'Net Features : infographics

Content Marketing Without a Blog

Administrator — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 21:00:00 GMT

It’s no secret that content marketing has a phenomenal ROI (the statistics only seem to get better with each passing year). In fact, Kapost and Eloqua recently produced an eBook on the ROI of content marketing in which they stated that per dollar content marketing produces three times the number of leads as compared to traditional marketing.

Unfortunately, many businesses have shied away from content marketing, mistaking the term for a synonym of “blogging,” which is not the end-all-be-all of content marketing. In fact, I can think of seven ways you can do content marketing without a blog…

Vlog

Not much for writing, but love talking? Share your experience and knowledge through a vlog series on YouTube, and promote it through your Twitter and Facebook page. Trust me, this works. If you need any evidence, allow me to point you to the wildly successful "Will It Blend?" campaign by Blendetc.

Podcast

You aren’t much for appearing on camera either. That’s fine – go the route of the podcast. Interview experts in your industry, or just take 10 minutes to address your customers’ frequently asked questions. The podcast is still a viable form of content marketing. Plus, it’s the only non-visual form on this list.

Facebook & Twitter

It almost goes without saying that Facebook and Twitter are great ways to drive a content marketing strategy, but don’t take my word for it. 76 percent of businesses are using social networking for business objectives.

Infographics

Are you in an industry that loves statistics and facts? (Hint – the answer is a resolute ‘yes’.) Put the right amount of creativity and effort into it, and you can have an infographic that goes viral. Seriously, any business can leverage an infographic to their advantage. As an example, take Brilliance, a jeweler whose “Kardashian Wedding vs. Average Wedding” infographic went viral in 2011. The infographic brought in thousands of visitors to the company’s website because it was well done and interesting.

Whitepapers

So, I said I have seven strategies that avoid blogging, but not writing. If you’re a B2B company, then a white paper could be just the thing you need to widen your reach and generate hundreds of new leads. If there’s no one in your company capable of writing a rock-solid white paper, then it’s worth budgeting some cash to pay a professional to do the job. A half-baked white paper receives the same critical acclaim that a half-baked research paper earned you in high school. Back then, it was a C+. Today, it’s money down the drain.

Knowledge Bank

You can approach the Knowledge Bank strategy in one of these two ways (or both): your bank could be an organized index to all of the resources on your website, and/or it could serve as a roundup of the web’s “Best of the Best.” Either way, the point is to make valuable information organized and easy to find.

Pinterest & Instagram

At the end of Aug. 2012, the Los Angeles Times described Pinterest and Instagram’s growth as “meteoric,” citing a 2,183 percent growth over the course of one year for Pinterest. Instagram has performed remarkably well, too. From July 2011 to July 2012, monthly traffic increased from 56,360 to 12 million. On Thanksgiving Day 2012, Instagram users shared a jaw-dropping 10 million photos. If your product or service has a visual draw, then sign up with these sites today.

The Bonus

There are many benefits of doing content marketing with a blog. According to the 2012 Digital Content Marketing Survey, blogging is the second-most utilized form of Web content (75 percent), right behind social media (90 percent). Also, the best results come from social media content, e-newsletters and blogs.

Though we’re still waiting on the 2013 Survey, I’d be surprised if the blog isn’t holding steady.

About the Author

Amie Marse, is the founder and managing partner of Content Equals Money, a content writing service for agencies and Web-based clients.

Infographics Get a Web-Friendly Upgrade

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 19:05:00 GMT

Piktochart, one of the darlings of the infographic world, has retooled its Web-based app to allow users to create not just interactive, but search-friendly, infographics.

In essence, these aren't your predecessors infographics.

Users are now be insert hyperlinks into their infographics, add viewable tabs in order to innlude different layers of content, and even export their infographics with hover effects on those data layers.

Piktochart currently has over 170,000 users of its services, and over 5,000 users of its Pro offering. Peraps it's time to jump on the Piktochart bandwagon and start developing more infographics?

Content Marketing Your Way

Linc Wonham — Fri, 25 May 2012 19:00:00 GMT

You have a strong, well-defined brand identity that suits your company’s values and serves the image you wish to portray. Your products and services are valuable, well-researched and carefully aimed at a specific audience.

You have all the pieces in place to succeed in your business venture, so there is no better time to begin a successful content marketing campaign to attract a potential client base to your company, your brand and your products.

