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sempiternalsandpitturtle · 5 years ago

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How to rebrand your company

Rebranding can take many forms. It can right the company ship in the public eye or elevate an already successful brand.

A company rebrand is not easy by any measure, and it’s possible for businesses to actually do more harm than good (you’ll see in a minute).

So what does rebranding mean, and how can a team successfully pull off a new company image?

Let’s find out.

What is a rebrand (and what is it good for)?

Rebrands help companies distance themselves from negative associations, target new markets or demographics, polish existing products or services and fine-tune corporate messaging.

If done well, rebranding can be a competitive differentiator.

Consider: 77 percent of consumers are not looking to form any type of relationship with a brand. But branding hopes to accomplish just that, a relationship.

These two facts appear to be at odds, which is why a rebrand may allow companies to penetrate perception gaps and reshape how the public interacts with businesses and makes purchasing decisions.

Why rebrand?

Glad you asked.

Rebranding generates a number of tangible and intangible benefits. It’s important to be absolutely clear on why a rebrand needs to occur and what goals it should achieve.

Here are some common scenarios that might necessitate a new company image:

Diminishing market presence

Yesterday’s customers are inherently different from tomorrow’s. Due to evolving generational tastes, fluctuating market forces and (potentially) fading relevancy or influence, brands may be at risk of losing customers.

A brand repositioning is akin to hitting the reset button, in that companies can shift their stances in the marketplace by targeting upcoming consumer demographics, ideas or locations.

Customer backlash

Poor reviews, subpar customer service standards and badly timed communications can cause a public relations disaster, resulting in significant hemorrhaging of customers and brand equity.

For example, the viral video of United Airlines forcibly dragging a passenger off a plane or the publication of a photo showing a decomposed chicken head inside food served at Buffalo Wild Wings are the types of unexpected events that dictate a conversation on the upside of a potential rebrand.

Inferior products or services

Rebranding isn’t always a consequence of a negative incident. In some cases, a brand’s product or service may have been organically or even predictably usurped in the marketplace (e.g., Uber over Lyft).

A rebrand can cast a new light on a businesses’ offerings and even facilitate the launch of a new product line that is, indeed, superior to anything else on the market. This proactive branding mentality can keep executives ahead of the next big customer trend.

Corporate consolidation or expansion

Similarly, mergers, acquisitions or general business growth/loss may warrant a rebrand.

Avoiding customer confusion is key, so renaming a portion of a business that’s unique from another could focus awareness on what a company wants to highlight. Conversely, bringing all names, trademarks, logos and product lines under one roof, one moniker, can streamline brand messaging.

Define a rebranding strategy: What needs to change?

Depending on the impetus of a rebrand, certain brand elements may be left as is, while others may require a notable overhaul.

The most common iterations of these changes are:

Logos.

Services.

Taglines.

Market positioning.

Messaging.

Names.

An audit of competitor brands should reveal where opportunities lie. A line-by-line assessment of what works, what doesn’t, what’s outdated, what’s not resonating, etc., helps creative teams ideate any potential brand changes.

Superficial colour or typographical changes can set the tone for the rest of the brand and may be completed in a matter of weeks or months, while wholesale adjustments to business lines will need more thorough planning, typically months or years in the making.

Starting with a simple spreadsheet that compiles potential changes (before and after snapshots) keeps rebranding strategies organised. From there, a small-scale pilot of a single change may show that only one brand element requires change. Further testing should then decide whether subsequent modifications are necessary.

What does the rebranding process look like?

The rebranding process is not uniform across all industries or organisations. Some companies outsource branding activities to creative agencies; some keep all tasks in house.

Budget, timeline, stakeholder approval and urgency will, rather by choice or not, direct what’s achievable.

Rebranding can broadly be boiled down to:

Crafting a new vision

What does the new brand stand for? What absolutely needs to change? Who is the target audience?

Conducting research

What are competitors doing better? What does the data say about market opportunities? How will changes map to results?

Determining stakeholders

Who will be affected by a rebrand? Which internal departments should be involved? Who has final say?

Setting timelines

Who manages daily progress? When will internal and external changes roll out?

Producing new work

Who’s doing what? Who’s compiling all updates and providing quality assurance? Who’s implementing changes?

Gathering feedback

What’s the initial reaction of internal stakeholders of small survey samples? Which changes are most effective? Which branding elements could still use more work?

Communicating change

When does the rebrand phase in? How will all employees and customers be informed? How often will communications go out?

How to communicate a rebrand

All the work that goes into rebranding is only as effective as the rollout.

A botched announcement can lead to unmet expectations and outright confusion. Brand managers should develop specific messaging targeted at three core groups of stakeholders. While a majority of the language used in these corporate communications will remain the same, the rubric of a successful rebrand is how it’s received, not how one hopes it is received, meaning customise messaging by recipient.

To employees

First and foremost, employees need to be in the loop. Executives and directors should hold training sessions with all staff members to review updated brand guidelines. All employees should be equipped with the updates, tools and messaging they need to appropriately communicate to the public through all channels.

To customers

Rebranding will impact existing customers. Some may love the new look; some not so much.

Customers should receive emails and social media updates on what they can expect to experience under the new brand. They should also be made to feel that their opinions are being heard and their feedback is welcome.

To prospects

Prospects are unique stakeholders in the rebranding process, as they’ve likely had limited interaction with a given company up to this point. Additionally, they may actually be customers at competing businesses. This means communication should focus on winning over new converts and highlighting key product / service differentiators.

