How to keep web content costs down without compromising quality

As the person in charge of the numbers, you probably have very little interest in the creative side of content. It’s a cost. What you probably are interested in is how you can lower that cost. The answer is not simply to negotiate harder with the writers to get the price down. In fact, that can have the opposite effect by limiting your sources of copy only to inferior writers who deliver poor copy that sells fewer products. It’s more about looking at what your content requirements are and how you manage them. Done well, this can bring you huge time savings, both internal and external. Rigour in this area also allows you to identify when you can use lower-priced junior copywriters and when it’s worth spending the money on higher priced heavyweight writers. …

Measuring the effectiveness of your Content Marketing Strategy

Our recent research with HubSpot on Competing on Content Marketing in 2015 identified that measurement of content marketing ROI was one of the main challenges of managing Content Marketing today - rated as a challenge by 51% of respondents. Our Expert member guide on Measuring Content Marketing ROI by Stephen Bateman gives the full technical detail on how to calculate the profitability of content marketing using analytics. In this post, we share the advice of five content marketing specialists. According to Daniel Rowles, from Target Internet, one of the greatest opportunities and advantages of content marketing is that we can create, deploy, measure and improve quickly and easily. Daniel explains that 'having well defined online objectives means that then our content marketing can be measured and ROI calculated relatively easily.…

Learning blog publishing best practices from the top 10 UK marketing blogs

Creating remarkable content is one of the core components of inbound marketing, and one of the best ways to generate a steady flow of fresh content is by publishing a business blog. HubSpot research indicates companies that blog generate 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links, and have 434% more indexed pages than companies that don’t blog. Whether you’ve only just decided to launch a blog for your business or you’ve been blogging for a while, this post will help prevent you from falling victim to some of the most common business blogging mistakes and teach you how to fix the blogging mistakes you might already be making.

1. Not having editorial/style guidelines

Mistake: Not having a documented style guide for all contributors to your blog. Your blog has a different look and feel for every writer, both internal and external to…

Dealing with the 3 Major Challenges Your Content Marketing Team Will Encounter this year

Initially we thought we should write about marketing predictions for the year 2525, as the song goes. But people are generally poor in forecasting long term, so we settled for the 'here and now' - more relevant since these are three problems you will definitely encounter when practicing content marketing.

Challenge 1. Lack of time

We all know this problem, as marketers already work long hours on a never ending list of projects and in most cases use dozens of technologies on a daily basis: we don’t have time to properly do anything new, but we have to and are expected to. Invest in automation. Start by investing with…

New research shows 72% of brands don't measure success

Content marketing is now a key digital strategy, but this infographic shows that  measuring content marketing effectiveness is still a challenge for many marketers.  Research from surveys including the joint SmartInsights-Hubspot Content Marketing ROI research highlights shows that companies are struggling to know how to measure content marketing ROI. Recently, Bite's research shown in this infographic supports this - they commissioned RedShift Research to survey over 100 Marketers to find out the roles of who is driving content marketing, resources allocated to it and the importance of video content. Key findings include: 81% of companies have a dedicated Content Marketing role or are looking to invest in a this as the board sees this as a priority amongst 43% of businesses. Top 3 benefits of content marketing are: to drive sales, customer retention and customer loyalty. …

Essential techniques for making your communications more customer-focused

It’s no secret that effective timing is an essential ingredient of successful marketing. Spotting seasonality and maintaining frequency are the easy things to manage. Getting people to want to spend time with you is more of a challenge. This doesn’t just mean showing up at the right time, it means earning the right to person’s precious time To pull people through the buying decision, you need to understand how much time they want to give to the process. Then, ensure that you have the right tools and techniques of an appropriate duration, available when they want them. Grabbing someone’s attention is something that’s done in seconds. A person will either notice you, or they won’t. Then the moment has passed. If they then start to consider buying from you, they will gradually increase the time that they’re happy to devote to finding out about your products…

5 content governance tips to keep your web experience relevant

When discussing website relaunches and redesigns, a common refrain I hear among the reasons for the relaunches is: 'our old website had grown organically over the years'.

Usually this is a euphemism for navigation becoming more confusing as it is amended and 'content creep'. To tackle these issues in preparation for relaunch, often some customer research is done, some content culled, card sorting exercises undertaken. The new website launches with a cutting-edge design; slimmed down, well written content and a breezy navigation. Big success!

Yet after a while content creep sets in again - the navigation is getting inconsistent and complaints come in about information being inaccurate or hard to find. Sound familiar? What lies behind it, and what can be done to stem the re-emergence of content creep and messy navigation?

Web maintenance, just like…

Recommendations on improving your content marketing capabilities

In our recent Smart Insights - Hubspot research on Managing Content Marketing, we asked five industry experts for their views on how content marketing can be successfully managed. Here they go into more detail of approaches to improve the effectiveness of content marketing. You can learn more ideas on how to better manage content marketing in this free webinar from Dave Chaffey showing examples and 10 techniques and examples to make content marketing more effective (recording available). 10 practical content marketing techniques from Smart Insights

The challenges of managing content marketing

The research showed that there were a common set of challenges of managing content marketing that companies need to manage. …