What is Content Marketing
The Content Marketing Institute has put together a fantastic definition that I will borrow here: To engage in content marketing is to create and distribute “relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience, with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

In other words, content marketing is the act of communicating with your target audience in a way that does not involve selling to them directly. Rather than pitching your audience on your products and services, you are providing them with informative content that allows them to decide for themselves that your products and services are exactly what they are looking for. Content marketing represents an invaluable opportunity to educate and inform your potential client and customer base, allowing for a more engaged and intelligent interaction with your brand.

Forms of Content Marketing
Content marketing is composed of many aspects, and in a successful content marketing campaign, these various parts of the campaign work together to engage your target audience. Content marketing can take the form of blogs, social media strategies, e-books, whitepapers, case studies, newsletters, reports, custom publications, podcasts, videos, webinars and infographics.

The most successful content marketing campaigns involve several of these forms, all working together in tandem to communicate a consistent message to your audience. Members of your target audience will each engage with your brand in a variety of different arenas, so using several different forms and techniques ensures that your content marketing strategy reaches the widest possible audience.

It is also advised to tailor your content and corporate message subtly, depending on the form that the message is being delivered, to more successfully and accurately target the needs of certain constituents of your audience. For example, you may find that you fine-tune your blog content slightly to appeal to a specific online community, such as mommy bloggers, whereas the content you present via social media may be designed for younger, single professionals.

Effective Content Marketing
The key to an effective content marketing strategy is to make sure that the content you produce will engage your audience, will be valuable to them and will ultimately increase their ability to intelligently interact with your brand and the products and services that you offer through it. The content that you offer should be easy to read, relevant to the interests of your audience, and provide them with valuable information that they are actively looking for. Well-written, thoughtful and well-placed content is essential to the success of your content marketing campaign.

Content Marketing as a Call to Action
Content marketing is essentially about ideas. Your brand, your company and the products and services that you offer are essentially extensions of that idea.

The content that you create and offer to your target audience should engage with the ideas that fuel your company's mandate and products. Always keep in mind that the end goal of any content marketing is to spur your target audience to action.

You have a unique opportunity through content marketing to communicate your company's vision to your target audience. The more that your audience learns about the concepts behind your products and services, the ideas that inform your corporate mandate, they should be all the more inspired to engage with those ideas.

The Practical Benefits of Content Marketing
Many of the quantifiable, palpable benefits of content marketing are laid out beautifully in this infographic (which is a fine piece of content marketing in itself). First and foremost, content marketing drastically increases your brand's visibility. Having a blog on your company's website will increase your traffic 55 percent. Even more impressive, the number of inbound links you will get will increase by 97 percent.

Your brand, and your brand's message, is also given a much wider reach via content marketing. A blog with regularly updated content will give your site 97-percent more indexed links and a staggering 434-percent more indexed pages, increasing your Google page rank and SEO profile very positively.

Perhaps even more importantly, content marketing campaigns have a tangible impact on the way that your target audience behaves. Sixty percent of Facebook and Twitter users are more likely to recommend a brand that they follow on social media. Sixty-seven percent of Twitter users are more likely to buy from brands that they follow, and blogs are shown to influence purchasing decisions 63 percent more than magazines.

Content marketing is an invaluable tool when it comes to not only influencing the way that your target audience perceives your brand, but also in the way that they then choose to interact with your products and services. With a thoughtful, well-executed content marketing strategy built on high-quality content, your brand and your business will succeed online.

About the author: Matt Goulart is the founder of and lead consultant at Webstar Content, and can be reached at Matt@webstarcontent.com.

Don’t Kill the Infographic – Design Killer Ones Like These

Linc Wonham — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Only about a year ago, infographics were the darlings of the Web – favored by marketers, designers and content consumers alike. Today, however, you will see quite a bit of blogging and commenting from people calling for a virtual cease-fire: “Please, no more infographics!”

So, what happened?

Like most anything else Internet users place on a pedestal, infographics have almost been done to death – which would truly be a shame if it plays out that way. Originally used to represent important data and statistical information in a more visually pleasing and more easily consumable way than plain text, infographics have become an excuse for creating increasingly larger, less useful and oftentimes incomprehensible art projects.