Branding tools and exercises

Rebranding may not always go smoothly. There will be setbacks and unexpected events that push back timelines and impede launch dates. That said, companies can benefit from a few dry runs.

Even if a brand isn’t considering changing in the foreseeable future, there’s still much to be learned from consistently brainstorming new ideas, looking for new business opportunities and reimagining a company’s potential.

Branding exercises that every company could benefit from include:

Brand personification

“If your company were a movie star, who would play you?”

“What TV show embodies the personality you want your brand to portray?”

These sorts of theoretical questions instantly force stakeholders to think of their brands as not just businesses but as entities that have human qualities. In short, to connect with a consumer, it’s not always price or product that matters; it’s often the personal touch.

Opposite of everything

It can be difficult to clearly articulate what a brand stands for, especially when using generalities like “value-add,” “customer service” or “strategic partner.”

In a room with other team members, outline what the company is not, rather than what it is. Turning brand discussions upside down in this way triggers a different set of thinking skills, which could produce valuable insights once a rebrand is in the cards.

Content marketing

Gathering user data on a brand, its services and its assets is a moving target that many companies are ill-equipped to do on a regular basis. But it’s this data that will help push a brand into new territory that is more likely to appeal to customers and prospects.

Content marketing turns companies’ websites, email campaigns and social media posts into deep vaults of user data. Frequently publishing blog posts and other content, then tracking performance metrics on those assets, provides hard data on what works and what doesn’t.

Use this information to steer branding campaigns and brainstorming sessions.

Company rebranding examples (some that worked, some that didn’t)

Rebranding can quickly go off the rails if stakeholders are misinformed or misguided in the process.

In recent memory, here are rebranding examples that hit the mark and others that missed it entirely:

Old Spice (good)

Old Spice had been in business for more than 75 years, with its trademark cursive lettering and sailboat imagery working well for much of that time. Until it didn’t.

The deodorant and men’s care products brand was losing market share to Dove and other competitors targeting younger customers. After all, sailboats don’t conjure up images of youth.

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Since 2010, Old Spice has utilised, among others, the faces of Terry Crews and Isaiah Mustafa in their commercials in addition to an updated logo. They had, in effect, positioned themselves as the hippest, manliest product on the market – and it worked. The company’s 2010 Super Bowl commercial received 10 times as many YouTube views as Dove’s.

Stella Artois (good)

Belgian brewer Stella Artois was facing a similar scenario. The traditionally pilsner-centric company considered itself to be an “upmarket” brand, and its elaborate red and gold branding said as much.

Fast forward to the new millennium and Stella was being displaced by craft beers with unique flavors. This prompted the company to branch out and create new products, including a Bock and a Cidre. The Stella Artois Cidre is now a common barroom offering and a favorite for younger drinkers who eschew hoppier tastes that flood the current market.

Hulu (bad)

It’s not always great news, however. In summer 2017, Hulu revamped its in-app UX, website branding and its logo.

While some viewers appreciated the new look, the actual user interface has received dismal reviews and hundreds of official complaints. Most of the feedback cited poor layout, confusing guides and hidden features as common concerns.

Within a matter of months, Hulu had to go back and make specific experiential changes as well as release a statement noting they intend to make additional enhancements in the future.

GAP (bad)

Clothing company GAP had a notoriously painful rebranding experience in 2010 when it opted to redo its 20-year-old logo using different front, gradients and shapes.

Via: Cannycreative.com

Just six days after plastering their new logo all over the internet, the company reversed course and went back to the original because of almost unanimous criticism. By some projections, GAP sank $100 million into their failed rebrand.

Calculating rebranding ROI

As we’ve discussed before, branding is ROI in the future tense.

There’s not always a direct line between a logo change and revenue – there are so many touchpoints and factors that contribute to any measurable ROI that attributing dollars directly to “branding” isn’t rooted entirely in data (as easily as, say, traditional marketing or advertising is).

However, metrics to track before and after a rebrand include:

Customer retention.

Customer lifetime value.

Brand mentions.

Google search data.

Referrals.

Social engagement.

Employee retention.

Price increases.

Should the above indicators rise, it’s safe to say there is a strong correlation between rebranding and ROI.

Branding is a long-term investment, one that has that capacity to completely change a business’s future trajectory.

So the question is, “To rebrand or not to rebrand?”

from https://bit.ly/2QyrFsR

#content marketing

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sempiternalsandpitturtle · 5 years ago

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Email marketing generates the highest ROI

Yes, content is still king. But every king needs a crown, and according to the numbers, that crown appears to be email. It might be one of the oldest digital marketing tactics, but it still delivers the best ROI, according to marketers.

Nevertheless, getting ROI from email, and for that matter, measuring ROI, is hardly a cut-and-dry process. More importantly, businesses are on a never-ending quest (or at least they should be) to discover new ways to optimise their email-marketing campaign and extract even more value from this clearly lucrative channel.

So, without further fanfare for our beloved marketing channel, let’s dive into the nitty gritty.

Let’s start with the basics: Measuring email’s ROI

Open rate is undoubtedly the first metric that any email marketing campaign should be measured by, and there’s a simple reason for this.

Every day, more than 100 billion are sent. That’s over 2.5 million emails per second. With that much noise to contend with, getting your target to open the email is half the battle.

However, click-through rate is the more significant indicator of ROI. Whereas open rate refers to the number of recipients who opened a message, CTR identifies how many of those users clicked on a link in the email. (Note: This is not to be confused with conversion rate, which more broadly refers to successfully getting a user to perform a desired action; that could be click-through, but it could be something more subjective, such as providing additional information through an opt-in form).

