines. However, it’s important to note that while these platforms can give us marketers SEO “grades” and do really help track SEO performance, the use of a subdomain to publish landing pages is not intended to house the valuable, authoritative content that should live on a business’ main website (top level domain).
For most marketers, it should not be your goal for the subdomain to rank organically. You want to build up the domain authority on your main website using that amazing content you’re spending so much time and money creating.

“[Subdomains] act as a barrier for the full link equity, brand, and user/usage signals to pass to your main site. They don’t amplify; they diminish your ranking/visibility potential”– Rand Fishkin, Founder of Moz

We recommend creating SEO optimized, organized resource pages that house your authoritative pieces on your top-level domain, like free guides, webinars, interviews, and blog content. Be sure to pay special attention to the URL structure, the keywords on the page, and the length of your content.
Use your marketing landing pages on a subdomain to test out different messaging and calls-to-action. When you split out your content this way, your marketing efforts won’t conflict with your long-term SEO goals.

Driving Traffic to Marketing Landing Pages

It’s important to note: with marketing landing pages, you do have to drive traffic with social, PPC, or other referral traffic.
“Optimizing” these pages for SEO is a best practice in theory — as you would any published web page – but in reality, totally unnecessary. It’s a bit misleading that some of these platforms use phrases like, “enter keywords into your landing page” as if you are truly optimizing the page. Most of the time, your marketing landing pages will need a paid source of traffic or volume from a popular referral network, like email or a third-party site linking to your offer.

Subdomains vs Subdirectories: FAQ

image: http://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/FAQ.png.png

Before we close, here are the answers to the most common questions we receive about properly using subdomains with marketing landing pages.

When should I use marketing landing pages on a subdomain?

Use a marketing landing page on a subdomain when you want to test different offers. Maybe you want to do an A/B test with copy or call-to-actions, or perhaps you want to create an offer just for your Facebook fans or Twitter followers. When you use a subdomain you don’t have to stress about affecting your top level domain with duplicate pages or content.
Use marketing landing pages on a subdomain when you want to isolate these pages from the rest of your primary website.
If you only have one offer on a page that will rarely change – say a request for a standard product demo on your top level domain – you could use a subfolder to house that page. Keep in mind though, that using a page on your subdirectory has ripple effects to your top level domain. Create these pages with as much effort and thought as you would any other main page on your website.

Should I link to my subdomain marketing landing pages from my top level domain?

You can if it’s appropriate for the lead generation offer you’re providing on your subdomain. While the outbound links from your top level domain to your subdomain won’t negatively affect your SEO efforts, I’d only recommend this tactic if it makes sense for you from a conversion perspective.
However, it’s important to emphasize that your authoritative content should not live on a subdomain. If you want to drive people to a gated free guide offer on your subdomain, make sure that free guide primarily lives somewhere on your main website on a dedicated page.

Do I need to use noindex and nofollow tags on my marketing landing pages?

I would use noindex if you want to direct Google not to index your landing pages. Nofollow tells Google not to apply link equity to the content so its use depends on if you want stand behind the content offered on your marketing landing pages.

This seems like a lot of work. Why would I even use marketing landing pages at all?

Using marketing landing pages correctly can feel overwhelming and a bit confusing. Some of our clients request to just use their top level domain to house all of their lead generation offers. And for many of them, it makes sense. The deciding factor here is flexibility and testing.
A subdomain allows you to test all different types of variables that go into generating conversions. Building marketing landing pages on a subdomain gives us the flexibility to test varying versions of pages. We also can create as many of these landing pages as we’d like without significantly affecting our top level domain SEO efforts. Now, this doesn’t give us a justifiable reason to create spam-filled pages, but it does give us a safe playground to test different approaches.
If you don’t plan on changing your marketing landing pages very often or you want to create just one page with a call-to-action form and focus on building up the page authority of that offer, you can just use a subdirectory. The use of subdomains are not required with marketing landing pages.
In the end, it all comes down to how you plan to use your marketing landing pages to decide on whether you should select a subdomain or a subdirectory for your offers.

SEO and Marketing Automation Platforms: The Good News

The good news: marketing automation platforms do let you track the SEO performance of your top level domain and grade individual top level domain pages for SEO – this is very similar to something like a Moz On-Page Grader. Some even come with helpful site and page-level keyword trackers.
I truly believe there are some powerful and helpful SEO tools within these platforms that should definitely be utilized. Marketing landing pages are just not one of them.

Marketing: Branding Strategies

Marketing: Branding Strategies

Branding Strategies

When a company manages its brands it has a number of strategies it can use to further increase its brand value. These are:

Line extension: This is where an organisation adds to its current product line by introducing versions of its products with new features, an example could be a crisp/chips manufacturer extending its line by adding more exotic flavours.

Brand extension: If your current brand name is successful, you may use the brand name to extend into new business areas. For example Virgin Group extending its brand from records, to airlines, mobiles and banking.

Multi Branding: The company decides to introduce more brands into an existing category. Kellogg’s for example have a number of brands in the cereal market and the cereal bar market. Multi-branding can allow an organisation to maximise profits, but a company needs to be weary over their own brands competing with each other over market share.

New Brands: An organisation may decide to launch a new brand into a market. A new brand may be used to compete with existing rivals and may be marketed as something ‘new and fresh’.