Many marketers and designers have lost sight of the fact that infographics should be driven by the data they provide. Too often today, the statistical data (if any is included) takes a back seat to competing elements, making it more difficult if not impossible to extract any useful information. Others seem to mistakenly believe that the larger an infographic is, the better; as if shouting your message into someone’s ear is more effective than speaking in a normal tone.

A well-designed infographic that provides useful information still carries a lot of weight for any business. To preserve the integrity of infographics and to reap their full benefits, Web companies must be smart about when and how they use them, and designers must maintain their focus on delivering the message in a powerful but helpful way.

Some simple tips include trying to create something unique without losing the message in the translation; visualize the data you are trying to convey and then tell the story through your design; use the most readable fonts possible for numerical data, and save the fancy typography for eye-catching titles.

Below are some examples for inspiration:

60 Seconds on the Web by Shanghai Web Designers

Facebook vs. Twitter by Digital Surgeons

The Content Grid by Eloqua

Optimal Email Times by Pure 360

Our Connected World by GigaOM

Increasing Traffic with Infographics

Linc Wonham — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 20:18:00 GMT

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but even the simplest infographic can be worth ten times that amount of new visitors to your website. Like all Web professionals, affiliate marketers should always be looking for new ways to increase traffic to their sites. The use of infographics in blogs, newsletters, RSS feeds, white papers and other pages throughout your site is a surefire way to improve not only the volume of traffic but also your brand awareness and search results rankings.

And with today’s resources, you don’t have to be an award-winning Web designer to create alluring infographics that will generate higher numbers of visitors and relevant backlinks. You may have to be a little more creative in your thinking, but the tools are available to build visually appealing charts, graphs and timelines out of otherwise dry data about your products, services or industry. Below are five suggestions for affiliates who want to enhance their business with the use of infographics.

Think Visually
You wouldn’t be in business on the Web if you didn’t have any content, but too many Web professionals limit their content to words and a sprinkling of supplementary images. Underneath every Internet business’ top layer of Web content is a certain amount of data, much more than most website owners realize. That data could be product information, sales figures, industry news, consumer trends or the global economy, and data is more likely to elicit a reaction in infographic form than it is in a block of text. Look through the pages of your website to find examples of data that could be presented in a simple pie chart or bar graph, and try to condition yourself to think that way as you add new content to the site.

Gather Data
I would wager that anyone who follows the above suggestion will be surprised at how much data they already have on their site that can be turned into an assortment of infographics. Keep in mind, however, that there’s more to creating effective infographics than just creating graphics — they also have to provide useful information. Obtaining useful information often requires a little bit of digging, but as we all know, most of the data you will ever need is right at your fingertips. In addition to thinking visually, also try to start thinking statistically as you read RSS feeds, newsletters and other content around the Web. In the absence of useful new data falling in your lap — which it will if you have the right mindset — start doing your own research and compiling relevant data for future blog posts, newsletters, etc.

Search for Ideas
Every creative person needs a little outside inspiration once in a while, and millions of new infographics appear on the Web every day. You can’t help but see the most relevant ones just by doing your standard industry research, but there are some other resources to go to when you have infographic-block. One of the best is the Flickr Infographics Pool, which has thousands of examples to get your creative juices flowing again. There are numerous other sites where you can view both simple and sophisticated infographics, and a Google search is all that’s required to get you unstuck.

Use Your Resources
Once you’ve established a vision, gathered your data and sought the proper inspiration, you’re ready to get to work. A rudimentary knowledge of Photoshop and a free open-source image editor is enough to get the job done, but why not try these online tools first? Wordle is a fabulous tool that will transform any block of text into an engaging visual package that will draw readers’ eyes. Another resource is the Visual Communications Lab at IBM, where you can create virtually any kind of graphic simply by uploading the data and watching it “visualize” based on the information you provide. Dipity is a site that creates eye-catching timelines, and Omnigraffle can do all of the above but only for Macs.

Ask for Help
The resources above can help make an artist out of anyone, but sometimes it just makes more sense to go to the professionals. Lacking any ability in graphic design but having realized the potential benefits of infographics, there are several resources for getting your great ideas onto the Web. The two that come to mind first are Infographic World and Column Five Media. Both are highly reputable firms that specialize in the ideation, production and execution of infographics that are aimed at driving more traffic to your website.