The good news is that the majority of in-house marketers are privy to the importance of open rates, CTR and conversions.

The bad news, though, is an alarmingly low number of them are missing other key indicators of ROI.

For example only 8 percent of in-house marketers are currently factoring in email inbox placement. This is very different than deliverability rate, which merely indicates the number of messages that reach the subscriber.

Unlike deliverability rate, which counts messages that end up in spam and bulk folders as being successfully delivered, inbox placement distinguishes between messages that actually make it to the user’s inbox, and those that are automatically filtered to the trash or a spam folder, never to be seen.

Marketers should be paying much closer attention to inbox placement so they can have a better idea of the audience they’re actually reaching, and the types of content that are resonating.

Other performance metrics that businesses should be paying closer attention to include:

Bounce rate: When a message fails to deliver because of a wrong email, server error, or when an email inbox is full or a message is sent to spam.

List growth rate: The rate at which your email list is growing, not growing, or worse, diminishing.

Email marketing works wonders – assuming you have emails

We can’t say enough good things about email marketing. But if we had to distill our profound appreciation for the channel into a list of five core strengths, it would look something like this:

Everyone uses email, and they can check it at nearly any point in the day thanks to mobile devices.

Email is targeted for personalisation. Marketers can easily perform basic segmentation (industry, location, job function) but also advanced segmentation (purchase history, previous engagements, etc.). You’re always fishing in a smaller pond.

Email is cost effective relative to many other channels.

It works at practically every stage in the customer journey.

It is ostensibly permission-based (assuming you’ve followed the rules).

The hardest part about email marketing, though, is email capture

Not nearly enough marketers (20 percent) are making it a priority.

B2B email lists need constant, ongoing replenishment. Over time, they organically shrink, for instance through employee turnover in your target audience. Sometimes you can lean on deliverability rate to help determine when certain emails have become more or less obsolete. At the very least, you might see the shortage coming.

But even then, the best defense against email-list depletion is proactive email capture. That requires, as you probably already know, compelling site content that will leave top-of-funnel leads wanting more. Once you have that bargaining chip in place, you can offer deeper-funnel collateral such as white papers and eBooks in exchange for contact information.

Formally purchasing email lists is also an option, but realistically, your inbound marketing will almost always attract the best leads.

Other ways to optimise email ROI

Think strategically

Who is your audience, and what time of day will they be most amenable to opening and clicking through your emails?

The strategic timing of your emails will vary depending on who you’re trying to reach, but consider this food for thought: According to Experian, Tuesday has the highest open rate for emails of any other day of the week. The best time for views is the early afternoon (so maybe that’s when you send your updates that require no action).

The best time for CTR and conversions, though, is the evening, once the day has wound down, and your audience might take more liberties with how they divide their attention.

Again, this is not a hard-and-fast rule, so don’t start barraging your leads with emails on Tuesday night. Rather, it’s merely an example of the types of strategic factors you should be considering when optimising your email marketing campaigns.

Make mobile a top consideration

Email is such a consistently direct line to your target audience because it’s accessible from so many different devices.

This is important to understand for several reasons, the first and most obvious of which is mobile optimisation.

The content presentation of every email – be it a newsletter or a basic welcome message at the beginning of a drip campaign – needs to look and feel like it was made for whatever device the user is viewing it on. Responsive design, as this is known, is probably one of the most important aspects of content and site creation in general.

Other basic pointers: Avoid large images, multi-column content and anything overly text-heavy. Use buttons, and make sure it is abundantly clear to the user what is clickable and what is not.

Newsletters are your friend

We cannot stress this enough.

Newsletters aren’t necessarily the swiftest path to email ROI, but from our experience, they’re the surest.

And there’s a simple reason for this: They represent an opportunity to disarm your audience by sharing insightful, interesting content that they will actually find useful in their own lives – professional or personal.

Half the battle of email marketing is just getting the user to take you seriously. If you can do that, then you can start valuable conversations at any point in the sales funnel.

Also, a good newsletter builds brand awareness and credibility – and not just in the minds of your current recipients. Ideally, you want to create something that will leave your target audience recommending your content to other people.

Unsure of what makes a good newsletter? Here is a bit of guidance.

Personalise, personalise, personalise

If your newsletter is doing its job, your target audience will more likely open your emails. But that doesn’t guarantee they’ll click through or convert.

For an email recipient to take any sort of action that leads them deeper into the funnel, the content needs to be personalised to that individual’s current placement in the sales cycle.

And we get it. Personalisation is one of the hardest nuts to crack, but it’s nut-cracking season.

Start with the following:

Create customer personas: Build your segmentation – basic and advanced – around these personas. At the very least, this can help you hone in on your recipients’ interests, and develop and continually perfect a voice that resonates.

Set up auto-generated behavior emails: Getting this part right may require a bit of data analysis on your end. But some correlations are pretty straightforward. If, for instance, a recipient downloads your eBook about mortars, it’s a safe bet they’ll be interested in the companion piece about pestles. Don’t waste any time sending that over.

Just ask: Every now and again send out a quick survey – maybe bake it into your newsletter – about the types of content your audience wants to see. It’s amazing what a simple question can reveal.

Use first names: “Dear reader” doesn’t cut it – not in an age when even Siri calls you by your name.

So where does that leave us?

With only one thing left to do: Get cracking on your new email marketing campaign.

As far as we and everybody else knows, it’s still the most effective marketing channel – and by most measures, it had a strong 2019.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t do more with it.

