The Innovative Marketer's Blog

Content curation has become integral to strategic social media marketing.  Social content curation can be defined as the discovery, collecting and sharing of relevant, industry-leading content across your social channels.  If you have committed to going social, a company presence on at least the big four social networks—Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn—is essential.  However, just having social media profiles is not sufficient.  Social content curation is valuable to others and can help you attract a wide social following and increase social lead generation. There are numerous high-quality resources for discovering content to share on social media. 

If you have not already, now is the time to go mobile.  There are 7 billion people on the planet, and 6 billion of them use a smartphone.  Mobile internet use is not a passing fad; it has settled into a secure role in the daily lives of a majority of the global population.  Mobile internet usage is skyrocketing, which has critical implications for business.  Smartphones and tablets are now particularly vital to the marketing industry.  

B2B content marketers are always looking for ways to extend the reach of their content.  As you create content to answer hot questions that your prospects are asking, Google does the job of matching interested people to the answers provided in your blog and other content assets.  However, successful content marketers know that they do not need to sit around and wait for Google to serve up the match that will generate leads.  Content syndication is about accelerating a match between prospective leads and your content by going beyond Google’s organic search and seeding your target market.  So, where do business professionals go for information?  The answer: LinkedIn. 

Social media is essential for marketing success in the current business world.  Your company may not even be taken seriously without a presence on the big four social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.  However, simply maintaining social media accounts for your business is not sufficient.  Winning social media marketing requires commitment, strategy, deep industry insight, genuine engagement and clever social content curation.  Producing a great deal of original, highly shareable content, genuinely and consistently conversing with industry influencers and building a significant social following could garner you a reputation as a thought leader and amplified exposure and brand recognition for your company.

Once you have your website and blog ready to roll, all you need now is highly contagious content, aligned with the right keywords, to lure prospects onto your webpages.  A quick and easy way to increase your online visibility is to craft an internal link-building strategy.  

B2B content marketers are charged with getting more qualified prospects to consume their helpful content and moving them down their automated sales funnel.  You can tell when the right people are finding your content, such as your blog, by looking at the conversion rates on your top-of-the-funnel offers. Assuming you have built strong calls-to-action into your blog articles, which lead to contextually aligned pieces of premium content, you will see your traffic and conversions moving up and to the right.  As you examine the conversion rates for organic search—search engine traffic that actually converts to leads—you will always be confronted with the fact that about 40 percent of your organic traffic has hidden source data or SSL traffic, meaning that you do not know what search term that person used to find your content (See screenshot below).  Yes, you know these people are arriving via a search engine, but Google will not release information on what terms they were searching for to find your content.  So, how does Google decide what source data gets hidden from you in analytics?  Anyone that is signed into Google will have hidden source data, which means that this mystery segment will continue to grow with every new Google application.  This is quite scary, right?

Video content can greatly amplify your social media marketing.  Unfortunately, many business owners and heads of companies fail to upgrade their social media strategies due to jam-packed schedules and the day-to-day demands of running their organizations.  They just keep doing what they have done in the past like tweeting their blog posts and posting premium content offers to their social channels.  If you have not hopped on the video content train, now is the time. Excellent video content can dramatically increase social lead conversions and the overall ROI of your social media marketing; the investment of time and resources is well worth it.  A great way to test the waters is to create a short, highly shareable video.

Social media is no one-hit wonder.  It is here to stay, and its wide-reaching influence continues to increase.  Certain prospects will not even take your company seriously, if you do not at least have a presence on the big four social networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.  Neglect social media marketing at your own peril.  Social media marketing done right calls for highly shareable content creation, smart content curation and genuine engagement.  Excellent content creation is critical and the foundation for strategic social media marketing.  Without it, social media success will remain elusive. Attract a wide captive audience on social media, and reap the rewards: dramatically increased website traffic and lead generation and conversion. 

Twitter can help your company increase engagement, build or expand your following, gain influence and attract new business.  Many marketers—in an effort to amplify their reach and influence to a wide captive audience—make the mistake of over-automating their social media and blasting promotional spam, while failing to foster engagement or really listen to their audience.  These marketers perform social media marketing like spambots in a misguided effort to make their inbound marketing content reach far and wide.  Twitter is a social network, so your marketing there must be social as well and not overly salesy.  Instead, transform your company into a trusted and credible informational resource and post original and curated highly shareable content—chock-full of relevant, smart and valuable solutions and insight. 

As content marketers, we have heard this term thrown around quite a bit in recent years. In an ideal world, all of our clients can and should strive to be “thought leaders” in their respective industries and market segments, even if their business niche is highly specialized.  Today, thought leadership = content marketing with an edge.