If you ask us, we think 2020 will shape up to be email marketing’s biggest year yet.

from http://bit.ly/3a5EVgu

#content marketing

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sempiternalsandpitturtle · 5 years ago

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What is a subdomain and how does it impact SEO?

Your website is a bit like an iceberg. People really only ever see a small proportion of it – your homepage, blogs, product pages, etc.

However, there is a much larger underbelly; a web of metadata, XML sitemaps, Schema markup, and site architecture that provide the framework generating a strong search presence. If you don’t want your search performance to go down like the Titanic, you need to account for these things.

The guts of any website are a complex web of pages and multiple subdomains, and the structure of those components is critical to SEO success. Google’s algorithms are infamously finicky, so you don’t want to go shifting around your site map without first understanding how these changes will impact your site’s ranking, especially when it comes to subdomains.

One of the most frequent questions our tech team hears is, “Exactly what is a subdomain?” An important question, to be sure. The more pressing followup, though, should be, “When is the best time to use a subdomain?”

What is a subdomain?

First things first, there’s a lot of confusion out there regarding what distinguishes main domains and subdomains. In some cases people will conflate the two, but rest assured they are entirely different.

Your main domain is essentially the name of your website. Now, before kicking off an argument around semantics, realise that definition comes directly from Google itself. How can you argue with that?

In Castleford’s case, our main domain is castleford.com.au. Notice I didn’t say http://bit.ly/2WtWDX8 or http://bit.ly/2xbFir4, which are technically our site URLs.

A subdomain is a division of your website that you want to distinguish with its own unique identity and content. For instance, if we wanted to create a subdomain for our blog page (we don’t), the result would be blog.castledord.com.au.

Why separate certain areas of your website into subdomains? Let’s take a look at an example of a site hierarchy:

That diagram is pretty clear-cut and easy to follow, right? But let’s say instead of a simple FAQ page, you want to build out an extensive research library filled with white papers, data sheets, training materials, user guides and product operation instructions. All of a sudden, that nice, neat sitemap would get very complicated, very fast.

A subdomain lets you separate portions of your site that are extensive enough to warrant their own dedicated hierarchy without going through all of the trouble of setting up a new site or confusing visitors with a completely different root domain.

Many companies use subdomains in this fashion, even Google itself. If you need assistance with any of the tech giant’s apps, you’ll be directed to this page:

https://support.google.com/

Notice that it’s not https://google.com/support, but https://support.google.com. That ordering is critical to distinguishing a subdomain from a subfolder. Unlike a subdomain, a subfolder branches off from the top level domain in the site hierarchy.

Site hierarchy best practices stress the importance of simplicity, recommending that organisations minimise the number of categories and subcategories included in any navigation sitemap. Kissmetrics, for instance, suggests keeping the number of site categories limited to anywhere from two to seven.

Second-level domains are basically the same as a subdomain, right?

Lord, no. Despite the nomenclature, the second-level domain is arguably the most important part of your main site name. That’s because top-level and second-level domains actually refer to the hierarchy of web addresses, not how they relate to your main site.

Again, take castledord.com.au. In this case, “.com.au” is the top-level domain (TLD), indicating that the site is a commercial website based in Australia. Web address suffixes like .org, .edu and .gov are all top-level domains. We’re really talking about the building blocks of websites here.

With that in mind, “castleford” is the second-level domain. And really, that’s what people remember and associate with your main site. No one calls Google “google.com” or LinkedIn “linkedin.com.” That would be crazy.

How do you set up a subdomain?

There are basically two ways to create a subdomain: using a CNAME record or an A record. CNAME is a record that resolves to an alternative URL, while an A record resolves to an IP address.

Regardless of which approach you take, the record needs to be created according to your subdomain’s hosting specifications. If you don’t follow those hosting specifications, you run the risk of setting up a DNS record that won’t properly resolve when the hosting account receives requests from it. With that in mind, it could be a good idea to consult your domain provider to get all the hosting information you’ll need and remove any guesswork from the equation.

How does all of this look in action? Let’s say you’re hosting through WP Engine and want to set up a dedicated subdomain for your blog. You’ll need to go through an online portal that looks something like this:

When you go to create a subdomain, WP Engine will issue you a temporary URL to use. From there, you can choose to create either a CNAME record to resolve back to that URL or an A record to resolve your new blog to a specific IP address.

Finally, you’ll need to register your new subdomain with WP Engine so it knows how to properly resolve it.

When does it make sense to use subdomains?

Given how extensive Google’s support page is, it’s a perfect candidate for subdomain status: There are a dozen apps to cover, each with unique troubleshooting articles and user guides.

Subdomains are also pretty essential if your company operates in different international markets and you want to set up distinct websites geared toward certain countries and regions. If your German customers are forced to navigate the same website as your customers in North America (in English, mind you), that’s not going to lead to a great brand experience.

In a similar fashion, subdomains are useful when you actually want to create a different brand experience for users. For instance, when companies have different products and services for both consumer and business audiences. If you want to create distinct e-commerce sites for both B2C and B2B audiences (Amazon, for example, has a separate Amazon Business site for B2B users. Although it’s not a subdomain.), a subdomain could be a good option.

Comcast Business is a great example of how subdomains support a better brand experience. Those services are specifically geared toward a B2B audience and are fairly extensive, so it wouldn’t make sense to bury that information somewhere in Comcast’s primary, consumer-focused site. The https://business.comcast.com/ subdomain allows Comcast to create two separate brand experiences for two very different target audiences.

Companies may also use subdomains to set up mobile-focused variations of their main websites. Obviously, navigating a web page is very different on a smartphone or tablet than a desktop PC. Adaptive development processes dictate that developers account for different screen sizes and form factors when designing mobile websites. Creating a separate subdomain allows businesses to provide an intuitive user interface for both desktop and mobile site visitors.

What are the SEO implications of subdomains?

“So, it’s a good organisational tool,” you might be asking yourself, “but what does a subdomain have to do with SEO and organic rankings?” Excellent question.

First of all, there’s really no such thing as organisation for organisation’s sake when it comes to site structure and hierarchy. A website that’s confusing to navigate due to poor structure is going to inevitably get dinged by search engines. A bad site layout will lead to visitors spending less time on your page or more time on page if it takes them a long time to find what they’re looking for, resulting in a less than satisfactory experience and potentially hurting your search performance. By using subdomains to streamline your site hierarchy, you help search engine users find the information they seek more efficiently, improving your website’s SEO performance.

If you’re keyed into the SEO-focused blogosphere, at this point, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Wait, I thought subdomains were bad for SEO?”

There has been a lot of talk out there about the potential negative impact that subdomains can have on SEO performance, specifically that search engines penalise them or have difficulty parsing between main domains and subdomains.

The reasoning goes that Google’s algorithms will recognise your subdomains as sites separate from your main domain, and rank them individually. They’ll essentially be stranded on little SEO islands, and your website won’t benefit from any positive impact your subdomain would otherwise provide if it were a subdirectory.

Although the debate on subdomains’ SEO merits – or lack thereof – rages on, there’s reason to believe that previous warnings of “organic search cannibalisation” may have been a tad overstated.

In an August 2016 Hangout session, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller addressed the question head on, stating that subdomains generally don’t hurt site rankings:

“[W]e recognise that some sites use subdomains as different parts of the site,” he said. “And, in the same way that other sites might use subdirectories.”

According to Mueller, Google’s algorithms are pretty adept at crawling subdomains and subdirectories equally well and making sense of it all.

That being said, he did caution against the use of wildcard subdomains designed to redirect anyone trying to access non-existent subdomains to a specific folder. Google’s algorithms have historically had difficulty crawling those specific kinds of subdomains.

Should you use subdomains?

You’re probably hoping for a pretty cut-and-dry answer here, but there isn’t one.

Like just about everything else related to SEO and Google ranking factors, you have to take things on a case-by-case basis. There’s no set rule dictating the use of subdomains because, for some companies, their benefits will outweigh any potential SEO fallout (either real or perceived).

In other instances, subdomains won’t provide any real tangible value over subdirectories that extend from your main domain, so there’s no sense in making significant changes to the site structure. At the end of the day, it depends on what makes the most sense for your particular website.

John Doherty, founder of the professional SEO and digital marketing provider network Credo, explains that to get the most SEO value out of your subdomain, you need to treat them as if they’re their own full-fledged websites.

“Subdomains can absolutely be made to work well for SEO, but it requires a lot of extra effort over putting the content (such as a blog) in a subfolder,” Doherty says. “We have seen many times that when content (such as a blog) is moved from a subdomain to a subfolder that often a dramatic increase in organic traffic and rankings occurs. This is harder to do, and maybe even impossible, depending on the purpose of the subdomain, but is something to be considered when launching a subdomain in the first place.”

So, don’t half-bake it. If you want to see SEO results with your subdomain, you better be prepared to put in the work.

If you have any questions about your own navigation hierarchy and how to set up your website for optimal ranking opportunities, drop our consulting team a line. We can help identify the best approach to meet your goals and optimise your website.

And once you have your site’s internal structure sorted out to perfection, you’ll be feeling pretty great – almost James Cameron great.

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from http://bit.ly/33AtriK

#content marketing

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sempiternalsandpitturtle · 5 years ago

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The ultimate guide to content syndication

Content creation is the best way to increase search presence. How so?

Websites with updated blogs have 434 percent more search engine-indexed pages than those that don’t. That’s 434 percent more opportunities to be found by users searching for services you provide. But content creation is just one component of a high-powered content marketing program.

Many marketers are relying on content syndication to elevate their content for greater visibility and link equity, not just for blogs but videos and graphics as well.

Sadly, content syndication is often mismanaged or poorly informed. So what are the dos and don’ts of content syndication? How do marketers reap the rewards of such a publishing strategy?

Explore every facet of syndication with this helpful guide.

What is content syndication?

Content syndication is the process of republishing web content on third party sites for broader reach and readership.

A comprehensive article on your blog page can generate only so much traffic and search visibility. But that same post published through other outlets multiplies the number of eyeballs that scroll through your content.

Content syndication exposes your marketing collateral to readers and viewers who may have never come across your brand organically.

Original vs. curated vs. syndicated content: What’s the difference?

Syndicated content isn’t an inherently distinct content format. It’s more an individual avenue through the content marketing supply chain.

Here’s a general breakdown:

Original content: Authentically created content courtesy of in-house producers or outsourced marketing partners. It’s unique and owned wholly by you.

Curated content: Compiled content from other sources that’s organised in a way for maximum reader comprehension. You can input additional commentary, but the core content itself is produced irrespective of you or your vendors. (More on that here.)

Syndicated content: Original content that can be solicited to other publications and published through agreed-upon channels. Common publishing opportunities for syndicated content are authoritative, industry platforms and print or digital magazines.

In simpler terms, syndication is much less a differentiator on the content production side as it is on the promotion side.

Additionally, syndication should not be confused with guest posting. Guest posts are often one-off opportunities for articles that are written to spec and published a single time on a single page. Syndication refers to republishing through external channels work that already exists on your own website (there will be two or more versions of the same content on the web. No, that’s not a problem, and you’ll learn why below).

Why syndicate?

The benefits of syndicating your content are many. Syndication provides:

Access to a larger audience.

Link authority and link equity.

Expanded social media presence.

Targeted lead-generation opportunities.

More information to factor into your buyer personas.

Brand recognition and brand mentions.

Content syndication allows smaller companies or those with fewer marketing resources to cast wider nets of readership. A single post on an established platform with hundreds of thousands of followers can greatly exceed the potential benefits of churning out new content and posting on your site alone.

Syndication can also lead to future opportunities for consistent posting on similar platforms, whereby your content may begin to draw its own followers. Think of syndication as adding an extra boost (both in terms of SEO and promotion) to the content you’ve so carefully crafted or paid for.

How do you syndicate content?

At its root, content syndication rests upon the efforts of a marketing manager or similar person monitoring industry publications.

More than anything, you need to know where the greatest upside lies. For example, in the content marketing space, syndicating with Search Engine Journal would be a great opportunity. It’s widely respected by industry insiders, it’s referenced by marketers at large and it’s a consistent source for authoritative perspectives. Above all, its Domain Authority is 84.

SEJ

Brafton

You’re darn right we’d love high-quality traffic routing from SEJ – that’s equity that can drive up our own Domain Authority over time.

Anna Crowe of Search Engine Journal experimented with syndicating her SEJ posts on LinkedIn and Medium for one month. On every Tuesday and Thursday on Medium and LinkedIn Pulse, Anna republished two blogs. This strategy resulted in a 34 percent increase in page views on the original SEJ posts. Shares, reads and comments likewise rose.

A few steps to consider:

Observe publications your target audience reads.

Reach out to those sources regarding publishing opportunities.

Determine timing, bylines and guidelines (establishing a strict contract is key).

Set up proper tags to avoid duplicate content penalties (not an official penalty – see below).

Track performance analytics.

Repeat with additional publications if successful.

Lastly, self-syndication services remove all barriers of entry (e.g., Medium) so you are free to post whatever and whenever you want while ensuring all syndication best practices are followed.

Avoiding duplicate content

Doesn’t republishing content elsewhere on the web lead to duplicate content?

It can, but it doesn’t have to.

This is where an adroit marketer or web manager comes into play.

Syndicated content can easily be SEO-friendly content with various indexing tags. Technically, Google doesn’t penalise you, per se, for duplicate content; it just selects which version of a web page is algorithmically superior and serves it to users, meaning the inferior version dies in a black hole. In this manner, a figurative penalty does exist.

To avoid duplicate content, you and the distribution partner you’re working with can utilise:

rel=canonical tag: This tag should be set up on the page that features the republished content (the syndicated page). So, all ranking signals are effectively diverted to your original page and Google knows to feature yours, not the duplicate.

meta noindex tag: Essentially the same thing as a rel=canonical tag, except that it fully removes the noindex page (the syndicated page) from indexing altogether – yours is the only one that officially exists on the record. Since syndication expands social presence, followers and subscribers will have more information on your brand to share.

Regular backlink: This is the least-desired and perhaps least-effective option, but it’s one that may be most conducive to marketers and distributors who aren’t savvy coders or have very strict code implementation standards. In this case, your original post would be backlinked to (and that’s it), which means it’s probably best to allow only a snippet of your post to be syndicated, ensuring that readers will have to click on your link to access the full post. Google will be able to ascertain who owns the original post and who should be featured in SERPs. But, as stated, the safest way to have complete confidence in circumventing duplicate content is to opt for a rel=canonical or meta noindex tag. Be sure to have written confirmation of these tags from your distributor as well, as they should be non-negotiable in most circumstances.

Content syndication sites and platforms

Content syndication isn’t a process to be completed singlehandedly. Several platforms contain networks of publication opportunities all in a single repository, and they can take your content straight to distributors and post for you. Great, right?

Of course. BUT. Some sites like Taboola and Outbrain charge you per click and they rely on overly clickbait headlines to generate those clicks. The problem is that these headlines don’t actually match the content, which produces astronomically high bounce rates – the opposite of what you want.

Further, some syndication platforms have amazing reach because of their popularity. You don’t need to place your entire syndication strategy in the hands of these sites, but it can still be great to gain that level of exposure.

Common syndication sites marketers use include:

Free syndication

Medium.

LinkedIn Pulse.

Mashable.

Business 2 Community.

BuzzFeed.

Facebook Instant Articles.

Quora.

SlideShare.

Paid syndication

ARC.

MailChimp.

PRNewsWire (press releases, specifically).

Zementa.

Manual outreach of targeted publications may be more time-intensive, but they’re likely to lead to higher quality results. Relying on paid services may be too costly and not helpful enough, so buyer beware.

RSS aggregator = the super simple blog syndication tool

There are a number of content types to syndicate, but the good ol’ blog is usually suspect No. 1. That’s why RSS aggregators, specifically, exist.

RSS refers to “Really Simple Syndication.” It is a short piece of XML code that is installed on a site (WordPress has a built-in plugin for this) that signals to readers that you encourage your content to be syndicated and distributed across other platforms.

Next to social share buttons at the bottom of blog posts, you’ll often see this symbol:

Readers can also subscribe to your RSS feed and be notified when you post again.

Syndication tools like Alltop and FeedListing are RSS directories, syndication platforms that marketers submit their RSS feeds to for automatic republishing. RSS aggregators do much of the dirty work for you, since with just a few clicks you can quickly disseminate your content all over the web (in addition to having it originally live on your dedicated blog page).

That said, RSS feeds are less common than they were in the early- and mid-2000s. More recently, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook serve a similar RSS purpose, as users can configure their timelines to view only the content they want to see, along with enjoying the more diverse types of content and commentary that occurs on social media. This fact has, in essence, sidelined more traditional RSS feed usage.

What works and what doesn’t?

Content syndication is really only valuable if the distributors posting your content are relevant to your prospects.

Prospects not big on Facebook? Don’t syndicate there. Do they comment often on industry-specific forums or publications? DO post there.

Here are a few guidelines to help you determine whether content syndication will be in your best interest:

Dos

Embrace syndication tools and sites that are reputable and popular.

Target sites that are highly relevant to your industry.

Use social platforms like LinkedIn.

Pitch to sites that accept submissions, like Huffington Post and Business Insider.

Use free sites if possible.

Don’ts

Work with tools or sites that have sleazy pay or reward structures.

Syndicate content without contractual language regarding SEO practices.

Overdo it. Distribution is one sliver of content marketing, so networking with every distributor you can find is likely inefficient.

Limit original content creation for the sake of content distribution.

Content syndication best practices

Curata found that brands believe the “ideal content marketing mix” comprises:

65 percent content creation.

25 percent content curation.

10 percent content syndication.

With this barometer in mind, it’s clear that content syndication is by no means a tactic that should spearhead your marketing efforts. It should be in the discussion but only after creation or curation has already been properly resourced and planned out.

Syndication should also serve four core functions:

Brand awareness.

Content exposure.

Lead generation.

Link equity.

If you’re not seeing any movements advancing these metrics, move on and try something else.

It’s also important to keep your content creation process at the forefront of your marketing. Before you publish (and republish), focus on:

Content quality.

Content depth.

Relevance.

Authority.

It’s these qualities that readers will pick up on, and they will help your original content rank higher in search while simultaneously matching the audience intent of the sites you syndicate on.

You’ve got the tools, the facts and the recommendations. Syndicate until your heart’s content, or at least until the results validate your strategy.

Let us know what you find!

from http://bit.ly/38MpdFm

#content marketing

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sempiternalsandpitturtle · 5 years ago

Text

Tips for a winning content marketing team structure

Just one thing separates a bad content marketing team from no content marketing team: the cost.

Far from “the poor man’s copywriting”, content marketing has evolved into a multimedia practice that demands creativity, expert analytics and highly synchronised execution. Half measures will do little more than waste your time and money.

That’s why step No. 1 in structuring a winning content marketing team is unequivocal buy-in. You have to want to create a dream team. We’re talking “1980 US Olympic hockey team” good.

Via buzzfeed.com

If that’s you, you’ve come to the right place.

Let’s find out what gold-medal content marketing teams are made of.

Part 1: Form

What kind of team are you?

Content marketing teams come in all shapes and sizes.

Yours might be an in-house operation with a substantial budget. It could be completely outsourced to a third party with strict caps on monthly spend and only one internal contact. It might be a combination, where a small marketing team oversees the content marketing activities of an external agency.

We’ve even encountered one-person operations, where a single person acts as content strategist, creator and promoter.

Whatever the case, the shoe needs to fit.

You have to be realistic about your organisation’s – or business unit’s – internal capabilities. This may mean making certain trade-offs to operate within your budget. Our advice? Always err on the side of quality. One really strong, well-promoted asset will always outperform five pieces of content that are just OK.

On a more concrete level, any content marketing team must exhibit certain cultural values if it hopes to excel across core functions.

Shared project ownership

“Build marketing programs around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”

– The Agile Marketing Manifesto

We cannot overstate the importance of caring. From the outset, every stakeholder – from your stategist to your project manager to your graphic designer – needs to be invested in the project. Cultivate this shared sense of accountability by:

Setting clear goal posts.

Tieing visions for execution back to these goals when communicating with creatives.

Tracking progress at various points in the campaign with the appropriate analytics (e.g., impressions on social, bounce rates on landing pages, etc.).

Sharing that progress with everyone, so the entire team can see the fruits of its labour.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 70 percent of organisations have the ability to illustrate, with metrics, how content marketing has improved B2B engagement.

Don’t keep that data under lock and key. The greatest source of success in content marketing is enthusiasm and collective pride for what’s been brought to the table.

Agility

“Great marketing requires close alignment with the business people, sales and development.”

– The Agile Marketing Manifesto

This first and foremost means eliminating silos, and we don’t just mean silos between strategists and execution teams. Start at the top, with sales.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Sales and marketing need to be in alignment if you hope to tell a consistent story to your prospects, leads and existing customers. This doesn’t mean you need to initiate sales into your content marketing team structure, but think of them as consultants.

Secondly, try not to think of your content marketing team as a well-oiled machine. You’re not manufacturers pumping products down an assembly line. You’re creative, responsive marketers whose objectives can change at a moment’s notice.

Instead, learn from the late, great Bruce Lee and “be like water.” On a practical level, this means:

Holding weekly or bi-weekly meetings to update one another on progress of current initiatives, or to re-calibrate as needed.

Leveraging project management resources such as Trello, Asana, Podio, Airtable, etc. to centralise core information and provide updates to the entire team on the fly.

Being ready and willing to make adjustments in response to shifting circumstances.

Once again, the Agile Marketing Manifesto, released in 2012, probably summed the goal up best:

“We welcome and plan for change. We believe that our ability to quickly respond to change is a source of competitive advantage.”

Now, here’s Bruce Lee playing pingpong with nunchucks:

Part 2: Function

What key roles need to be represented in your team?

By now, it’s clear that every function on a content marketing is deeply intertwined. Of course, that raises an important question: What are those functions?

We’re glad you asked, and we’ll tell you.

But first, bear in mind that scale has a lot to do with how these functions will be divvied up among individual team members. In smaller teams, a single person might wear more hats than in say, a well-funded enterprise marketing department, or a content marketing agency.

Ideally, though, all of these core functions will be fulfilled in your content marketing team structure:

Strategy

Your strategists are responsible for creating a marketing strategy that aligns with the business goals du jour. In content marketing, they’ll typically focus on SEO strategy, content creation and distribution goals at a high level, website consulting services, brand awareness and analytics. Strategists are also responsible for aligning budget and execution.

Strategists might go by any number of names depending on your content marketing team structure. Internally, they might be “marketing directors.” Externally you might call them “content marketing strategist” or “account manager.” But a rose by any other name …

Ideation

This is the unsung hero of content marketing, partly because it doesn’t necessarily belong to any one, single role on your team. A case could be made that marketing directors / associates and agency project managers are the stewards of ideation. But by definition, ideation is development of a creative execution plan for the strategy at large. Thus, it requires input from your strategists, project managers and your production people (writers, designers, etc.).

This is where the “agile” aspect of content marketing team structure really comes into play. More often than not, ideation is a shared effort that requires signoff from multiple stakeholders, and possibly even ad-hoc input at different phases of content development (you’re not married to an idea, after all; if you think of something better during the production phase and can pivot within reason, then by all means, do it).

Execution and creative tracking

That brings us to the doing. Once you have a strategy and high-level creative vision — as in you know the assets (eBooks, videos, paid ads) you want to create — you need someone or someones to create content calendars, and to manage timelines for deliverables, release dates and social posting schedules.

That someone — usually a project manager, managing editor, marketing assistant or combination thereof — also needs to track the progress of those deliverables as the campaign or scope of work moves forward and, if necessary, adjust schedules in the face of the unforeseen.

Production

Your writers, designers, videographers, editors and social media managers are the lifeblood of your content marketing team. Without them, you’re all talk.

If you’re lucky, your internal marketing has the budget, time and resources to produce its own content. But if you’re like the vast majority of organisations, you’ll probably outsource content production to freelancers or to a content marketing agency. And if that’s the case, think of these creatives as an extension of your team. The farther removed they are from the shared vision, the less likely they’ll be to deliver killer content.

Promotion and distribution

You’ve put all this work into creating awesome content, which is great, but now you have to make sure that it reaches the target audience. This requires social media mavens who know how to build a base of followers, and then hook their attention with compelling teasers that will lead them to your content, and deeper into the sales funnel. Likewise, you’ll need strategists who understand how to structure an email drip campaign.

Whether these functions are fulfilled internally by your own marketers or externally by contracted marketers makes no difference. What matters is that you have someone on your team who has dedicated time to promote and distribute your content, and maintain a strong social presence. Otherwise your assets will collect dust, and all your hard work will have been for naught.

Dev and IT

Last but not least, you need people who can help on the technical side of things — to make sure that different content types are loading correctly, and that your integrations aren’t disrupting the user experience.

This is web marketing, after all, and that means you’ll need access to web development experts and site admins to answer the tough questions: Is my site performance optimised for mobile? Are there any hiccups in UX? If you’re working with an agency that has its own CMS, is it exporting multimedia content properly? These are all questions that someone on your content marketing team needs to be able to answer.

Part 3: Finesse

How are you executing?

Ok, so you have an idea of the types of values that drive good team dynamics, and you’re familiar with the core functions that will need to be covered.

That brings us at last to the final lap of building a gold-medal content marketing team: the nuances of execution.

Let results show you the way

As we’ve already mentioned, agility is hugely important in a content marketing team. You can certainly establish an operating rhythm, but don’t get hung up on trying to create a rigid routine.

Instead, let your results determine your next actions. Content marketing has a cycle in that directives are continuously handed off between roles.

For example, analytics-based insights provided by your strategist will influence the types of assets (videos, blogs, etc.) that need to be created, and the channels on which they should be promoted and distributed (social, email, etc.).

Subsequent SEO research might reveal more nuanced keywords that will improve the performance of these assets, which will then impact topic research and ideation. At this point, additional research from your strategist might identify optimal content length, and more specific talking points that will help those particular topics cut through the noise.

Once the piece is produced by your creatives, project managers — the QC gurus of the content marketing world — might identify areas where the content could be improved, or better optimised to align with the strategists’ findings.

Finally, the piece is posted, distributed and promoted. Subsequent analytics might determine that engagement for the piece is high, but clickthrough is low, which could be indicative of a shortcoming in how the content is being promoted. Or, maybe the piece appears to be performing well on search, but doesn’t seem to be generating qualified leads, which could indicate a fault in your site’s UX design.

Whatever the case, the team will need to take action to respond to the newest findings. Consequently, the many roles of a content marketing team will play off each other in unique, and sometimes unpredictable, ways.

And it goes on and on like this, in a never-ending cycle.

Because that, in a nutshell, is what content marketing is: A marathon made up of many sprints.

Ready? Set. Go!

from http://bit.ly/38KPjZx

#content marketing

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